Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Worst Acquisition in History, Again: Scott Galloway on whichever deal just earned this dubious distinction. After six months and eight failed bids, the Ellisons made the Warner Bros. Discovery board an offer they couldn’t refuse. The potential Netflix acquisition would’ve been akin to fusing LVMH and Walmart — HBO’s prestige TV and Warner’s iconic IP, plus Netflix’s scale. Paramount Skydance buying WBD is the fusion of a dog and a car bumper traveling 80 miles an hour. Spoiler alert: It’s not going to end well. The Prof G postmortem is always more entertaining than the deal itself. (No Mercy / No Malice)
• As bitcoin mining economics “have gone from bad to worse,” companies pivot and sell to survive: Core Scientific is just the latest miner offloading its bitcoin, as other miners turn their compute power to AI. (Sherwood) see also Bitcoin’s Plunge Should End the Hype That It Is Digital Gold: Bitcoin fell while gold rallied. Again. At some point, the “store of value” crowd has to reckon with the fact that it trades like a risk asset in every downturn. (The Hill)
• Gambling in the modern age. Sports betting is being marketed to young Americans as an investment. America’s next epidemic. More than 10% of college students are pathological gamblers. That’s 5x the national average, by some estimates. (Bettor Off)
• Books and screens: Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time. (Aeon)
• Kash Patel’s Latest Firings Ousted Agents with Expertise in Iran: You’d think that during a war with Iran, you’d want to keep the people who know the most about Iran. You would be wrong. (MSNBC) see also Intel report warns large-scale war ‘unlikely’ to oust Iran’s regime: A classified U.S. report doubts that Iran’s opposition would take power following either a short or extended U.S. military campaign. (Washington Post)
• The Return of Measles Is Bad. A Polio Comeback Would Be So, So Much Worse: If you think measles outbreaks are scary, wait until you remember what polio actually does. (Techdirt)
• Pardon Industry Offers Rich Offenders a Path to Trump: One inmate paid lobbyists and lawyers with ties to the president’s team and walked free. Others are following his blueprint, but it is not always clear who can deliver. A cottage industry of lobbyists and fixers is selling access to presidential clemency. The NYT maps the network and the price list. (New York Times) see also Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate: ProPublica digs into the financial disclosures and finds exactly what you’d expect: Financial disclosures paint a damning picture of foxes guarding henhouses across every corner of the administration — the regulators are invested in the industries they oversee. Corruption hiding in plain sight on government forms. (ProPublica)
• Ted Cruz Asks Treasury to Approve $200 Billion Tax Cut Without Congress: Who needs the legislative branch when you can just ask the Treasury Department to unilaterally slash capital gains taxes? (Washington Post)
• I Was a Broke Millennial. I Tried to Trade My Way to Financial Freedom: A cautionary tale of a generation that grew up on Robinhood and learned the hard way that markets don’t care about your student loans. (Wall Street Journal) see also Record Numbers of Workers Are Raiding Their 401(k) Savings: Hardship withdrawals are at all-time highs. So much for the ownership society. (Wall Street Journal)
• Russia Is Providing Iran Intelligence to Target U.S. Forces, Officials Say: Moscow is feeding targeting data to Tehran. The war in the Middle East is becoming a proxy conflict with Russia in ways that weren’t part of the original pitch to the American public. The targeting information has included the locations of American warships and aircraft in the Middle East, the officials said. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ed Perks, president of Franklin Advisers and chief investment officer of Franklin Income Investors. He serves as lead portfolio manager of Franklin Income Fund, as well as Franklin Managed Income Fund. He is a member of the Franklin Templeton executive committee, a small group of the company’s top leaders responsible for shaping the firm’s overall strategy.
Anecdotal evidence AI is replacing young workers’ jobs showing up in the data across a wide range of countries.
Source: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
