Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Tourists Are Staying Away from the U.S. in Droves: With the World Cup approaching and the country’s 250th anniversary also on tap this summer, 2026 was supposed to be a banner year for tourism in the U.S. But that’s not how things are shaping up. (Der Spiegel)
• The Continuum of Truthiness? Jefferies’ reported prices on secondary sales of private equity stakes have historically been a price lower than the General Partners’ own marks. Secondary PE pricing doesn’t jibe with accounting rules (The Alt View) see also Investor Advocates Ask FASB to Reconsider Guidance on Secondaries: Secondary funds’ returns are “artificially inflated” by the practice, say investor advocates asking FASB to reconsider its guidance. (Institutional Investor) see also The Vanishing: How BDCs Disappear Bad Loans: In a recent interview defending private credit, Blackstone’s head of Private Wealth suggested separating the signal from the noise. Dubitsky does exactly that. A case study in gaming loan reporting via Blackstone’s BCRED (Rod’s Substack)
• Revisiting Valeant: HBO’s Industry prompts a fresh look back at the Valeant Pharmaceuticals saga and what it still teaches about financial engineering gone wrong. The $90 billion pharma meltdown that changed nothing. (Drugstore Cowboy)
• This Isn’t Trading. It’s Theft from Your Retirement: Adam Kinzinger on the 15-minute gap that shows congressional stock trading is theft from everyone else’s retirement savings. Someone keeps making perfectly-timed bets right before the President speaks. The victims are your pension, your 401(k), and the country I took an oath to defend. (Adam Kinzinger)
• Car Owners Are Revolting Over Tesla’s Self-Driving Promises: A decade of pre-sold FSD finally meets a class of buyers who kept the receipts. An international backlash is growing over outdated Tesla hardware. (Wall Street Journal)
• How the Tech World Turned Evil: Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and they have to be stopped. Timothy Noah on how Musk, Bezos, and Thiel came to define a darker, more political Silicon Valley. (New Republic)
• A Flailing President Seeks a Hellhole Airline: Donald Trump wants to buy Spirit Airlines. Honestly, they deserve each other. (The Bulwark)
• The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish: ProPublica models what lapsing childhood vaccination coverage actually looks like on a U.S. mortality chart. The graphs do the arguing. (ProPublica) see also Where measles is spreading in the U.S.: Outbreaks fuel infections in states coast to coast: Measles infections continue to spread across the United States, largely fueled by outbreaks – large and small – in multiple states. Health officials in multiple states are concerned measles cases are going unreported because there are people who aren’t seeking diagnosis and treatment. Spring break travel may contribute to more people falling ill with measles in the next few weeks. It can take two to three weeks for symptoms to appear after a person is infected. (Health Beat)
• “In America the Law Is King”: Judge J. Michael Luttig’s Neukom Center address on the rule of law, the courts, and the moment the country is in. “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other” Thomas Paine 1776 (Judge J. Michael Luttig)
• The Warehouse, in Plain Sight: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is converting some of the largest buildings in the country into shadow detention centers, where secret police will warehouse people, holding them without charge, before deporting them. The DHS warehouse is a place of flows made into a place of containment. A concealed infrastructure created by capitalists, adapted by fascists. A disappearing machine. You don’t need to know the history of warehouses to oppose their transformation into concentration camps. There are ways to slow down that machine, jam it up, break it apart, until we end it. But it is useful to know who owns the buildings for sale, who zones the land, who controls levers of power. Writing the warehouse into the atlas. (Places Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with David Gardner, cofounder of The Motley Fool in 1993 (with his brother Tom Gardner). Originally launched as a print investment newsletter based on the idea that ordinary investors could beat Wall St., it gained traction when promoted on America Online (AOL) in 1994; it soon became a major presence on AOL and then Fool.com. His latest book is “Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth.”
China Edges Past U.S. in Global Approval Ratings
Source: Gallup
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