My morning train WFH reads:
• The Best And Worst Places to Be as Reopening, Variants Collide: 1) Norway 2) Switzerland 3) New Zealand 4) France 5) United States. The world got a reality check this month. The road to recovery from the worst pandemic in a generation won’t be smooth. (Bloomberg)
• Starbucks Is the New Talent Factory Powering Corporate America The coffee chain—which has produced as many executives as significantly larger companies—is a favorite source for recruiters, and it’s fine with that. (Businessweek) see also Work-From-Anywhere Perks Give Silicon Valley a New Edge in Talent War Startups in smaller markets feel pinch as coastal tech giants poach their employees; ‘a national competition’ for every hire (Wall Street Journal)
• Can’t Be Bearish Maybe all the good news is baked in. This type of thinking hasn’t been a profitable strategy very much over the last decade, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand. The bottom line is it’s hard to be bearish on these stocks right now, and therefore, it’s hard to be bearish on the market. (Irrelevant Investor)
• More Money Than Ever Is Flowing Into Climate Tech The question now is, where and how is that going to pay off? (Green)
• The Chobani Story: Strained yogurt and a strained balance sheet Is it possible for an immigrant to build a multi-billion dollar food business without venture capital? Chobani’s founder Hamdi Ulukaya made an all-in bet on his heritage and a powerful emerging consumer trend: Greek yogurt. (Neckar’s Notes)
• States that cut unemployment early aren’t seeing a hiring boom, but who gets hired is changing The 20 Republican-led states that reduced unemployment benefits in June did not see an immediate spike in overall hiring, but early evidence suggests something did change: The teen hiring boom slowed in those states, and workers 25 and older returned to work more quickly. (Washington Post)
• Billionaire Charles Koch On Why Cannabis Should Be Legal Depending on whom you ask, Charles Koch is a titan of industry, dark money political bogeyman or the Marcus Aurelius of the libertarian movement. But soon Koch might be known as the billionaire who persuaded Republican and Democratic holdouts to legalize cannabis at the federal level. (Forbes)
• The Time Tax: Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens? To make sure that the safety net catches us, to make sure that our social-insurance programs insure us, to make sure that we get what we pay Uncle Sam for, we work as our own health-care administrators. Our own tax professionals. Our own social workers. Our own disability-law experts. Our own child-support advocates, long-term-care reps, and public-housing officials. (The Atlantic)
• As Vaccines Do Their Work, Focus Moves to Long Covid Array of long-term symptoms afflict as much as 30% of infected people (Wall Street Journal) see also The Delta Variant Is the Symptom of a Bigger Threat: Vaccine Refusal There are almost as many reasons for vaccine hesitancy and refusal as there are unvaccinated Americans. But this problem, not the variant, lies at the root of rising infection rates. (New York Times)
• Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess’s First Woman World Champion For years, Hou was the only woman who stood a chance against the very best. But she had her own ambitions. (New Yorker)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Charity Dean. Dean was the director of the California Department of Public Health in 2020. She is a lead character in Michael Lewis’ book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story; Lewis called her “one of the people who saw the real danger of the virus before the rest of the country did.” She is co-founder of The Public Health Company.
Inflation Residing at Low End of Wage Scale
Source: BCA
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