The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• AI Wants More Data. More Chips. More Real Estate. More Power. More Water. More Everything: Businesses, investors and society brace for a demand shock from artificial intelligence. (Bloomberg)
• It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman: I got a rare look at the one tool responsible for all the tech in your life. It’s made by a company you’ve never heard of. And it’s maintained by hidden figures like her. (Wall Street Journal)
• 200 Years of Market Concentration: Is this trend an anomaly or part of an ongoing pattern in the stock market? To answer this question, we have collected data on the concentration of the US stock market over the past 235 years, from 1790 until the present. Figure 1 shows the market capitalization of the largest company, the five largest companies and the ten largest companies in the United States between 1790 and the present as a share of the entire stock market. Based upon Figure 1 and Figure 3, we have broken down the market concentration of the United States during the past 235 years into seven periods. (Global Financial Data)
• Vanguard 2025 economic and market outlook: The global monetary easing cycle will be in full swing in 2025, with inflation in most developed economies now within touching distance of central banks’ targets. The good fortune of high productivity growth and a surge in available labor has propelled the U.S. economy, while other economies have been less lucky. (Vanguard) see also Apollo/Torsten Slok’s Outlook for Private Markets 2025: Interest rates higher for longer has important implications for private markets. (Apollo)
• Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation: Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations? (The Garden of Forking Paths)
• Indian immigration is great for America This isn’t ambiguous. The debates over high-skilled immigration, Indian immigration specifically, and programs like H-1b are closely related — increasingly so, in fact. Most H-1b workers are Indian, and Indians make up a plurality of foreign-born STEM workers. Indian workers have become far more important than Chinese workers to America’s strategic high-tech industries…(Noahpinion)
• 52 Things I Learned in 2024: Every culture has a word for black and white. If a culture has a third word for a color, it is always red. If it has a fourth word, it is either yellow or green (Kent Hendricks) but see 52 things I learned in 2024: To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. (Medium)
• Cutting Government Is Easy… If You Go After McKinsey: Elon Musk engineered a panic over government spending, thwarting major PBM reform and bans on junk fees. But cutting government spending is easy, if you take on power. And therein lies the rub. (BIG by Matt Stoller)
• Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does) All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is. (Nature)
• Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts: From symphonies to rock music, marching bands and advertising jingles — we hear Zildjian cymbals everywhere. Drummers across the globe know that name because it’s emblazoned on every gleaming disc. What’s less known is the Zildjian family has been making their famous cymbals — with a secret process — for more than 400 years. (Vermont Public)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Sunaina Sinha, Global Head of Private Capital Advisory at Raymond James. She was named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Private Equity for 2 years in a row by Dow Jones Private Equity News, and earned a spot as one of the Twenty Trailblazing Women in Private Equity in 2023.
Visualizing Bitcoin’s Wild Ride in the Last Decade
Source: How Much
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