A period of stagflation is a quasi certainty, but there are policies that could attenuate how long it lasts. The extent of the international food crisis explained in graphics. Two books explaining how on the internet we are simultaneously the source of most content and the ones being manipulated by it. There is a pandemic-induced tech bubble and it is now doing what bubbles do best. Why living in the present is best.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“She’s successful at failing” Fraser Perring about Catherine Wood, in the fourth article of the week
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
David Malpass, The Supply Solution to Stagflation
(Project Syndicate, 7 June 2022)
This is the ‘official’ view of what the global economy looks like. The World Bank now forecasts that global growth will slow by 2.7 percentage points between 2021 and 2024 and views as “considerable” the danger of above-average inflation and below-average growth persisting for several years. To avoid a prolonged period of stagflation, it recommends that policymakers worldwide: (1) coordinate the crisis response in Ukraine, (2) counter the spike in oil and food prices, (3) step up debt-relief efforts, (4) strengthen health preparedness and efforts to contain Covid, (5) accelerate the transition to low-carbon energy sources (metered paywall – reads in 6-7 min).
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Dea Bankova, The war in Ukraine is fuelling a global food crisis
(Reuter Graphics, 30 May 2022)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24th February has dramatically worsened the outlook for already inflated global food prices. The food CPI has sharply risen in all of Europe’s largest economies, while in the US it climbed more than 14 percentage points since January 2020. In developing and emerging market countries, the index change is even more dramatic, leaving consumers facing much higher prices for essential food staples. A series of compelling graphics and visuals makes sense of all this and explores some of the consequences (metered paywall – around 6-7min).
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Kyle Chaika, How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines
(The New Yorker, 4 June 2022)
Two new books examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom. The first (“Content”) defines content as digital material that “may circulate solely for the purpose of circulating” in an overwhelming flood of text, audio, and video that fills our feeds and has grown to encompass just about everything we consume online. The other (“The Internet is Not What You Think It Is”) argues that the Internet limits attention, with a business model of digital advertising that incentivizes only brief, shallow interactions (metered paywall – reads in 7-9 min).
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Jen Wieczner, The Rise and Fall of Wall Street’s Most Controversial Investor
(New York Magazine, 26 May 2022)
How not to catch a falling knife! Cathie Wood, whose flagship fund lost more than half its value in a year, is undeterred, telling “risk-drunk investors exactly what they want to hear.” In her view, tech stocks can only go up. That said, her collapse has started to look emblematic, not just of the current bear market in tech, but of the excesses that fed into what now appears to be a pandemic bubble. A one short seller says: “She invests in every shitco going” (metered paywall – reads in 5-7 min).
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Oliver Burkeman, In your own time: how to live for today the philosophical way
(The Guardian, 10 June 2022)
The author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How To Use It” thinks there is a kernel of truth in the cliched advice about the importance of “living in the moment” – not that we should try to meditate into a mystical state of total presence or concentration, but we should just recognise the fact that the past is past, and that soon we won’t have any future left – so we really might as well be here. “It’s not so bad. Often enough, it’s wonderful. And in any case, there’s nowhere else to be” (free access – reads in 3-5 min).
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