Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption, and policy failures:
• When the Homeowners Association Comes for Your Home: A spate of foreclosures filed by HOAs in Denver illustrates the potential risks of an increasingly common homeownership model. (Citylab)
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development: Walter Isaacson’s insight-free doorstop makes at least one thing clear: the richest man in the world has a lot of growing up to do. (The Guardian) see also Every CEO Talks Like Elon Musk Now: Meet the workforce-slashing, loyalty-demanding, “extremely hardcore” Great Men of Business. (Slate)
• Slack Is Basically Facebook Now: Slack’s redesign suggests that keeping up with Slack is the only work worth doing. (The Atlantic)
• Meet the Man Making Big Banks Tremble: Michael Barr, whom President Biden appointed as the Federal Reserve’s top bank cop, has drawn blowback for his bank regulation push. (New York Times)
• How Misreading Adam Smith Helped Spawn Deaths of Despair: A Nobel Prize–winning economist reflects on the dire consequences of libertarian economics. (Boston Review)
• An Issue of Trust: Jay Alix, a retired corporate turnaround man and certified fraud examiner, has spent the last seven years ricocheting from courtroom to courtroom, arguing that McKinsey, the elite global consulting firm, has been breaking the law, improperly enriching itself, and rigging cases in the bankruptcy courts, where it’s required to act as a fiduciary. Not just once, but again and again. “If somebody’s doing this across multiple cases, across billions of dollars of transactions, they’ve corrupted the system.” (Medium)
• Google’s Dominance Over the Internet, Visualized: A graphic analysis of the companies customers rely on during their daily visits online. (Businessweek)
• The leafy street in Leigh-on-Sea that 80 sham firms call home: If you believed the paperwork, Henry Drive in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, would be a thriving business metropolis specialising in the wholesale clothing market with entrepreneurs from across Europe choosing this leafy Essex street as their operations base. (BBC)
• We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized. The pandemic. The mass shootings. Insurrection. Trump. We’ve been through so much. What if our entire national character is a trauma response? (New Republic)
• Have you noticed that everyone’s teeth are a little too perfect? Celebrities and civilians alike are “fixing” their natural teeth. Now everybody has the same smile … and it’s kind of creepy. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Elizabeth Burton, Managing Director and Client Investment Strategist at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Previously, she was Chief Investment Officer of Hawaii’s Employees’ Retirement System (“HIERS”). She was named to Chief Investment Officer Magazines’ 40-Under-40, as well as winning the 2017 Industry Innovation Award, and a Power 100 member in 2019.
US economy going strong under Biden – Americans don’t believe it
Source: The Guardian
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