My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• The Covid Trauma Has Changed Economics—Maybe Forever Policymakers learned the lessons of 2008 and deployed a wider set of tools to help repair the damage from Covid. They know how to create a recovery, but can they manage the boom? (Bloomberg)
• Americans Don’t Want to Return to Lousy Low Wage Jobs The majority of the jobs that aren’t back to prepandemic work force levels are very low-income jobs; they are what the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, which I cocreated, calls low-quality jobs. (New York Times)
• Are we better off? Yes. But not as much as we ought to be. Americans ARE better off than they were at the start of the neoliberal age. Don’t let anyone tell you living standards have gone down. But by the same token, Americans aren’t as MUCH better off as they could be, given how much the country has grown economically (Noahpinion)
• The Capitalist Culture That Built America: Since the early 19th century, the firm of Brown Brothers defined the distinctive American mix of financial power and public service. Its example can still instruct us. (Wall Street Journal)
• Hacker Lexicon: What Is a Supply Chain Attack? From NotPetya to SolarWinds, it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon. (Wired)
• Resistance to vaccine mandates is building. A powerful network is helping. A New York firm has filed suit or sent letters to employers in several states as part of an effort spearheaded by one of the largest anti-vaccination groups in the country.(Washington Post)
• How Electric Car Designers Are Reimagining Iconic Grilles With their electric vehicles, BMW, GM and Ford are re-inventing the grille in ways both familiar and strange. (Bloomberg)
• Why are we so uncharitable to those doing good deeds? From veganism to fundraising, psychologists have found acts of altruism often attract mistrust and even anger (The Guardian)
• It’s His Job to Stop LeBron. And Steph. And Luka. Mikal Bridges, a skinny kid who once took a redshirt year because his body wasn’t ready for college basketball, now has an unlikely role for the Suns: guarding the other team’s best player. (Wall Street Journal)
• Liz Phair is back, and she’s setting the record — and the record business — straight It’s convenient to blame 2003 for Liz Phair’s musical silence. That’s when she put out her most sugary pop record, an album so slick that it both blasted up the charts and infuriated the indie rock kids who had once worshiped her. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Carson Block of Muddy Waters. The firm is known for its scathing in-depth research reports and shorts of various companies, several of which have collapsed.
Annual real (after-inflation) returns for U.S. stocks, 10-year treasuries, cash and commodities
Source: @robenfarzad
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