The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat by the fire, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The 2024 research dump! A comprehensive round-up of all the 2024 investment outlook reports (Financial Times)
• Christmas Didn’t Start Out as a Shop Fest. Here’s How It Became One. the holiday season accounts for nearly a fifth of U.S. annual retail sales, and more for sellers of clothes, toys, and other prime gift items. The end-of-year trade is crucial to industries like airlines, hotels, manufacturing, and shipping, as well as to thousands of seasonal workers. The U.S. economy is centered on the holidays.It wasn’t always that way. The Pilgrims didn’t observe Christmas. Like the Puritans, they objected to its biblically unsupported placement on Dec. 25, as well as its link to rowdy pre-Christian festivals that celebrated the winter solstice and harvest’s end. (Barron’s)
• Twitter’s Demise Is About So Much More Than Elon Musk: TikTok is eating microblogging as we’ve always known it. (The Atlantic)
• As Office Workers Make Their Return, So Does the Lowly Cubicle: Once derided as symbols of a commodified work force, cubicles are making a comeback, and workers are personalizing them and posting photos on social media. (New York Times)
• Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird: Bird was once valued at more than $2 billion—now it has filed for bankruptcy. This is the untold story of the contractors who risked it all to try to make the micromobility dream a reality. (Wired)
• Everyone has an opinion – but my gut is telling me differently. Should I trust it? Our intuition can reflect knowledge or understanding that is well-founded but just below the level of our awareness. (The Guardian)
• The Year in Physics: From the smallest scales to the largest, the physical world provided no shortage of surprises this year. (Quanta)
• New Clues for What Will Happen When the Sun Eats the Earth: Recent observations of an aging, alien planetary system are helping to answer the question: What will happen to our planet when the sun dies? (Quanta Magazine)
• ‘Warhol After Warhol’ Review: A Question of Authenticity The ‘Red Self-Portrait’ owned by one collector is not a fake, according to the artist’s foundation—but not truly a Warhol. (Wall Street Journal)
• “You Better Be as Good as Letterman!” Conan O’Brien’s Wild First Year: An Oral History: In 1993, NBC made a historic decision—and gave Late Night to a nobody. O’Brien, Letterman, Lorne Michaels, Lisa Kudrow, and more tell all. (Vanity Fair)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Stephen Suttmeier, director and chief equity technical strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. His research appears regularly in Monthly Chart Portfolio of Global Markets, Market Analysis Comment, Sectors and Stocks on the Move, Thematic Stock Charts, and Chart Blast.
Powell’s Pivot Sows Confusion Over When and How Fast Fed Will Cut
Source: Wall Street Journal
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