My morning train WFH reads:
• Evergrande Debt Crisis Is Financial Stress Test No One Wanted China’s real estate powder keg threatens President Xi’s drive for stability—and may yet force a too-big-to-fail moment with global implications. (Businessweek)
• Banking the Poor: Lending Without Collateral There’s a disconnect that sits at the heart of banking: the people with the highest demand for loans aren’t the ones banks want to lend to. More often than not, it’s because they don’t have collateral – and there’s nothing a bank likes more than collateral. (Net Interest)
• The Consequences of a Market Correction The average peak-to-trough drawdown for the S&P 500 in a given calendar year since 1928 is around -16%. There have been 53 double-digit drawdowns overall in this time frame. The average loss for those corrections is -23%, lasting more than 200 days from peak to trough. Over the past 93 years the U.S. stock market has fallen 20% or worse on 21 different occasions. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• He pushed Uber out of China. Then he got too big for Beijing Didi’s risky play for expansion and dominance — culminating in a disastrous IPO this summer — has caused it to run afoul of Beijing. And now, the company’s top executive faces a difficult balancing act: placating regulators at home and investors abroad, while fending off fierce competition. (CNN)
• How to Learn More About the History of Your Home Houses are secret keepers, witnesses to history, be it everyday milestones like the spot a baby takes first steps to significant historical events like the porch, which provided shelter so we could wave to neighbors during a pandemic. (New York Times)
• A decade of the Tim Cook machine In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships – and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strategic roadmap. It also likes lecturing its peers. But is there another Jesusphone? (Benedict Evans)
• Endless to-do list? Here’s how not to waste your life Most approaches to time management make things worse. Start by acknowledging your limits (Financial Times)
• The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward, the Subreddit That Catalogs Anti-Vaxxer COVID Deaths This is not a forum that attempts to change minds. It’s much darker. It is one of the fastest-growing subreddits on Reddit: An archive of those who have been hospitalized and/or killed by COVID and didn’t believe the disease could harm them. If someone is merely hospitalized, they are “Nominated;” When they die, it changes to “Awarded.” It is cruel, a site for heartless and unrepentant schadenfreude. While endless ink has been spilled on the anger of Trump voters and Fox News viewers and QAnon adherents, there are other angers that haven’t been nearly as well explored. (Slate)
• Lucy’s wild ride to Jupiter’s orbit… but not to Jupiter It launches on an Atlas V rocket from Florida. It’ll go into a high loop around the Earth, then some months later drop back down toward our planet and use a gravity assist to boost it into an even higher loop that’ll take it out a bit past the orbit of Mars. Then it falls back to the Earth a second time to get another boost. This will fling it through the main asteroid belt where it has its first science encounter with a 4-km asteroid called Donaldjohanson (Syfy Wire)
• Everything You’ve Learned From Movies About Fire Sprinklers Is Wrong (Except ‘Die Hard’) Film scenes provide inspiration for a man on a quest to increase fire-sprinkler awareness; ‘It’s always a little exciting to find another example’ (Wall Street Journal)
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.”
Global Gas Price Surge Threatens to Dent the Economic Recovery
Source: Bloomberg
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