Jan 20, 2019
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
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Lives Lived
John C. Bogle, Founder of Vanguard Group, Dies at 89 by Jason Zweig and Sarah Krouse (WSJ)
Near-zero cost access to index investing was a revolutionary idea in the 1970s when Vanguard’s first products were launched. Today, the ability to access equity markets and gain exposure to the market with no active selection is virtually free, mostly thanks to Bogle’s vision. [Link; paywall]
Weird News
Why every ski trail map looks the same by Katharine Schwab (Fast Company)
More than 250 trail maps for 175 mountains around the world have all been painted by the steady hands of James Neihues, the subject of a new coffee table book funded on Kickstarter. [Link]
100 years ago in Boston: The day molasses was deadly fast by William J. Kole (AP)
A century ago a giant storage tank in the bustling heart of New England burst, with more than 2.3mm gallons of molasses flowing through the streets at 35mph, killing more than 20. [Link]
Friends Don’t Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires by Ray Kwong (Forbes)
In 2011 there were 115 billionaires in China. Since, 72 have died, with 15 murders, 17 suicides, 7 accidental deaths, and 19 from illness. Another 14 were executed. [Link]
Canadian air traffic controllers send pizzas to U.S. counterparts working without pay by Sarah Smellie (CBC)
Since 9/11, there’s been a special link between air traffic controllers monitoring the eastern approaches to North America from Europe and the busiest airport hub in the country (New York’s three airports). Amidst the US government shutdown, controllers in Atlantic Canada sent their counterparts a batch of pizzas to alleviate some of the pain of furloughs. [Link]
Attention Economy
Is having the most popular photo on Instagram worth anything? We’re about to find out. by Kurt Wagner (recode)
This week a single picture of a brown egg on Instagram became the service’s most-liked picture. While the effort to make the egg the most-liked picture is interesting, is it worth anything? [Link]
Investors Are Singing Along to ‘Baby Shark’ by Jacky Wong (WSJ)
For those not familiar, Baby Shark is an earworm nursery rhyme originating in Korea (link in case you’re not familiar) that has gotten a huge amount of play and the accompanying merchandising attention as well. [Link; paywall]
Tech Hardware
Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive by Nilay Patel (The Verge)
While it may sound counter-intuitive, smart TVs allow their manufacturers to also run content, advertising, and data businesses which lower the sticker price of their hardware. [Link]
As Carmakers Change Business Models, This Chip Firm Is Perfectly Positioned by Jon Markman (The Street)
Hyundai has introduced a new walking car, just one example of rapidly proliferating vehicle form factors with a range of attributes that Monolithic Power Systems (MPWR) can help enable, fueling the chipmakers’ business. [Link]
Recession Chatter
Yellen Warns Anecdotal Signs Show Businesses Putting a Pause on Spending by Anne Riley Moffat (Bloomberg)
In a somewhat unusual move for a recent Fed Chair, Yellen worried publicly about the path of Fed policy under Chair Powell, citing less synchronized global growth as a major risk. [Link; soft paywall]
Markets Take the Lead When It Comes to Factoring in Recession by Liz McCormick, Sarah Ponczek, and Molly Smith (Bloomberg)
Market moves into the end of last year (falling yields, flattening curve, falling equities, widening credit spreads) suggest a roughly 50% chance of a recession in the next year, though of course much of that rise in risk premiums have since reversed. [Link; soft paywall]
Shady Dealings
WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork by Eliot Brown (WSJ)
In what can’t be described as anything approaching arms’ length transactions, a series of building leases by WeWork came on buildings the CEO had an ownership stake in. [Link; paywall]
Sacklers Directed Efforts to Mislead Public About OxyContin, New Documents Indicate by Barry Meier (NYT)
New details in a court filing against the maker of OxyContin show that the Sackler family directed efforts to mislead the public about dangers of opiods. [Link; soft paywall]
Sports
A Must-See Gymnast, and the Meaning of Joy by Jason Gay (WSJ)
The floor routine of UCLA gymnast Katelyn Ohashi inspired, thrilled, and delighted the internet this week; the reason may be as simple as the pure joy of the routine. [Link; paywall]
ESPN’s Ex-President Wants to Build the Netflix of Sports by Ira Boudway (Bloomberg)
After resigning in the wake of a scandal involving substance abuse and the possibility of a sexual harassment allegation, John Skipper wants to bring on-demand streaming sports to the masses. [Link; soft paywall]
Taxes
Four former Fed chairs call for US carbon tax by Leslie Hook (FT)
27 Novel Laureates, 15 former CEA chairs, and 4 different former Fed Chairs have signed a letter urging the implementation of a carbon tax. Just as remarkable, the broad agreement across the economics profession has the support of companies like Shell, BP, and ConocoPhillips. [Link; paywall]
Middle-Class Growth Sparks Latest Surge in CT Tax Receipts by Keith M. Phaneuf (WestportNow)
Connecticut’s fiscal picture has improved rapidly of late as income tax receipts (typically driven by middle class households) have surged much more than estimated. [Link]
South Florida Mansion Sales Surge as Tax Exiles Seek Savings by Prashant Gopal & Jonathan Levin (Bloomberg Quint)
In response to state and local tax deduction caps in 2017’s tax reform bill, high income households are moving to Florida and bidding up real estate. [Link; soft paywall]
Policy Lab
Microsoft pledges $500 million to tackle housing crisis in Seattle, Eastside by Vernal Coleman and Mike Rosenberg (Seattle Times)
In an effort to combat the collapsing affordability of Seattle housing that Amazon and Microsoft have themselves contributed to, Microsoft unveiled a huge chunk of funding for new projects to ensure access to affordable housing. [Link]
A Failure to Adjust by Scott Lincicome (The Bulwark)
The argument against a so-called “China shock” being responsible for manufacturing job losses in the United States. [Link]
Security
The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel by Jeremy Kahn (Bloomberg Quint)
Light’s combined wave and particle properties are used in a technology that insures taps on fiber optic cables can’t be run. [Link; soft paywall]
PnL
BNP Loses $80 Million on S&P 500-Linked Derivative Trades by Donal Griffin, Harry Wilson, and Alastair Marsh (Bloomberg)
The US equity market plunge in Q4 led to an $80mm loss in index derivatives for BNP Paribas’s New York-based trading unit. [Link; soft paywall, auto-playing video]
Crime
Is a Serial-Killer Gang Murdering Young Men Across the U.S.? by Nicole Weisensee Egan (The Daily Beast)
A group of retired detectives claims evidence exists linking 100-350 deaths. Per their investigations, they are murders conducted by an organized group of serial killers with cells in dozens of US cities. [Link]
Personal Data
The 773 Million Record “Collection #1” Data Breach (Troy Hunt)
A trove of email addresses and passwords with more than 2.6bn rows has hit the internet, assembled from a range of sources and posted for download on a file sharing site. [Link]
Judge unseals trove of internal Facebook documents following our legal action by Nathan Halverson (Reveal)
Children make for easy targets, and while in Facebook’s case the harm caused is only monetary, the social media company’s conduct resulted in huge credit card bills. New documents detailing the company’s policies are being unsealed. [Link]
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Have a happy New Year!
Aug 26, 2018
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Labor In The Valley
What is this weird Twitter army of Amazon drones cheerfully defending warehouse work? by Devin Coldewey (TechCrunch)
Amazon appears to be astroturfing a public display of worker satisfaction via either bots or the Twitter accounts of actual workers; the larger story isn’t exactly clear. [Link]
Microsoft Bug Testers Unionized. Then They Were Dismissed by Josh Eidelson and Hassan Kanu (Bloomberg)
While tech companies, especially those based on the West Coast, have a reputation for being liberal or left-wing bastions, their relationship with labor isn’t consistent with that image; this story about Microsoft is a good example. [Link; soft paywall]
Turkey
Framing Turkey’s Financial Vulnerabilites: Some Rhymes with the Asian Crisis, but Not a Repeat by Brad Setser (Council on Foreign Relations)
Setser makes the case that Turkey’s banks are so exposed to foreign exchange denominated debt that the decline in lira has dramatically raised the odds of a funding crisis similar to the Asian Tigers in 1997. On the other hand, the complexity of the Turkish banking and credit system is very different, and Setser discusses in great detail. [Link]
Framing Crashed (5): The Turkish Crisis – the Missing Chapter (Adam Tooze)
Due to its very unique geographic, religious, cultural, financial, and political position as a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, Turkey is a nexus for all sorts of narratives related to near-history. [Link]
Real Estate
Traditional mortgage denial metrics may misrepresent racial and ethnic discrimination by Laurie Goodman and Bing Bai (Urban Institute)
While minorities tend to face higher mortgage applications denial rates than whites, they also typically have lower credit scores and incomes. After adjusting for these credit profiles, an interesting trend emerges: while Hispanic and white borrowers face an elevated denial rate relative to whites when adjusting for credit quality, it’s actually Asian buyers who face the highest “real” denial rates. [Link]
Climate Change Has Already Hit Home Prices, Led by Jersey Shore by Christopher Flavelle (Bloomberg)
A comprehensive study of property values on the New Jersey coast which are exposed to sea level rise shows that climate change’s impacts are already starting to have adverse impacts on home values. [Link; soft paywall, auto-playing video]
Luxury Apartment Sales Plummet in New York City by Josh Barbanel (WSJ)
Sales of apartments priced at $5mm or more fell 31% YoY in the first six months of the year, digesting extremely high prices and the impact of tax reform. [Link; paywall]
Unreal Animals
Company is offering ‘fur-ternity leave’ for new pet owners by Matthew Haag (CNBC/NYT)
A Minneapolis firm is offering its employees the ability to work from home for a week when they get a new dog or cat. [Link]
Animal crackers break out of their cages (CNBC/AP)
For more than a century, Barnum’s Animal Crackers (a Nabisco brand owned by Mondelez) were shown in cages, as animals were kept for circuses were historically. A 2016 request from PETA led to the change. [Link]
Weird History
Before the Civil War, Congress Was a Hotbed of Violence by Anna Diamond (Smithsonian)
Imagine if your Senator was beaten nearly to death with a stick at his desk during discussion of legislation? That was the environment of Congress prior to the Civil War, when outbursts like the Caning of Sumter were frequent and part of the process of making (or, in the case of the South, more frequently preventing) laws. [Link]
History of Rat Control In Alberta (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry)
As rates crept westward across the Prairies in the 1940s and 1950s, Alberta prepared by instituting an intense public awareness campaign and immediately eliminating even the smallest infestations. As a result, it’s just about the only human-populated place on earth without rats. [Link]
Economics
Elizabeth Warren Has Got It All Wrong by Matthew C. Klein (Barron’s)
Senator Warren of Massachusetts wants companies to distribute less cashflow to shareholders via buybacks. She’s misinformed about when and how companies buy back shares, and how that effects their ability to invest. [Link; paywall]
Demographics, Unemployment Rate and Inflation by Bill McBride (Calculated Risk)
Teasing out the relationship between demographics and macroeconomic variables is a significant challenge, but the general consensus is that population growth and inflation are positively correlated. [Link]
Network Defects
Apple and Google Face Growing Revolt Over App Store ‘Tax’ by Mark Bergen and Christopher Palmeri (Bloomberg Quint)
Apple and Google take a big cut from developers who make games or apps that get discovered and installed via the centralized app stores. But now, publishers are pushing back. [Link]
Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests by Amanda Taub and Max Fisher (NYT)
A study by University of Warwick researchers suggest that a one standard deviation rise in Facebook use was correlated to a 50% increase in attacks on refugees. [Link; soft paywall]
Social Norms
Sorry, Pal, I Don’t Want to Talk: The Other Reason People Wear AirPods by Rebecca Dolan (WSJ)
Apple AirPods are being worn all day by users who want to avoid conversation or interruption. We’re wondering why it has to be AirPods as opposed to other forms of wireless headphones which generally have the same effect. [Link; paywall]
Venture
Benchmark Capital Stays Lean, Even After $14 Billion Bonanza by Rolfe Winkler (WJS)
Despite a trend that has seen billions of new capital flow into VC firms, one of the original early stage shops is not expanding its annual fund size, keeping things the same size as it has since 2004 despite a 25x performance from its 2011 vintage fund. [Link; paywall]
Sports
Won and done? Sportsbooks banning the smart money by David Purdum (ESPN)
Bookmakers in the UK are increasingly banning successful bettors, a practice that is totally legal and spreading to the US. [Link]
‘Listen To The Kids’: How Atlanta Became The Black Soccer Capital Of America (Bleacher Report)
A walk through the grass roots soccer scene in Atlanta, where immigrant families, hip hop, and an electric MLS squad have combined to create a passionate fan base for the beautiful game in Georgia. [Link]
Have a great Sunday!
Jul 29, 2018
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Policing
Sombra the drug-sniffing police dog is famous in Colombia. Now, smugglers have put a bounty on her head. by Kyle Swenson (WaPo)
A single drug-sniffing dog in Colombia has done such a good job finding cocaine (200+ arrests have been credited to her) that a group of drug smugglers have put a price on her head. Stay safe Sombra! [Link; soft paywall]
Abject Failure
Amazon’s Facial Recognition Tech Falsely Matched 28 Members Of Congress With Arrest Mugshots by Davey Alba (BuzzFeed News)
We mentioned some of the pitfalls of Amazon’s Rekognition technology in Bespoke Brunch Reads on May 27th (NYT link; soft paywall). This week the ACLU released a report which showed the platform matching 28 members of Congress to mugshots in its database, a spectacularly high error rate given the high quality input. More disturbingly, the error rate was biased against people of color: they are 20% of Congress but 40% of false matches. [Link]
Darts Are Beating the Ira Sohn Investing Pros by Spencer Jakab (WSJ)
Over the three months since the famed Sohn Conference, a series of stock picks chosen quite literally with darts thrown at the wall are beating the favored picks of presenters. [Link; paywall]
Politics
How The Hell Do You Run An Election When Your Country’s Been Ruled By A Dictator For 37 Years? by Tamerra Griffin (BuzzFeed News)
The first open and free elections in Zimbabwe since its independence are about to take place. This is an on-the-ground look at how candidates are approaching the challenge of introducing themselves to voters. [Link]
Chinese sentences of the day another view of Trump by Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution)
A different (and perhaps deceptive?) perspective on the Trump Presidency’s foreign policy, as recounted to Mark Leonhard of the Financial Times. [Link]
A Booming Economy Hasn’t Given House GOP Candidates an Election Edge by Arit John, Laura Litvan, and Katia Dmitrieva (Bloomberg)
Historically low unemployment and accelerating growth have benefited the party in power but ahead of midterms this year the GOP faces a significant deficit in the generic ballot, fundraising, and primary turnout. Explanations include inequality, regional divides, and the intense cultural/values dispute over the President. [Link; soft paywall]
Horror Stories
When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life by Kashmir Hill (Gizmodo)
The awful story of an Alabama woman who was libeled after a debate on Facebook. Despite a desire to remove her lies on the part of the perpetrator, numerous websites still feature the invented slander and refuse to take down the content. [Link]
Hospitals know how to protect mothers. They just aren’t doing it. by Alison Young (USA Today)
Back in December, Bespoke Brunch Reads included a ProPublica investigation of drastically higher mortality related to pregnancy among black women (link). This piece from USA Today looks even more broadly at the issue, which isn’t driven by a single factor but includes failures by hospitals, economic incentives to perform more C-sections, high blood pressure’s prevalence, and more. The result? A staggering and tragic 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000, drastically higher than in 1990 and standing in sharp contrast to other countries where maternal death rates have consistently fallen. [Link]
Big Projects
The New Rockets Racing to Make Space Affordable by Andre Tartar and Yue Qiu (Bloomberg)
A graphics-intensive look at the race to cut costs for orbital lift capacity. Per kilogram costs have plunged in recent years thanks to increased competition and new entrants, making especially small and generic payloads like mini communications satellites downright affordable to fling into low earth orbit. [Link; soft paywall]
The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery by Ivan Penn (NYT)
One of the problems with some forms of renewable power (especially solar and wind) is that its supply is uneven relative to more predictably harnessed alternatives like natural gas or nuclear plants. One idea: use bursts of electrical power availability to push water upstream of the Hoover Dam, effectively turning the reservoir into a battery. [Link; soft paywall]
History
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton by Left Outside (Medium)
A re-casting of British economic history to revise the 20th century narrative of economic and geopolitical development. The details are too extensive to discuss here but this is good food for thought. [Link]
Real Estate
Luxury Homeowners Retreat With Sensory-Deprivation Tanks by Alina Dizik (WSJ)
Tanks of salty water for floating in a state of total sensory deprivation are the latest in a long line of luxury goods added to the homes of the wealthy. [Link; paywall]
Southern California home sales crash, a warning sign to the nation by Diana Olick (CNBC)
CoreLogic data shows a 12% YoY drop in new and existing home/condo sales in Southern California even as prices hit a record, fueling speculation that the national housing market is poised to collapse. [Link]
Economic Policy
Is the Fed Partly to Blame for Wage Stagnation? by Matthew C. Klein (Barron’s)
Klein argues that the Fed has effectively been running monetary policy far too restrictively for a very long time, including but not limited to the post-crisis era. [Link]
Vehicular Assault: Proposed Auto Tariffs Will Hit American Car Buyers’ Wallets by Mary E. Lovely, Jérémie Cohen-Setton, and Euijin Jung (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
A very good teardown of how import taxes on autos would impact the price of cars, on top of existing steel import taxes. The total cost increase estimate ranges from 8% (for compact cars, assuming a 66% pass-through of costs) to 20% (for luxury compact SUVs/crossovers, assuming 100% pass-through of costs), along with a 1.5% decline in auto production and a 1.9% decline in the auto labor force. [Link; 8 page PDF]
The missing profits of nations by Thomas Tørsløv, Ludvig Wier, and Gabriel Zucman (Voxeu)
Global average statutory tax rates on corporations have fallen by more than half in the last three decades, driven in very large part by tax avoidance by multinational companies. [Link]
Hedge Funds
Leon Cooperman’s Omega Hedge Fund Converts to Family Office by Katherine Burton and Katia Porzecanski (Yahoo!/Bloomberg)
Part of a broader industry trend, Cooperman is returning outside capital and reducing his regulatory footprint by converting to a family office, a much less restrictive form of management. [Link]
Investing
Millennials Are Making a Costly Investment Mistake by Riley Griffin (Bloomberg)
In addition to risk aversion that favors cash or cash-like investments to riskier, long-term approaches like the equity market, young adults aren’t earning as much interest as they could be. [Link]
Best. Day. EVER! Survey Finds Average Person Has Only 15 ‘Perfect’ Days A Year by Ben Renner (StudyFinds)
The type of day the average person considers “perfect” is vanishingly uncommon. [Link]
Read Bespoke’s most actionable market research by starting a two-week free trial today! Get started here.
Have a great Sunday!
Jul 15, 2018
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Investors
A rare and expensive investment book tearing up the Amazon Kindle charts is actually an illegal copy by Tae Kim (CNBC)
“Margin of Safety”, Baupost manager Seth Klarman’s tome on investing is rare and carries extreme secondary market prices. So its appearance on Amazon Kindle for $9.99 seemed a bit out of step. [Link]
Buffett Starts to Say Goodbye to a Pile of Equity-Index Options by Katherine Chiglinsky (Bloomberg)
A series of extremely long-term equity options written between 2004 and 2008 are starting to expire, having added billions in income to Berkshire over the past decade and a half. [Link; soft paywall, auto-playing video]
Carceral State
Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among formerly incarcerated people by Lucius Couloute and Daniel Kopf (Prison Policy Initiative)
In addition to the specific penalty paid by spending time in prison, the formerly incarcerated pay extreme labor market penalties, with significantly higher burdens in terms of unemployment for black or Hispanic/Latino former prisoners. [Link]
Manhattan District Attorney Demands Access to Police Records by James C. McKinley Jr. (NYT)
The NYPD is refusing to give the Manhattan DA access to disciplinary records which the office wants in order to weed out potentially bad arrests. [Link; soft paywall]
Sports
The Story Behind Why Soccer Players Sit In Race Car Seats by David Tracy (Jalopnik)
Why do soccer players have benches made out of racing bucket seats? The answer is found in an obscure sponsorship of a German team in the mid-90s. [Link]
We’ve Exhausted America’s Supply of Retro-Fitness Fads. Maybe It’s Time to Try Communism by Oliver Lee Bateman (MEL Magazine)
An investigation of the athletic sorting and training techniques deployed by Soviet Union, with possible application to our own techniques in the gym. [Link]
Gaming
Don’t blame Ed O’Bannon for the death of the video games. Blame the NCAA. by Alex Kirshner (SBNation)
A 2014 class action law suit against the NCAA found that video games based on NCAA football and basketball used players’ likenesses. As a result, NCAA sports video games are no more, but it didn’t have to be that way. [Link]
Something I Changed My Mind About Recently by Ben Carlson (A Wealth of Common Sense)
Making the case that e-sports (competitive video games) are not only here to stay, but likely to get even bigger than they are today. [Link]
Failure
Historic blunders: 50 worst product flops of all time by Michael B. Sauter, Evan Comen, Thomas C. Frohlich and Samuel Stebbins (USA Today)
A review of the most intense product failures ever, including tech hardware, video games, TV shows, and so forth. New Coke, Cheetos lip balm, and Coors sparkling water are all interesting examples we enjoyed. [Link]
Scams
Hunting the Con Queen of Hollywood: Who’s the “Crazy Evil Genius” Behind a Global Racket? by Scott Johnson (Hollywood Reporter)
A racket has bilked hundreds of thousands of dollars from freelancers who fly to Indonesia and provide upfront funds for projects which never pan out. [Link]
Labor
States launch investigation targeting fast-food hiring practices by Jeff Stein (WaPo)
So-called “no poach” agreements can hold down wages for the lowest-credentialed workers. State attorney generals are starting to investigate the practice. [Link; soft paywall]
Russkies
Russia Is Building $320 Million Icebreakers to Carve New Arctic Routes by Eric Roston (Bloomberg)
Icebreakers designed to haul liquid natural gas out of the high Arctic are under construction, each one capable of hauling 1mm barrels of oil equivalents. [Link; soft paywall]
Trade Wars
China Has Arsenal of Non-Tariff Weapons to Hit Back at Trump by Enda Curran (Bloomberg)
The large trade imbalance between the US and China means direct Chinese tariffs on US goods can’t keep up with new US tariffs. But there are many, many alternative means that can be used to interdict US activity in China: increasing regulatory oversights of US subsidiaries onshore, slowing down regulatory approvals, cancelling orders, or encouraging consumer boycotts. [Link; soft paywall, auto-playing video]
Read Bespoke’s most actionable market research by starting a two-week free trial today! Get started here.
Have a great Sunday!
May 27, 2018
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
Italy
Will Italian banks spark another financial crisis? by Jeffrey Moore (Global Risk Insights)
While our position would be a decisive “no”, the dire picture of Italy’s financial system painted in this 2016 overview is worth keeping in mind. One especially interesting tidbit is the differing geography of NPL concentration between north and south. [Link]
Second thoughts on miniBOTs by Toby Nangle (Principles and Interest)
Why the so-called “mini-BOT” instruments proposed by the platform of Italy’s new populist government are an ineffective tool, even leaving aside their negative impact on Italy’s other forms of sovereign debt and market access. [Link]
Crypto
A crypto stunt gone tragically wrong by Jemima Kelly and Alexandra Scaggs (FTAV)
A publicity stunt by Ukraine-based ASKfm to plant a hard drive full of tokens at the summit of Mount Everest resulted in the emergency evacuation of the team and the death of a Sherpa assisting them. [Link; registration required]
U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation by Matt Robinson and Tom Schoenberg (Bloomberg)
With bitcoin now a reference for multiple futures contracts, US regulators are starting an investigation of price manipulation in spot markets, including spoofing. [Link; auto-playing video, soft paywall]
Trump Tweets
Judge Rules Trump Can’t Block People on Twitter by Chris Dolmetsch and Patricia Hurtado (Bloomberg)
Because the President is a public official, his account is considered a “public forum” and therefore cannot simply block users according to a federal court ruling this week. [Link; auto-playing video, soft paywall]
Inside the Trump Tweet Machine: Staff-written posts, bad grammar (on purpose), and delight in the chaos by Annie Linskey (Boston Globe)
The grammatically destitute state of the President’s Twitter feed is often the result of specific choices by a team of staffers who send out tweets in his voice. [Link]
Tech
Blocking 500 Million Users Easier Than Complying With GDPR by Nate Lanxon (Bloomberg)
Compliance with the sweeping new privacy regulation in Europe is a thorny thicket, so much so that a big chunk of the American media landscape simply cuts off access to their sites from the entire EU as a temporary measure to remain compliant. [Link]
Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police. Critics See Surveillance Risk. by Nick Wingfield (NYT)
Since 2016 Amazon has been hawking a service that helps identify people based on their facial features, with law enforcement agencies a major customer. Now, the ACLU and other civil rights organizations are concerned about the implications, especially for non-criminals that law enforcement may decide to track anyways. [Link; soft paywall]
Research
Era of ‘lower for longer’ oil prices is dead by Amrita Sen and Yasser Elguindi (FT)
With oil markets tightening up despite a best-effort showing by the shale patch to ramp up supply as fast as possible, Energy Aspects analysts argue that oil prices are sustainable at current levels and headed higher. [Link; paywall]
The links between stagnating wages and buyer power in U.S. supply chains by Nathan Wilmers (Washington Center for Equitable Growth)
One possible explanation for wage growth is growing monopsony (single-buyer) power for large firms, which pressures wages lower among suppliers. [Link]
Long Reads
Burying NYC’s Forgotten Dead at Hart Island by Bess Lovejoy (JSTOR)
Since 1869, New York City’s municipal cemetery has been on Hart Island, a little stretch of terra firma a few miles west of Pelham Bay Park in Long Island Sound. Over the years, more than a million souls have found their final resting place on the island. [Link]
Death of a Biohacker by Jonah Engel Bromwich (NYT)
A secretive and frankly sketchy leader in the community of entrepreneurs and experimenters who look to modify the human body in myriad ways mysteriously died in a sensory deprivation tank. [Link]
Big Trades
Bond Trader Reaps 2,000% Profit by Just Trusting the Fed by Edward Bolingbroke (Bloomberg)
A bet that the Fed would simply do what it was forecasting it would do (combined with the leverage of options on already extremely leveraged Eurodollar futures) delivered some pretty fantastic returns for on bond market player. [Link; auto-playing video, soft paywall]
Dan Loeb wants to raise $400M to target fintech by Carleton English (NYP)
The latest in a string of capital raises targeted at financial technology is Third Point, which has set up an acquisition company to begin investing in the space at scale. [Link]
Food
With Recipes, the Key to Making Millions Is Not About the Food by Kate Krader (Bloomberg)
Recipes are not open for copyright, and that creates some unique incentives for the intellectual property of creating new culinary concoctions. [Link; soft paywall]
Read Bespoke’s most actionable market research by starting a two-week free trial today! Get started here.
Have a great Sunday!
