My back to work morning train WFH reads:
• What the ‘Smart Money’ Knows About China’s Evergrande Crisis: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. In all its original screaming capitalization, that line from “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” William Goldman’s 1983 book about Hollywood, sums up the fiasco of China Evergrande Group and the global investors caught up in its collapse. (Wall Street Journal)
• Put These Charts on Your Wall … 2021 Edition They say a picture is worth a thousand words and in markets that is absolutely true. Having a few extreme charts on your wall can be a helpful reminder that there is no such thing as “can’t,” “won’t,” or “has to” in markets. (Compound)
• Is the Seller’s Market for Houses Over? Slowing sales, a decline in over-asking contract prices, and fewer bidding wars in many areas are among recent shifts. 59% of Home Offers Written by Redfin Agents Faced Bidding Wars in August—the Lowest Level Since 2020 (New York Times)
• What to Do in the Case of Sustained Inflation: An important distinction must be made between inflation hedges and stores of value. The former aim to track the short-term fluctuations in inflation or track inflation very precisely. In this category we have instruments such as inflation-indexed bonds and inflation caps. Of more interest to long-term investors should be assets that act as a store of value (those that maintain or even increase their real purchasing power notwithstanding times of inflation). (GMO)
• U.S. Poverty Fell Last Year as Government Aid Made Up for Lost Jobs When government benefits are taken into account, a smaller share of the population was living in poverty in 2020 even as the pandemic eliminated millions of jobs. (New York Times)
• A Tiny Piece of Plastic Is Helping Farmers Use Far Less Water An Israeli company’s modest innovation in drip irrigation could forever change agriculture, especially in resource-starved environments. (Businessweek)
• File Not Found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans. It’s possible that the analogy multiple professors pointed to — filing cabinets — is no longer useful since many students Drossman’s age spent their high school years storing documents in the likes of OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy. (The Verge)
• Biophilic Design Is Helping Big-City Apartment Towers Get Back to Nature Buildings that incorporate plants, outdoor space, large windows and natural ventilation are growing in popularity (Wall Street Journal)
• The digital death of collecting. How platforms mess with our tastes. In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it. (Kyle Chayka Industries)
• Al Franken has a new comedy tour. His targets? Former Senate colleagues. For more than eight years in the Senate, Al Franken largely stifled the funny, as though he coexisted with a powerful alter ego in desperate need of submission: Senator Franken and “Saturday Night Live” Al. He had to watch everything he said. He dared to be dull. No longer. Now, everything is political roadkill for his new comedy tour. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Hubert Joly, former Chairman Chief Executive Officer of Best Buy, who turned the company around, returning them to profitability and a 10X stock run in the face of competition from Amazon. He has been named a Top 100 CEOs by Harvard Business Review, and 10 CEOs in the U.S. by Glassdoor. He is the author of a new book “The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism.”
Corporate tax revenue keeps shrinking
Source: YouTube
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