What we’re reading (8/19)
“Student Call For Colleges To Cut Tuition Costs As School Year Begins Online” (CNN). Watch for litigation in this area in the near future. Per NYU marketing prof. Scott Galloway: “Universities have backed themselves into a corner…[w]e have raised tuition on average 2 1/2-fold over the last 20 years. I think Covid-19 was just the straw that broke the camel's back, where families across America are saying, ‘Enough already. We're not going to pay $58,000 for Zoom classes.’”
“A TikTok Ban Is Overdue” (New York Times). Columbia prof. Tim Wu—one of the sharpest minds on the antitrust issues that may well dominate the political-economic discourse in the U.S. in the next decade and the author of the best op-ed I’ve read all year—is back with another thought-provoking piece in the Times: “In China, the foreign equivalents of TikTok and WeChat — video and messaging apps such as YouTube and WhatsApp — have been banned for years. The country’s extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad.”
“How Can Wall Street Be So Healthy When Main Street Isn’t?” (Associated Press). Of the numerous recent hot takes speculating about why the stock market seems to be so out of sync with from economic reality lately, this one comes closest to the mark in my opinion. The main point as I see it (and reading between the lines a bit): the adverse economic effects of covid are concentrated in the non-publicly traded part of the corporate economy. Large-cap equities’ stocks are doing just fine because their underlying businesses really are actually doing just fine.
“‘Semiconductors And Software Are Really The Future Of Cars,’ Analog Devices CEO Says” (CNBC). The automotive industry is continuing its long march toward an inevitable future when cars are just computers on wheels, for better or worse.
“EU Not Just Going To Take U.K.’s, Hedge Funds’ Word On Things” (Dealbreaker). “As it turns out, without interference from the Anglo-Saxons, the Germano-Gallic impulse to regulate alternative investments can proceed unmolested—and can be imposed on those Anglo-Saxons, anyway, if they’d like to maintain any clients across the Channel.”
