The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• NFL Succession Crisis Forces Teams to Let Private Equity In: Once treated as heirlooms, pro football franchises are now billion-dollar businesses, and a new class of investors is circling. (Bloomberg)
• Boeing is a wake-up call: America’s businesses gambled that ‘greed is good.’ Now they’re losing that bet, big time. (Business Insider)
• Office Towers Reshaped US Skylines. Now Construction Cranes Are Vanishing. Few new buildings are going up, diminishing economic vitality Slowdown is particularly pronounced in Chicago, Manhattan. (Bloomberg)
• The World’s Most Important Industry Has a New Captain—and She’s Piloting It Into the 21st Century: Meet Marina Hadjipateras: Greek shipping heiress, successful venture capitalist, and the woman trying to transform the $14 trillion shipping industry. (Wired)
• Realtor Commissions Are Still a Hefty Part of Home Sales. Maybe Not for Long. Despite years of technology disruption, home commissions remain stuck near 6%. Now courts, consumers, and some brokers are fighting back. (Barron’s) see also Realtors Are in Crisis—and Home Buyers Could Be the Winners: A wave of lawsuits over fees paid to agents has put the giant trade association on the defense; ‘it got arrogant.’ (Wall Street Journal)
• What Happens When TikTok Is Your Marketing Department: The Pink Stuff, a home cleaning paste, went from total obscurity to viral sensation — and Walmart staple — thanks to one “cleanfluencer” and her legion of fans. (New York Times)
• Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash: The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen. (Asterisk)
• A journalist goes undercover to reveal the absurdity of the art scene: In ‘Get the Picture,’ journalist Bianca Bosker paints a portrait of people who talk ‘like they were trapped in dictionaries and being forced to chew their way out.’ (Washington Post)
• 200 cats, 200 dogs, one lab: the secrets of the pet food industry Pet food is a £120bn industry, with vast resources spent on working out how best to nourish and delight our beloved charges. But how do we know if we’re getting it right? (The Guardian)
• ‘Happy Days’ at 50: ‘The Fonz Bought Me a House’. In an interview, the surviving members of the original cast — Ron Howard, Donny Most, Anson Williams, Henry Winkler and Marion Ross — look back on the nostalgic hit, which premiered Jan. 15, 1974. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Bill Dudley, former president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he also served as vice chairman and a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee. He was executive vice president of the Markets Group at the New York Fed, where he also managed the System Open Market Account. Previously, he was chief US economist at Goldman Sachs (the firm’s first) as well as a partner and managing director.
The Mag 7 combined make more profit per year than listed securities in all non-US countries other than China and Japan.
Source: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank
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