Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy: Box demand touches nearly every industry, from flat-screen TVs to packaged food, all of which see sales fluctuate based on how flush shoppers feel. (BusinessWeek)
• Cybertruck Leads Tesla’s Used-Car Collapse: Once hyped as the indestructible truck of the future, the sci-fi pickup is now leading a massive plunge in used Tesla values as the company grapples with the fallout from its CEO’s politics. (Gizmodo) see also Tesla lowers its prices more than other EV makers: Tesla lowered its prices 9% in July — versus 4% for all EVs — to move inventory ahead of the $7,500 tax credit sunset. (Sherwood)
• Rebuffed: An Empirical Review of Buffer Funds: Products catered to investor preferences of achieving equity-like returns with less downside risk have been around for decades. “Defined outcome” strategies such as buffer funds are the most recent in a line of products designed to accommodate this desire and offer a wide range of customizations to fit investor objectives. Like their predecessors, however, buffer funds don’t hold up to scrutiny, either empirically or theoretically. (AQR)
• Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling: The paralysis has left many people in houses that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or shackled with ‘golden handcuffs.’ For everyone, there are economic consequences. (Wall Street Journal)
• Why struggling companies are loading up on bitcoin Biotechs, miners and hoteliers are snapping up crypto to boost their share prices, but experts warn of a crisis if markets crash. (Financial Times)
• The Black Market for Fake Science Is Growing Faster Than Legitimate Research, Study Warns: A small but growing number of academics are improperly taking credit for articles, citations, and authorships, allowing them to appear prestigious without having conducted their own research. (Wired)
• Google Search Is Fading. The Whole Internet Is at Risk. The lifeblood of the internet is drying up. What the decline of search means for users, companies, and stocks. (Barron’s) see also Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi: I like how the search engine is the product instead of me, so I dumped Google’s enshittified search for Kagi (Ars Technica)
• How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness: What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together. (New York Times)
• Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds: Security researchers found two techniques to crack at least eight brands of electronic safes—used to secure everything from guns to narcotics—that are sold with Securam Prologic locks. (Wired) see also Hackers Cut a Corvette’s Brakes Via a Common Car Gadget: The free dongles that insurance companies ask customers to plug into their dashes could expose your car to hackers. (Wired)
• Social Security Is Turning 90. Here Are 6 Myths About It That Won’t Go Away. The program gave birth to the idea of retirement and covers nearly all Americans — but now it faces major financial and customer service challenges. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Deven Parekh, Managing Director, Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm. He has made 140 investments in enterprise software, data &, consumer internet businesses in N. America, EU, India, Southeast Asia, Israel, Africa, Latin America, and Australia. He was named to CB Insights’ Top 100 Venture Capitalist.
Global Trade Slowdown Coming
Source: Apollo
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