My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• Predicting the Next Recession: I Am Not On Recession Watch: The recession callers are back, and some like ARK’s Cathie Wood and Home Depot’s Ken Langone claim the US is already in a recession. I disagree. We did see negative real GDP growth in Q1, and we might see negative real GDP growth in Q2 – but this doesn’t mean the US economy is in a recession. (Calculated Risk)
• Inside the secret, often bizarre world that decides what porn you see The adult industry’s de facto regulator isn’t government, international convention or business itself. It’s Mastercard and Visa. (Financial Times)
• Tesla is killing off coal and gas plants with its giant battery projects. Megapacks are utility-scale batteries, meaning a power company can use them as a backup to store electricity for hundreds or thousands of customers. Each Megapack battery can store three megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, enough to power about 100 US homes for a day. Tesla’s biggest battery installation involves 256 Megapack battery units with a combined storage capacity of 730 MWh, enough to power about 25,000 US homes for a day or nearly 600,000 homes for an hour. (Quartz)
• Working From a Tropical Island Is the New Working From Home Business-leisure travelers are a growing breed, and tourist hotspots want their trade. (Bloomberg)
• Meat, monopolies, mega farms: how the US food system fuels climate crisis From a beef-heavy diet to growing crops that don’t feed people – the biggest challenges facing the agriculture industry. (The Guardian)
• China has a PR problem — and it’s not just over Hong Kong. Here’s why in three charts. A new survey shows more and more people in advanced economies hold unfavorable views of China. (Grid)
• The Pervasive Problem—and Far-Reaching Impact—of Tree Poaching I have watched a spate of wood poaching sweep North America: in the Pacific Northwest, the lush forests of Alaska, and the timber stands of the eastern and southern United States. Timber poaching happens everywhere, on vastly different scales, throughout the seasons—one tree taken here, another there. It has become “a problem in every national forest.” (Literary Hub)
• America is in the grip of a right-wing minority We are now at a stage where the minority is taking over. Worse, it’s an extremist minority that has exploited imperfections in our system of government to impose retrograde policies on the rest of the country. (Los Angeles Times)
• ‘Pickleball Is the Wild, Wild West’: Inside the Fight Over the Fastest-Growing Sport in America There are: Too many leagues. Too many federations. Battling billionaires. Bad behavior. And the growth of a booming sport is on the line. (Sports Illustrated)
• The Golden Age of the Aging Actor Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ isn’t the exception—he’s the rule. There’s long been anecdotal evidence that top-line actors and actresses are getting older. Now, The Ringer has the data to back it up. (The Ringer)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week Perth Tolle with founder of Life + Liberty Indexes, index provider and sponsor of the Freedom 100 Emerging Markets ETF. The first-of-its-kind strategy uses personal and economic freedom metrics as the primary factors in its investment process. Prior to forming Life + Liberty Indexes, Perth was a private wealth advisor at Fidelity Investments in Los Angeles and Houston and had lived and worked in Beijing and Hong Kong, where her observations led her to explore the relationship between freedom and markets.
Housing Starts, 2021 and 2022
Source: Calculated Risk
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
