Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Trillion-Dollar Grift: Inside the Greatest Scam of All Time. (Yahoo News)
• Quackonomics Medical Properties Trust spent billions buying community hospitals in bewildering deals that made private equity rich and working-class towns reel. (American Prospect)
• The Romance Scammer on My Sofa: A writer’s quest to find the con artist in Nigeria who duped his mother. (Atavist)
• Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ An aging population that values its free time set the stage for economic stagnation. Then came Covid-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine. (WSJ)
• This Supposed Mafia Manifesto Doesn’t Stand Up to a Google Search: The “Green Bible,” a document that’s helped Italian authorities put dozens of Nigerian immigrants in prison, is a mess of lines stolen from American gangs as well as mob movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas. (Businessweek)
• This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers: This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of villages about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the Francisco Morazan department of central Honduras. The valley is also the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately sell drugs, according to an 18-month investigation by The Chronicle. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• How Harlan Crow Slashed his Tax Bill by Taking Clarence Thomas on Superyacht Cruises. In lavishing gifts on the Supreme Court justice, the billionaire GOP donor may have violated tax laws, according to tax experts. (ProPublica)
• A Major Polling Company Is Throwing Its Weight Behind Huge Conspiracy Theories: Rasmussen Reports is polling — and pushing — election denialism and COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. Can they still be the Walmart of pollsters? (Huffpost)
• Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says: Democratic candidate’s recent false claim that Covid could have been ‘ethnically targeted’ is not an aberration but fits long pattern. (The Guardian) see also The Most Shocking Aspect of RFK Jr.’s Anti-Semitism: What’s surprising isn’t that Kennedy voiced an anti-Jewish conspiracy, but that it took this long. (The Atlantic)
• Fans Keep Dying at This Country Music Festival. Their Families Want Answers: At Faster Horses in Michigan, seven reported deaths have occurred over the fest’s short nine-year history. Survivors of a 2021 tragedy want accountability (Rolling Stone)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jawad Mian, CFA and Chartered Market Technician, who runs the independent global macro research and trading advisory firm Stray Reflections. The firm’s focus is on major investment themes, and its clients include many of the world’s largest hedge funds and alternative asset managers.
States with weaker gun laws have higher rates of firearm related homicides and suicides
Source: CNN
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