Welcome to June! My morning WFH reads:
• We Asked Workers Why They’re Not Coming Back to the Office: Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home. (Wall Street Journal)
• Why Are Food Prices So High in Europe? Throughout the European Union, consumer food prices were on average 17% higher in April than a year earlier — the fastest pace of growth in over two and a half decades. The situation is worse in Britain, where food and nonalcoholic drink prices were 19% higher, the quickest pace of annual food inflation in more than 45 years. By comparison, the annual rate of U.S. food inflation was 7.7%. (New York Times) see also The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive: Big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. (New York Times)
• JPMorgan Builds Unit for World’s Richest Families in Wealth Bet: Wall focuses on 700 families worth more than $4.5 trillion Andy Cohen leads the unit with offices in US, Europe and Asia. (Bloomberg)
• Short selling makes markets work better. So why do banks want to outlaw it? Such calls for regulatory actions against short sellers are all based on the assumption that short selling is nefarious — that daring to take a negative view of a company’s stock is tantamount to market manipulation, especially if the short sellers have the impudence to publicize their viewpoint. (Los Angeles Times)
• We See The Chinese As The Main Competitor, Not GM Or Toyota;” Ford CEO On EVs: Jim Farley thinks that Chinese brands will be “the powerhouse” when it comes to electric vehicles. (Inside EVs)
• What San Francisco can learn from Wall Street: Sidewalks left desolate after dark, empty office buildings, and retailers struggling to get by on sparse daytime foot traffic. The problem in both cases was office workers going elsewhere. In Wall Street’s case, they’d migrated north to Midtown. In modern San Francisco, they’re staying home. New York’s answer was to turn Wall Street into a mixed-use neighborhood, building new housing and converting older buildings into apartments. It may have taken half a century, but the plan worked. (San Francisco Examiner)
• The Man Who Invented the Trillion-Dollar Coin: An Atlanta lawyer was just spitballing on a financial blog. He didn’t expect Washington to listen. (New York Magazine)
• The Complete Guide to Haggling in This Economy: From cars to hotels to medical bills, the cost of things we purchase every day is more negotiable than you might think. Here are strategies for asking for a discount. (Wall Street Journal)
• Can the ‘California Effect’ Survive in a Hyperpartisan America? For decades the state has been setting policy for the whole nation. Now red states are pushing back. (New York Times)
• ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ was a sitcom that changed sitcoms: Actors, writers and directors remember the highs and lows of making the seminal ’90s series, which aired for the last time 25 years ago this week. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Ramit Sethi writes about money, business, and psychology. He is the author of NYT bestseller I Will Teach You to Be Rich and the host of the popular Netflix series “How to Get Rich.”
The Most Important Banks in the World
Source: Net Interest
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Ritholtz Reads will be on vacation, and will return June 15th.
