My end of week morning train WFH reads:
• How Many Bagels Does It Take to Keep a Place in Business? Two quintessential bagel shops dish on the business of selling lots and lots of bagels. (New York Times)
• Why Isn’t the Stock Market Down More Right Now? We’re less than 3% off all-time highs yet it feels like the market is teetering on the brink of disaster. The Nasdaq 100 is down around 6% from its highs so big tech stocks are still holding up as well. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• As Fintech Eats Into Profits, Big Banks Fight Back in Washington Traditional finance and digital upstarts alike claim the other side has an unfair advantage. (Businessweek)
• Vanguard fires fresh salvo in asset management fee war Group to cut costs on investment funds by $1bn over next four years, chief executive Tim Buckley says. (Financial Times)
• From living rooms to landfills, some holiday shopping returns take a ‘very sad path’. More than half a trillion dollars. That’s the estimated value of all the stuff that U.S. shoppers bought last year only to return it — more than the economy of Israel or Austria. (NPR)
• Imagining the unimaginable: The U.S., China and war over Taiwan One way to avoid conflict may be to understand just how destructive it would be. (Grid)
• OpenSea, Web3, and Aggregation Theory OpenSea has power not because it controls the NFTs in question, but because it controls the vast majority of demand. (Stratechery)
• A thousand-light-year-wide bubble around the Sun was blown by the ghosts of long-dead stars What created the bubble? More than a dozen supernovae, massive stars that exploded just a few million years after their birth, 14 or so million years ago. The Sun coincidentally is near the center of the bubble, having happened to enter it 5 million years ago as it orbits the center of the galaxy. (Syfy Wire)
• Seven ways Republicans are already undermining the 2024 election The next attempted coup will not be a mob attack, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one. Instead of costumed rioters, the insurrectionists are men in suits and ties. (The Guardian)
• The Visions of Penélope Cruz: She already felt a mystical connection with the director Pedro Almodóvar. For their seventh collaboration, “Parallel Mothers,” she gave her all, even collapsing after one scene. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square (with Jack Dorsey), and currently CEO of Invisibly, empowering people to manage the future of their personal data.
America’s Electric Vehicle Selection Is About to Get a Lot Wider
Source: Businessweek
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