My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• Is a Recession Coming? Better Check Men’s Underwear Sales. Champagne flows, lipstick sales, Dining out trends, library activity, Lipstick sales and Men’s underwear, and French fry sales each provide a little insight. (Barron’s)
• Goodbye to the Prophets of Doom: The conventional wisdom about the global economy is that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. What if that isn’t true? (The Atlantic)
• Slow-burning Minsky moments — Or Montier moments? We seem to live in an era of rolling financial crisis. I suspect this is the result of a massive build-up of private sector debt. Sometimes these build-ups are accompanied by very high rates of credit growth, giving rise to a credit bubble. On other occasions, these build-ups sit simmering in the background, largely unnoticed until the proverbial s**t hits the fan, when they suddenly act as an amplifier causing a much steeper decline than would otherwise have been the case. I call these systemic vulnerabilities “slow burn Minsky moments.” Sadly, most markets appear to carry the fingerprints of these moments today. (Financial Times)
• HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says: A pair of professors found that home renovation media leads homeowners to decorate for the masses, not for their own happiness. (Washington Post)
• Threads Is About to Make All the Money That Twitter Isn’t: Advertisers are already clamoring to spend big on Meta’s new social network. (Slate) see also Does Threads Pose an Existential Threat to Twitter? Elon Musk’s Twitter isn’t fun; Twitter’s swan song (maybe) (Young Money)
• Tortoise Estate Planning—One Chore of Having a Pet That Lives 100 Years: More people are putting their desert tortoises, and other long-living animals, in their wills. Can the grandkids take ‘Jebediah?’ (Wall Street Journal)
• Rebuilding Ukraine Is an Act of Resistance: Russia’s invasion has caused $1 trillion of damage. Technology will be at the heart of Ukrainian recovery from the war (Wired)
• Why Do So Many People Still Support Donald Trump? People will vote for Donald Trump in 2024 for many different reasons, but foremost among them: They believe he stands for what they want and he is the best person available to get it for them. Which are perfectly good reasons for voting for someone. In this case, however, his enthusiastic supporters are willing to send a vengeance-driven, delusional autocrat into the White House to get what they want. A man who will know much better than he did in 2016 how to wield the vast powers of the presidency to corrupt and ultimately destroy America’s democracy. And in so doing put the other democracies in the world on quaking ground. (The Authoritarians)
• The Mango Is King of the Miami Summer: Those who sweat and suffer through June and July in South Florida are rewarded with mangoes blushing from trees in yards, streets and strip malls.. (New York Times)
• If Shohei Ohtani Gets $600 Million, He Should Thank Satchel Paige: Black baseball players integrated White leagues and brought with them a different philosophy that helped shift the power dynamics between teams and talent. (Bloomberg)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Tom Wagner, Co-Portfolio Manager at Knighthead Capital. The $10 billion event-driven is a deep value-focused investor specializing in companies that need financial and operational restructuring. He is a co-investor with football legend Tom Brady in several sports assets, including a Pickleball team, Birmingham City FC in the English Football League, and an endurance auto racing team. Wagner began his career doing hedge fund accounting at Ernst & Young.
Q2 2023 Bond Market Performance
Source: Morningstar
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