Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top: I was just looking to make rent when I stumbled into a part-time gig stealing secrets from Wall Street elite. I made millions once I realized how desperate we humans are for someone who will actually listen. (Narratively)
• How a Brazen Plot to Rig Oil Auctions Cost Venezuela Billions: America’s best-known lawyer, a couple of fraudsters and a pariah government joined forces to sue the world’s largest commodities trading firms. The evidence is explosive, but the bungled lawsuit has so far come to nothing. (Businessweek)
• Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India: Students around the globe are increasingly questioning the returns on education. Nowhere is the problem more complex than India. (Bloomberg)
• Crooks’ Mistaken Bet on Encrypted Phones: Drug syndicates and other criminal groups bought into the idea that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. They were wrong—big time. (New Yorker)
• America Fails the Civilization Test: The average American my age is roughly six times more likely to die in the coming year than his counterpart in Switzerland. (The Atlantic)
• Audubon in This Day and Age: The artist and his birds continue to challenge us: John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color. (Humanities)
• ‘Fair share’ deficits at nonprofit hospitals reached $14.2B in 2020. KFF found that half of hospitals spend 1.4% or less of their operating expenses on charity care, and reports have pointed out lax oversight over hospitals practices. Many hospitals did, however, expand eligibility for charity care during the COVID-19 pandemic, though policies were vague, according to a report in JAMA. (Health Care Dive)
• I Really Didn’t Want to Go On the Goop cruise: but that doesn’t matter—even if someone thinks she’s done more harm than good, and that a lot of it is an upscale scam, they will comment, wearily, pragmatically, just a little bit enviously, that you have to respect it, don’t you, what she’s done. She has successfully integrated her imperial wellness company into American life. Memories of a time when gut health wasn’t something you discussed at parties are distant. Moms are microdosing. Vulnerability reigns. (Harper’s Magazine)
• A House Divided: How a Band of Speculators Seized Deeds of Black-Owned Brooklyn Brownstones: A quartet of investors say they’re only helping the dispossessed get what’s due. But their actions have exploited family divisions — and relatives on both sides of the deals say they’ve been ripped off. (The City)
• Fire and Ice: The planet’s ice is fundamentally tethered to weather patterns that stretch across the globe. Scientists are finding that as the climate changes, that connection could be helping fuel disasters. More than 25 million acres have burned in the Western U.S. since 2018. Some fires have been so extreme, they’ve seemed impossible to contain. Weather has been the deciding factor in many of those fires. When hot, arid conditions settle on the Western U.S., the fire danger skyrockets. Far to the north, the season of ice is changing. The Arctic Ocean is normally covered in a vast, frozen blanket for most of the year. But sea ice is shrinking. It’s breaking up earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. As the climate gets hotter, the Arctic is spending more days as open ocean. These extremes of fire and ice are more than 3,000 miles apart. But now, connections are emerging. (NPR)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Brian Hamburger, founder of MarketCounsel and Hamburger Law Firm. He is an entrepreneur, attorney, consultant, and advocate for independent investment advisers, which is a $97 trillion industry. MarketCounsel and Hamburger Law Firm are the leading business & regulatory compliance consultancy to the country’s preeminent entrepreneurial independent investment advisers in the investment and securities industry.
Silicon Valley Bank failure was the 2nd largest in US history of 3,500 bank failures since 1934
Source: USA Facts
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