My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads:
• High-Frequency Charts Show U.S. Economy Softening From Delta The delta variant has muted the progress of the U.S. economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with consumers putting off some leisure spending and businesses delaying a return to normal operations, according to a number of high-frequency reports that show softness in August. (Bloomberg) see also Delta is Coming For Your Economic Recovery If we do not radically improve our Vaxx rates ASAP, the entire economic recovery and precariously positioned, somewhat expensive market is put at risk of a 20-30% crash. This one will not have the trillion-dollar stimulus and rapid recovery of the 2020 edition, but rather, will be long, slow, and painful. (The Big Picture)
• Private Equity Has Definitively Entered the World of Professional Sports. Here’s What Comes Next. Buying stakes in NBA and MLB teams is just the beginning of the private equity takeover of major league sports. (Institutional Investor)
• More People Are Moving In Than Out of Areas Facing High Risk From Climate Change The U.S. counties with the largest share of homes facing high heat, drought, fire, flood and storm risk saw their populations grow from 2016-2020 due to migration. (Redfin) but see Where to Stash Your Down Payment if You Didn’t Buy a House This Year A guide for would-be buyers who are putting off the hunt for their dream home and considering how to gauge risk, evaluate time horizons and cope with low yields (Wall Street Journal)
• Investors Are Running Scared From China’s Stocks. Where to Find Opportunities. It has been a rough year for investors in China, especially those who forgot that it’s still a Communist nation with a government that can act unilaterally and change direction swiftly and ruthlessly. China’s market is down 20% in the past six months; some of its biggest names have dropped more than 40%. Has China become uninvestible? (Barron’s)
• Bird Brain: The Worst Managed Tech Company in History Social-networking service Twitter is a truly iconic brand and product that’s the nervous system of the information age… It’s also been an epic disappointment on many levels. It has been a terrible investment… has left tens, if not hundreds, of billions on the table… is run by the worst kind of part-time CEO… and has shown few signs of figuring out what’s wrong. (American Consequences)
• Misinformation Is Bigger Than Facebook, But Let’s Start There Social networks’ addictive algorithms continue to provide safe harbor for anti-vaxxers. They need to change. (Businessweek) see also A Harvard professor predicted COVID disinformation on the web. Here’s what may be coming next (Boston Globe)
• Virus surge breaks hospital records amid rising toll on kids Kentucky and Texas joined a growing list of states that are seeing record numbers of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in a surge that is overwhelming doctors and nurses and afflicting more children.(AP) see also A Calif. elementary school teacher took off her mask for a read-aloud. Within days, half her class was positive for delta. A CDC-funded simulation projects that without masking or testing, more than 75 percent of children could be infected within three months. (Washington Post)
• An immense mystery older than Stonehenge Reshaping previous ideas on the story of civilisation, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was built by a prehistoric people 6,000 years before Stonehenge. (BBC)
• Killing the Kraken: Federal Judge Sanctions Trump’s Big Lie Lawyers The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing litigation in federal courts require attorneys to certify through their signatures that any filings in court have a good faith basis in fact and law, and that they are not being filed for an improper purpose. (The Bulwark)
• How The Left Wrist Became The Right Wrist For Watches About 10% of the population is left-handed and it was not unusual, once upon a time, for lefties, once they started school, to be forced to write with the right hand. There are many reasons for this, including cultural bias against lefties, and the fact that many appliances and tools are designed on the default assumption that the right hand is the right hand. (Hodinkee)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Joan Solotar, Blackstone’s Global Head of Private Wealth Solutions. PWS manages over 100 billion dollars of the private equity giant’s $684 billion in assets. She has been named to Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance list.
Second-quarter revenues compared to pre-pandemic levels
Source: Wall Street Journal
