Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• ‘What if Yale finds out?’: Suicidal students are pressured to withdraw from Yale, then have to apply to get back into the university (Washington Post)
• The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX: A crypto implosion for the history books. (Slate) see also Bankman-Fried’s Cabal of Roommates in the Bahamas Ran His Crypto Empire – and Dated. Other Employees Have Lots of Questions: “The whole operation was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas,” a person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk on condition of anonymity. (Coindesk)
• The Private Equity Guys Trying to Shoplift a Supermarket Chain Before They Sell It: The Albertsons/Kroger merger tells you a lot about our cash-extractive economy. (Slate)
• How corporate chiefs dodge lawsuits over sexual abuse and deadly products: Scandals brought down Harvey Weinstein’s movie studio and major opioid supplier Mallinckrodt. But their wealthy owners, directors and executives were granted lifetime immunity from related lawsuits in bankruptcy court — an overwhelmingly common tactic in major U.S. Chapter 11 cases, a Reuters review found. (Reuters)
• #FAIL: How TikTok Stats Fool Hollywood: Execs, agents & marketers value stars based on followers. Data casts doubt on those numbers (The Ankler)
• Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter: Mr. Musk ordered immediate layoffs, fired executives by email, laid down product deadlines and has transformed the company. (New York Times)
• Meta Investors Are in No Mood for Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Moonshot: The CEO thinks virtual reality is the future. But does that project need to be inside the same company as Facebook? (Businessweek)
• Beijing’s Long Arm: China’s Secret Police Stations in Europe: China has allegedly established dozens of police stations abroad, including many in Europe. Beijing has sought to play down the reports, but one dissident in Europe recounts how he has been constantly harassed by staff members of one such office. (Spiegel)
• When destitute small towns mean dangerous tap water: While failures of big city water systems attract the attention, it’s small communities like Keystone, West Virginia, that more often are left unprotected by destitute and unmaintained water providers. Small water providers rack up roughly twice as many health violations as big cities on average, an analysis of thousands of records over the last three years by The Associated Press shows. In that time, small water providers violated the Safe Drinking Water Act’s health standards nearly 9,000 times. They were also frequently the very worst performers. Federal law allows authorities to force changes on water utilities, but they rarely do, even for the worst offenders. (AP)
• Why problem gamblers are suddenly emerging from the Fantasy Football generation: As legal sports gambling spreads, addiction researchers are beginning to see troubling patterns among young men. (Grid)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dave Nadig, Financial Futurist at VettaFi. The ETF industry pioneer has over 25 years of ETF experience. As Managing Director of ETF.com, he was a key participant in the rise of the passive and ETF industry. Previously, he was Was Managing Director at Barclays Global Investors. He co-authored the definitive book on ETFs, “A Comprehensive Guide To Exchange-Traded Funds,” for the CFA Institute.
A climate reckoning for US housing
Source: USA Today
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