10 Thursday AM Reads – The Big Picture

My morning train WFH reads:

• Shake the Valuation Fixation: Whatever their level and whichever flavor you prefer, price-to-earnings ratios say little about markets’ future direction. (Fisher Investments)

• Jamie Dimon Says Private Credit Is Dangerous—and He Wants JPMorgan to Get In on It: Bank puts $50 billion toward lending to riskier companies to compete with nonbank giants; Walgreens deal the payoff. (Wall Street Journal) but see Is the PE Machine Broken? Private equity firms want investors to pony up $1.5 trillion more than they are giving back in distributions, which are running 50 percent below normal. (Institutional Investor)en

• The Streaming Wars Come Down to 2: YouTube vs. Netflix: The two giant video companies have far different strategies, but the same goal: controlling your TV set. (New York Times)

• Forget Kitchens—Zillow Says This is Where Homeowners Are Spending Big in 2025: In a year of surging costs, curb appeal improvements, such as an upgrade to your mailbox, seem to top the list of places homeowners are still willing to invest, regardless of resale value. (Though, let’s be honest: we know how important first impressions are, hence better curb appeal usually leads to a better sale price!) (Country Living)

• Declining immigration weighs on GDP growth, with little impact on inflation: Unauthorized immigration surged sharply in 2021–24 but has since declined abruptly with negative implications for economic growth. Estimates based on historical data and a structural vector autoregression model suggest gross domestic product growth in 2025 is 0.75 to 1 percentage points lower than in a benchmark simulation using the Congressional Budget Office’s immigration projections through November 2024. (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)

• It’s No Bluff: The Tariff Rate Is Soaring Under Trump: The president has earned a reputation for bluffing on tariffs. But he has steadily and dramatically raised U.S. tariffs, transforming global trade. (New York Times)

• Freedom over death: Death is a certainty. But choosing how and when we depart is a modest opportunity for freedom – and dignity. (Aeon)

• At 66, I Decided to Get Healthy Again. Was It Too Late? A quest for eternal vigor led to less drinking, more exercise and an epiphany about the parts of life that make physical decline bearable. (Bloomberg)

• He may have stopped Trump’s would-be assassin. Now he’s telling his story. In his first extensive media interview since the assassination attempt, Aaron Zaliponi, a 46-year-old Army combat veteran, recounted firing the “ninth shot.” (Washington Post)

• The Interview The Grody-Patinkin Family Is a Mess. People Love It. the twosome, who have been married for 45 years, recently found a new level of acclaim simply by being themselves. During the pandemic, Gideon Grody-Patinkin, the younger of Kathryn and Mandy’s two sons, began posting zany TikTok videos of his parents bickering, joking, kibitzing, needling and being sweetly affectionate with each other. Those videos found a wide fan base online, at a time when people were hungry for a dose of familial closeness. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Neil Dutta, head of the economic research team at Renaissance Macro Research. Previously, he was Senior Economist NA at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch under Ethan Harris and David Rosenberg. He has a history of making successful contrarian calls, including calling for no recession in 2022, and warning that the FOMC would raise rates aggressively in 2022. He is now expecting a mild recession late 2025/26.

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