Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Ghost Fleet Helping Russia Evade Sanctions and Pursue Its War in Ukraine: Turkish companies have bought dozens of tankers that ship Russian oil. (Wall Street Journal)
• SPACs – The Implosion Continues. And… Where’s the SEC? It reached the point that there were more companies than acquisition targets. So many, in fact, that so far this year SPAC Track says 142 SPACs were liquidated without ever finding a business to merge with. That compares to 144 in all of last year. (Herb Greenberg) see also Why Most SPACs Suck: The investing world is as much a victim of Sturgeon’s Law as anything else. Dating back to 1953, this maxim was coined by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who, in response to a critique of his genre made the insightful observation that “90% of everything is crap.” The simple reality is that most human attempts at creation fail, many quite spectacularly. This not as a curmudgeonly observation, but rather, the joyful celebration of how rare true success is. (The Big Picture)
• Credit card debt collection: One core waste stream of the finance industry is charged-off consumer debt. Debt collection is a fascinating (and frequently depressing) underbelly of finance. It shines a bit of light on credit card issuance itself, and richly earns the wading-through-a-river-of-effluvia metaphor. (Bits About Money)
• ‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text: In an exclusive excerpt from Zeke Faux’s forthcoming book, “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall,” he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring in Cambodia. (Businessweek)
• ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are Everywhere. What Are They Doing to Us? PFAS lurk in so much of what we eat, drink and use. Scientists are only beginning to understand how they’re impacting our health — and what to do about them. (New York Times)
• The Man Who Made the Suburbs White: J.C. Nichols pioneered racial covenants in Kansas City’s surrounding enclaves. The country is still grappling with them. (Slate)
• How to Catch Pandemic Fraud? Prosecutors Try Novel Methods. Strained by limited resources, prosecutors are deploying special teams and nurturing local relationships to catch up to a wave of fraud. (New York Times)
• The Supreme Court is taking a wrecking ball to the wall between church and state: The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub. (Vox)
• Two Months in Georgia: How Trump Tried to Overturn the Vote: The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election. (New York Times) see also How Donald Trump tried to undo his loss in Georgia in 2020: Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, where all of their strategies came together in a complex and multilayered effort that unfolded against the hyperpartisan backdrop of two ongoing U.S. Senate races. (Washington Post)
• Wish you weren’t here! How tourists are ruining the world’s greatest destinations: Overtourism has long been a problem – and besieged cities are fighting back. But can angry locals stop the tide of stag parties, ‘anus burners’, noise and graffiti? (The Guardian)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who founded and leads Harvard Law School’s program on behavioral economics and public policy. He authored several books, including the bestselling “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” (written with Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler) and the New York Times best-seller “The World According to Star Wars.” His new book is “Decisions about Decisions: Practical Reason in Ordinary Life.”
Unintentional overdoses rose for the ninth consecutive year in 2021
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
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