Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• How the ‘Harvard of Trading’ Ruined Thousands of Young People’s Lives: IM Academy promises a Wall Street education. But instead of riches, many of its members have lost everything. (Businessweek)
• New Florida Law Roils Its Condo Market Three Years After Surfside Collapse: More units are being dumped on the market because of six-figure special assessments tied to repairs for older buildings. (Wall Street Journal)
• I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty: Your online influencer girlfriend is actually a rotating cast of low-wage workers. I became one of them. (Wired)
• Elon Musk’s Diplomacy: Woo Right-Wing World Leaders. Then Benefit. Mr. Musk has built a constellation of like-minded heads of state — including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi — to push his own politics and expand his business empire. (New York Times)
• Suit: Cheap Prison Labor Is Keeping People Locked Up Longer: Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good. (Businessweek) see also Doing Right Is Hard When Doing Wrong Is Profitable: The 17th-century Dutch were quite aware that slavery was pernicious and dove in anyway. There are modern parallels. (Bloomberg)
• QAnon Claims on X Soar by 1,283%: Mentions of specific QAnon phrases — including “The Great Awakening,” “WWG1WGA” (Where we go one, we go all), and “QSentMe,” among others — have surged since platform owner Elon Musk’s decision to allow dozens of prominent QAnon influencers to return to the platform after they were previously banned. (NewsGuard’s Reality Check)
• The Most Infamous Cop in New Orleans History: In 1994, a corrupt cop ordered a hit on a civilian. He went away for murder, but he left a trail of other victims in his wake. They are still crying out for justice. (Longreads)
• At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display: An upside-down flag, adopted by Trump supporters contesting the Biden victory, flew over the justice’s front lawn as the Supreme Court was considering an election case. (New York Times)
• The 9 worst court decisions since Trump remade the federal judiciary: This is what happens after four years under an insurrectionist president. It will get much worse if he gets eight. (Vox) see also How Originalism Ate the Law: America is captive to a legal theory that dictates our laws on guns, abortion, and so much more. We need to act. (Slate)
• She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and condemned. The problem? Nothing was fake after all: The moral panic following Raffaella Spone’s ‘deepfake’ video spread around the world. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story in which nothing was as it seemed … (The Guardian)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Savita Subramanian, Head of US Equity and Quantitative Strategy, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She was Institutional Investor All America Research Team for the past 11 years.
15 Funds That Have Destroyed the Most Wealth Over the Past Decade
Source: Morningstar
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