Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Crypto investors lose billions in biggest-ever liquidation event: A record $19 billion crypto liquidation rocked markets this month. Discover what caused the crash and what it means for long- and short-term investors. (MoneySense)
• The New Gold Rush: Geopolitics is fueling this new gold rush. Much of global demand comes from China, which is stockpiling gold to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, develop the means to influence the international monetary system, and shield itself from potential U.S. punitive measures. (Time)
• This Small-Town Pension Fund Has a Warning for Millions of Retirement Savers: If you think cashing out of a private fund is easy, just ask a guy who used to manage $750 billion. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work: The web archive Common Crawl has been quietly funneling paywalled articles to AI companies—and lying to publishers about it. (The Atlantic) see also The Ghostwriters in the Machine: Arcadia Publishing built its empire on small-town storytellers. Now it wants to sell their words to an A.I. company no one will name. (Slate) see also The most likely AI apocalypse: How artificial intelligence could be leading most humans into an inescapable trap. (Vox)
• The Popular 3D-Printed Gun Globalizing the Second Amendment: Designed by a German incel, the FGC-9 was created in a distinctly American spirit. (Businessweek)
• Anti-Vax Facebook Groups Ushered in Our Current MAHA Nightmare: “Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots post content about vaccination at significantly higher rates than does the average user,” the study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, said. “Content from these sources gives equal attention to pro- and antivaccination arguments. This is consistent with a strategy of promoting discord across a range of controversial topics — a known tactic employed by Russian troll accounts.” (Talking Points Memo)
• ICE Watch: One morning before dawn, I traveled to a dark parking lot to meet the people doing what the courts, politicians, and the police have failed to do: give ICE a run for its money. (Slate)
• The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands: The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes. We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Estimates are that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children. (New Yorker)
• ‘If it was anybody else, we’d arrest him tomorrow,’ Justice Department aide said of Trump: A handful of documents found by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago were so sensitive that even a senior Justice Department official didn’t have authorization to see them. (MSNBC) see also A Confederacy of Toddlers: The Trump administration is a regime of troubled children. (The Atlantic) see also The secretive donor circle that lifted JD Vance is now rewriting MAGA’s future: Chris Buskirk put tech elites at the center of power in Trump’s Washington. His efforts are grounded in a controversial theory: An “aristocracy” is needed to move the country forward. (Washington Post)
• Extreme Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars: Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Brandon Zick, CIO of at Ceres Partners, where he is responsible for all investments, including Ceres Partners flagship farmland fund and Ceres Food & Agriculture private equity strategies. He serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Advisory Council and Small Business, Agriculture & Labor sub-council. Ceres was just purchased by Wisdom Tree Investing.
In 2025, it’s not just low-income America that’s in trouble: now it’s the middle class, too.
Source: Bloomberg
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