Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Nasdaq’s Shame. How to rig an index to appease a billionaire. A look at how the exchange has lost its way. (Keubiko’s Musings)
• U.S. Plan to Unblock Strait of Hormuz Collides With Realities of Global Insurance: This U.S.-centric insurance idea runs counter to the realities of an international market, according to industry executives. You can clear the mines, but if no insurer will underwrite the tankers, the strait stays effectively closed.(Wall Street Journal) see also Pentagon Tells Congress First Week of Iran War Cost More Than $11.3 Billion. One week, $11.3 billion. And that’s before the real costs start compounding. In a Capitol Hill briefing, officials gave their most comprehensive assessment of the cost of the first six days of the war, but the number omitted several aspects of the operation. (New York Times)
• The insurance catastrophe: Whole regions of the world are now uninsurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy. How do we fix the problem? (Aeon)
• Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers: The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world. (The Atlantic)
• Indexing Capital Gains to Inflation by Executive Order Is Still Illegal and Still a Bad Idea. Bruce Bartlett explains why this perennial conservative wish list item remains both unlawful and economically dubious. The Usual Suspects Have Been Trying Since 1992 (Bartlett’s Notations)
• Trump Just Pardoned Ticketmaster When No One Was Looking. The DOJ’s settlement with Live Nation amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card for the concert monopoly. The Trump DOJ settled with Ticketmaster, while state enforcers said they’ll continue. The judge is mad, the parties showed “absolute disrespect for the court, for the jury, for this entire process.” (BIG by Matt Stoller)
• Foreign Hacker Reportedly Breached FBI Servers Holding Epstein Files in 2023. Cybercriminal reportedly accessed a server at the FBI’s New York field office, according to a source and DoJ documents. The foreign hacker got into the FBI’s Epstein files three years ago. What did they get — and what happens next? (The Guardian)
• The US Is Counting Traffic Deaths Wrong. How you measure road fatalities changes whether the picture looks like progress or catastrophe.By emphasizing the number of people killed per mile rather than deaths per capita, traffic safety groups risk normalizing the factors that make American roads so deadly. (CityLab)
• President Trump’s Head-Spinning Pivot on an Emergency Oil Release: In a matter of hours, the White House changed its position and pushed allies to move forward with a massive oil market intervention. (Wall Street Journal) see also Oil Prices Could Easily Go Much Higher: If the Strait stays closed, look out above: If one looks at the state of global oil supply, it’s extremely dire. Around 20 percent of the world’s normal flow of oil is bottled up inside the Strait of Hormuz — and as we’ve seen in the past day, even tankers and oil facilities inside the Strait are vulnerable to attack. If this blockade persists, it will be a much worse shock to world oil supplies than the 1973 embargo, the 1979 Iranian revolution, or the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Paul Krugman)
• Preliminary Inquiry: U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran: Outdated targeting data may have resulted in a mistaken missile strike, according to the ongoing military investigation, which undercuts President Trump’s assertion that Iran could be to blame. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Matt Cherwin, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Marek Capital. The alternative asset management firm launched in 2024. Previously, he spent 16-years at JPMorgan Chase & Co where he held titles of Chief Investment Officer, Group Treasurer, Co-Head of Global Spread Markets, Global Head of Securitized Products, and Global Head of Asset-Backed Trading.
Per capita income for the bottom 95% of the population, as measured by the World Inequality Database’s pre-tax national income series
Source: Informer
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