My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• How Wall Street Sussed Out That Situational Awareness Was on the Ropes: From whispers of Anthropic stake sale to strange options moves, traders sensed trouble and swung into action. The Wall Street Journal’s exclusive on the detection — the prime broker signals, the counterparty chatter, and how the Street smelled the blow-up before the announcement. (Wall Street Journal)
• ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent: The New York Times on BNPL’s grim frontier — installment loans for utilities and rent, the clearest signal yet about household financial stress. (New York Times) see also Weak Retail-Sales Number Adds to Softening Economic Data: Retail sales fell 0.6% in July against an expected 0.1% increase; nonstore retailers were down 2.2%. Economists had expected a small increase in retail sales, but July brought surprisingly sour news (Wall Street Journal)
• Go to the mountains, come down from 30,000 feet: Kevin Warsh’s first Jackson Hole speech is a test of the Chair, and of the Fed’s credibility. Stay-At-Home Macro’s Jackson Hole preview — what the symposium can and can’t tell us about the Fed’s reaction function this year. (Stay-At-Home Macro)
• “Vibe Chipping”, Vanishing Moats, & Future Semiconductors: The changes that AI is driving are truly breathtaking:”Cadence says its new AI agents can run hundreds of simulations simultaneously. This reduces a typical five-week verification cycle to less than a day.” (Paul Kedrosky)
• Inside Nvidia’s $500 Billion AI Debt Machine: A Credit Analysis: Who bears the risk in Nvidia’s $500 billion financing platform? Sascha Steffen’s credit-risk breakdown of the Nvidia-centered financing web — the vendor financing, the circular deals, and the balance-sheet exposure if the capex cycle turns. (Sascha Steffen)
• Tesla’s true believers are starting to question their faith in Elon Musk: As Musk turns his focus to other ventures such as SpaceX, some of his biggest backers are wondering whether his car company has become an afterthought. (Washington Post)
• The death of the stick shift is almost here: Driving a manual vehicle is a lost art. Hopes of a revival have fallen flat. With the rise of EVs and autonomous vehicles, only a few die-hards are holding on. Todd C. Frankel on Alvaro Puig, who learned the clutch and three pedals in his father’s old manual BMWs in the early ’90s and got hooked on deciding when to shift. (Washington Post)
• The Enshittification of Big Food: Why the food on your shelf keeps getting worse: Mike Lee traces the 1990 swap of beef tallow for partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in McDonald’s fryers. The trans fats proved more dangerous than the saturated fat they replaced, and by the late 1990s were blamed for roughly 50,000 premature American deaths a year. (The Future Market)
• Her Brain Was Broken. It Was Fixed With Sound—Not a Scalpel: One woman’s meth addiction was so bad, the only option left might have been brain surgery. Then a single session of noninvasive, focused ultrasound seemed to do what years of treatment could not. Emily Mullin on Erin McNulty, missing for weeks and years into methamphetamine use, and the focused-ultrasound procedure that reached her without surgery. (Wired)
• R.I.P. Columbia House: Here’s How It Improbably Survived This Long It wasn’t music streaming that killed it, because it pivoted. Gizmodo’s obituary for the 12-CDs-for-a-penny empire — the negative-option billing, the bankruptcies, and the zombie afterlife that finally ended. (Gizmodo)
Video of the day: The Ultimate Guide To Absolutely Everything In The Universe
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this past weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents. She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.
Tariff Refunds Are Here—and Turbocharging Earnings
Source: Wall Street Journal
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