Facts and Figures
In a Fortune survey of 116 CEOs in June 2022, 67% of CEOs had a "very pessimistic" or "pessimistic" view of the global economy over the next 12 months, but very few are feeling "pessimistic" (5%) or "very pessimistic" (0%) about their own company’s performance.
One long-running consumer sentiment hit its all-time low of 50 points, the worst level recorded since the survey began in the 1950s. A different survey showed a more nuanced result but still recorded an all-time high in the difference between current conditions and expectations of future conditions.
$2 billion — the Starbucks liability for unredeemed gift cards as of Jan. 2. It declared the previous fiscal year that $181.1 million of cards it had sold would never be used. That was up from less than $40 million in 2015. The free loans swell around the holidays: Amazon.com had $5.2 billion in cards outstanding at the end of last year
A Burmese python captured in Florida weighed in at 215 pounds (topping the previous record of 140 pounds) and had 122 eggs inside her.
Quoted
Here’s a guy who looked like he never played the game in his life telling me how bad I was, what part of my game was the worst and what needed work…..That was his recruiting
pitch. He didn’t say one positive thing to me, and that kind of honesty is pretty intimidating because no one is brutally honest these days. Coach (Carril) was honest with us every single day of the year, and we are all better players and people for it.— Craig Robinson on his former coach, Pete Carril (via “What Executives Can Learn from Pete Carril”
Books
Trillion Dollar Triage — This is the definitive account of the government’s fiscal and monetary response to the Covid-19 crisis. It came highly recommend at the Berkshire meeting and from several friends (thanks, Adam S.!) and I agree that it is very good and worth the time.
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music — Even if you’re not a music fan of a certain age, Dave Grohl wrote a very compelling collection of stories.
Articles
Blots on a Field? A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease — This is a wild story about some short-sellers pulling on a string that unraveled a huge mess.
Who Americans spend their time with, by age — This is a fascinating, somewhat sobering graphic. Your time spent with your children peaks (on average) at age 40 and then starts to plummet. Time spent alone bottoms around the same age and then steadily climbs through the rest your lifespan.
Dee Hock, the Father of Fintech — Dee Hock, founder of Visa, recently passed away, and this article from an excellent newsletter is a good look back at his life and career. An announcement and obituary is here.
AMC’s CEO Will Do Whatever It Takes to Keep His Company a Meme Forever — I’m sure that someday we will look back with alien fascination at the phenomenon that was meme stock mania. But it’s *still* going today, and this article captures the crazy.
“Aron knew from his years optimizing stunts and membership schemes that first you capture their attention, then you get them hooked. ‘It was just as true with our shareholders in the year 2021 as it was with airline passengers in 1981,’ he says. So he designed a program that bridged the meme world with the real one: Buying AMC’s stock would get you movie-related perks.” The new program may have seemed gauche to the traditional Wall Street crowd, but it gave an air of exclusivity to everyman investors, even if the benefits were fairly silly. By 2022 the program would swell to more than 700,000 members. Meanwhile, Aron began doubling down on his new AMC persona. Dating back to his time with the 76ers, he’d been an active social media user, albeit with fewer followers and more mishaps. At an investor roundtable last year, he was briefly caught on Zoom untrousered, according to a participant. In June 2021 he was doing a remote interview with a YouTube market influencer when he accidentally bumped his webcam, which swiveled downward to reveal that, once again, he wasn’t wearing pants. Some AMC fans speculated that the YouTube incident was another one of Aron’s public-relations stunts. When asked about it, Aron declined to comment. “I would be the first to admit that I can be iconoclastic,” he says.
Can America’s Cities Make a Post-Pandemic Comeback? — Edward Glaeser, chairman of Harvard’s economics department, studies cities and their impact on the economy. “Zoom and hybrid work may be here to stay, he allows. ‘But for most of us the most important interactions of our lives will occur in the real world and, consequently, location remains absolutely critical.’
The way Mr. Glaeser tells it, cities are among mankind’s finest creations—engines of entrepreneurship, inventiveness and economic growth. His intellectual inspiration as an urban economist is Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), who formulated the hypothesis that Mr. Glaeser says has been central to his own career. ‘Great are the advantages,’ Marshall observed of cities, ‘which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighborhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mystery but are, as it were, in the air.’ That explains why young people are drawn to cities—and why, in Mr. Glaeser’s view, in-person work is vital in the early stages of a career.”