My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads:
• The number of U.S. workers quitting their jobs in September was the highest on record. More than 4.4 million workers quit their jobs voluntarily in September, the Labor Department said Friday. That was up from 4.3 million in August and was the most in the two decades the government has been keeping track. Nearly a million quit their jobs in the leisure and hospitality industry alone. (NYT) but see The “Great Resignation” isn’t happening equally everywhere. The quits rate for professional and business services quits is not much higher than where it was. It’s easy to over tell this story across the whole economy (@BrewersStats)
• Seed Rounds At $100mm Post Money We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons; Given those assumptions, a $100mm seed fund that makes all of its investments at $100mm post-money will barely return the fund. And that number is gross, before fees and carry. (AVC)
• Inflation Bets Give a Boost to Small-Cap Stocks Smaller companies can manage inflationary pressures more quickly than larger ones, say investors who are seeking refuge from price increases. (Wall Street Journal) see also $1 trillion in checks and 5% inflation. Worth it! 2021 began with economists arguing about $1,400 stimulus checks. Americans got them, but they got higher inflation too. Even so, the checks were very good policy. (Stay-At-Home Macro)
• Four Things That Will Keep You Out of the Stock Market If everything in the grocery store was on sale for 30% off you wouldn’t turn around and say “I don’t trust this, I’m going to come back when the prices are much higher.” People would think you’re insane. So why is it ok when it comes to our money? If you truly want to put your dollars to work, employ them when unemployment is high. (Wealth Found Me)
• The Crypto Capital of the World It has to be somewhere. Why not Ukraine? The anything-goes ethos has dogged Ukraine for years, and now the government is hoping to bury it, with an assist from cryptocurrency. In early September, the Parliament here passed a law legalizing and regulating Bitcoin, step one in an ambitious campaign to both mainstream the nation’s thriving trade in crypto and to rebrand the entire country. (New York Times) but see also Inside the cult of crypto “If you look online at ‘what is bitcoin’, what you’ll see is a gigantic amount of literature and decontextualised media snippets that paint a beautiful picture of the imminent success and domination that is surely awaiting us. However, if you look at bitcoin off the screen, what you’ll see is declining merchant uptake, zero evidence of blockchain deployment or efficiency, and mostly just a lot of promotional events offering cures to whatever ails you.” (Financial Times)
• How America’s Pandemic Economic Response Fought the Last War A focus on the challenges of the Great Recession has fueled some of the challenges of this crisis. (The Upshot)
• Will Kids Vaccines Get the Pandemic in Check? A tour through what the research says on transmission of the virus among the vaccinated. (Slate) see also The FDA Is Greatly Underestimating the Benefits of COVID Vaccines for Kids Yes, they reduce the severity of a COVID-19 case even if you still end up getting COVID-19, and that’s wonderful. But they also have an effect at the population level. (Slate)
• New Mineral Discovered in Deep-Earth Diamond The surprising find has never shown up in nature before and reveals secrets about the earth’s mantle (Scientific American)
• Vizio makes more money spying on people who buy TVs than it does on TVs themselves Time and again, we learn that companies spy on you whenever it suits them even companies that make a lot of noise about how they don’t need to spy on you to make money. If a company has power because of lock-in and if the company can make money by abusing you, it will abuse you. (Pluralistic) see also Surveillance Capitalism: You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation Facebook reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. Facebook now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world. (New York Times)
• We Compared ‘Taylor’s Version’ Songs With the Original Taylor Swift Albums The same song. The same artist. Two different copyright owners. Can you hear the difference? (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Robin Wigglesworth, the FT’s global finance correspondent based in Oslo, Norway. He focuses on the trends reshaping markets and investing, from technological disruption to quantitative investing. His new book is Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever.
Where Inflation Is Highest in U.S.
Source: Wall Street Journal
