My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• The Business of Betting on Catastrophe: World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital. (MIT Press Reader)
• EU Considers Lowering Tariffs on U.S. Imports in Effort to Woo Trump: European leaders to debate what they could give up to secure speedy trade deal. (Wall Street Journal) but see also Tracking Every Trump Tariff and Its Economic Effect. Here’s a compilation of measures both implemented and planned, accompanied by a Bloomberg Economics view on the effect. (Bloomberg)
• Lessons on Money & Life I Learned From Warren Buffett. The 94-year-old “Oracle of Omaha” announced at his last shareholder’s meeting that he’s stepping down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of this year. Though I never met him, he has taught me a lot about money — and life. Here are some brilliantly simple lessons for us all that I learned from Warren Buffett. (Advisor Perspectives)
• Happy Birthday, Money. This currency proved to be both a blessing and a curse for the war effort. It’s not mere history: Both the successes and the failures offer crucial lessons about how monetary and fiscal decisions affect the economy, and how they shape the credibility of the nation as a whole. Those lessons have resonated through all the intervening years of independence, expansion, conflict, depression, war, reinvention and more. Today the prospects for our currency are starting to turn ominous again. (New York Times)
• Don’t Be Fooled by Treasury Yields: Adjusting appropriately for inflation is key to understanding the expected payoff from government securities versus stocks. (Bloomberg)
• The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting: Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. (The Atlantic)
• Is Mark Cuban the Loudmouth Billionaire that Democrats Need for 2028? He’s a sports mogul, small-business influencer, media personality, health-care disruptor—and the ultimate Trump foil. (Businessweek)
• When Does Consciousness Emerge in Babies? Answering the question of when consciousness emerges is deeply tied to the mystery of what it actually is and how it can be measured. (Scientific American)
• When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation: After spending nearly two weeks in a secret bunker somewhere in Iran during his country’s war with Israel, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, might want to use the opportunity of the ceasefire to venture out. (BBC)
• This songwriter shaped today’s country music. You’ve never heard of him. Ashley Gorley spent years trying to crack the code behind a hit song. It paid off. We asked him for the stories behind some of his record-breaking 83 No. 1 songs. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week Velina Peneva, where she manages more than $100 billion of Swiss Re‘s internal cpaital as the firm’s Chief Investment Officer: Previously, she was Private Equity practice leader in Zurich for Bain & Company.
Due to historical and geographical reasons, European countries tend to spread their populations across many medium and smaller cities rather than concentrating everyone in a few megacities
Source: @simongerman600
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