My Summer Solstice morning reads:
• Is Crypto Dead? Or can the industry recover? Even before the SEC announcements, crypto was in trouble. Dozens of firms had failed, millions of individual investors had plunged into the red or cashed out, and billions of dollars of institutional investment had moved on. Beset by long-standing problems of its own invention, the industry now faces not just a regulatory crisis but an existential one too: Is crypto down, or is it dead? (The Atlantic)
• The hottest new perk in tech is freedom: How small tech companies are using remote work to compete with the big guys. (Vox) see also Places Most Affected by Remote Workers’ Moves Around the Country. The rise of remote work meant that many such workers moved into these places, too. But for New York, San Francisco, Washington and Los Angeles, significantly more remote workers left than arrived. By contrast, Austin, Denver, Dallas and Nashville all attracted a net influx of people working from home. (New York Times)
• Why Americans Are Still Splurging Even as Inflation Bites: A majority of Americans are cutting back on everyday purchases to afford the occasional splurge, Harris found. FIfty-four percent of those surveyed said they succumbed to the allure of splurging in 2023—a trend especially prevalent among the millennials Harris surveyed. (Barron’s)
• Goldman Sachs Is at War With Itself: CEO David Solomon has come under fire from partners who complain about bonuses, strategy and that DJ side gig. (Wall Street Journal)
• What the Scientists Who Pioneered Weight-Loss Drugs Want You to Know: Two researchers whose work led to the development of Wegovy and Ozempic spoke to WIRED about the creation of these drugs and how they should be used. (Wired)
• China’s Rebound Hits a Wall, and There Is ‘No Quick Fix’ to Revive It: Policymakers and investors expected China’s economy to rev up again after Beijing abruptly dropped Covid precautions, but recent data shows alarming signs of a slowdown. (New York Times)
• Running Amazon Became a Lot Less Fun Once Jeff Bezos Left: Assessing Andy Jassy’s first two years: Almost immediately after Jeff Bezos handed Amazon to Andy Jassy in July 2021, the trouble began. The company had been soaring post-pandemic, bolstered by overwhelming interest in e-commerce and the cloud, but a return to in-person life and a broad tech drawback changed it all fast. As Jassy took over, Amazon’s share price plunged, customers started buying less, easy corporate deals became hard, and hard deals fell apart. While Bezos lived the good life, his anointed CEO dealt with the fallout. (Slate) see also How Amazon Became Ordinary. At least 3 of the giants – Amazon, Facebook, and Google – are moving away from their basic founding principles. Microsoft and Apple seem to still be doing what made them giants; Netflix falls somewhere in the middle. (The Big Picture)
• An Earnest Exploration Of Hublot, The World’s Most Polarizing Watch Brand: Yes, some of their watches are insane. Isn’t that the point? (Hodinkee)
• How Nine Months Of Dobbs Changed America: Texans making 4,000-mile round-trip journeys for abortions. Weeks-long waits for appointments at clinics across the Midwest. Desperate calls to abortion funds asking for help with procedure costs, flights and gas. One year after last summer’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, this is the new reality of abortion in the U.S., as thousands of people are unable to obtain abortions in their home states or nearby — and tens of thousands more travel farther and farther to end their pregnancies. (FiveThirtyEight)
• Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice: “How am I going to stay calm before she goes onstage?” “I need to do remote today because I can’t get Covid before the concert.” “How am I going to go back to regular life once it’s all over?” They were saying they needed to calm down, and to help them do that we dug through the full bag of tricks — behavioral, cognitive, psychodynamic, existential — and explored these patients’ relationships to anticipation, to enjoyment, to self-regulation, to suffering. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with NBC News and former WSJ reporter Gretchen Morgenson. The Pulitizer prize-winning investigative journalist is the author of a new book, These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs―and Wrecks―America.
The FOMC wrongly been predicting that within a year, core inflation will fall below 3% at every Fed meeting over the past 2 years
Source: Torsten Slok, Apollo
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