Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a threat to your health — and our democracy: Kennedy’s anti-vaccination and anti-government spiel appeals to prominent entertainment and business figures who like to be thought of as iconoclasts. For instance, he’s been embraced by Elon Musk, whose apparent determination to tell it like it is has been hampered by his towering ignorance. (Los Angeles Times)
• The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb: From San Francisco to Hong Kong, higher interest rates and falling property values are bringing the commercial real estate market to a perilous precipice. (Businessweek)
• The Biotech Edge: How Executives and Well-Connected Investors Make Exquisitely Timed Trades in Health Care Stocks. Secret IRS records reveal dozens of highly fortuitous biotech and health care trades. One executive bought shares in a corporate partner just before a sale, and an investor traded options right before a company’s revenues took off, netting millions. (ProPublica)
• Arizona Is Running Out of Cheap Water. Investors Saw It Coming: The state just moved to restrict housing construction around Phoenix as groundwater demand outstrips supply. But fast-growing towns are already buying water from elsewhere — and investors’ bets are paying off. (Bloomberg)
• He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him. Kyle Roche was a rising star in the field of cryptocurrency law — until his career imploded. Who orchestrated his downfall? (New York Times)
• Trump’s Fox News interview was a defense attorney’s nightmare: The former president offered a confusing, and likely damaging, defense of his latest indictment. (Vox)
• An Aggressive Supreme Court Reshapes the US as Its Standing Erodes: A conservative supermajority is remaking US laws on the environment, health and firearms, even as public confidence declines and ethical questions grow. (Bloomberg) see also The Supreme Court’s latest opinion means innocent people must remain in prison: Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion ensures that innocent people will spend years behind bars. (Vox)
• Inside North Korea: “We are stuck, waiting to die”. For months, the BBC has been communicating in secret with three North Koreans living in the country. They expose, for the first time, the disaster unfolding there since the government sealed the borders more than three years ago. (BBC)
• Well-funded Christian group behind US effort to roll back LGBTQ+ rights: Advocacy groups condemn Alliance Defending Freedom as ‘a danger to every American who values their freedoms’. (The Guardian)
• The Mets spent $445 million for MLB’s most underachieving team. Can it turn? The Mets have been outscored in the first inning of games this year, 54-21. They haven’t performed in any facet of the game — pitching, fielding or hitting — particularly well. Without much of an identity, it’s hard to see what the Mets could lean on to power any potential string of success. (The Athletic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Peter Borish, founding partner at Tudor Investments, where he was Director of Research for 10 years working directly with Paul Tudor Jones. He has also been Chairman and CEO of Computer Trading Corp, and Chief Strategist for quant fund at Quad Group. Borish is also a founding trustee of the Robin Hood Foundation, formed with Paul Tudor Jones in 1988.
The Bush and Trump Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio
Source: Center For American Progress
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