What we’re reading (1/24)
“Boeing Made A Change To Its Corporate Culture Decades Ago. Now It’s Paying The Price.” (New York Times). “By 2020, Boeing itself had in a way been stretched, redesigned and repowered in a series of corporate restructurings that each yielded its own defects. Since the mid-1990s, the company has bought out McDonnell Douglas, a domestic rival, moved its headquarters twice, shifted some assembly to the East Coast (which allowed the company to sidestep the unions) and changed chief executives the way you would planes in Atlanta. What got lost in all this shuffling is a corporate culture that once prized engineering and safety, replaced by one that seemed to be more focused on delivering profits over perfection.”
“SPAC Mania Is Dead. The SEC Wants to Keep It That Way.” (Wall Street Journal). “The Securities and Exchange Commission, which Gensler chairs, voted 3-2 Wednesday to adopt rules that seek to make it clearer to SPAC investors if they are getting a raw bargain. Once the rules take effect in about five months, according to lawyers familiar with the deals, they will likely drive another nail into the coffin of a recent Wall Street fad fueled by market froth and regulatory arbitrage.”
“What Happened To David Graeber?” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “By his own account politically unemployable in American academia, he claimed that, though the academy of that era sheltered myriad ‘authoritarian Marxists,’ anarchism was considered beyond the pale, as I can confirm from personal experience. But with his remarkable energy and productivity, he landed on his feet in London, eventually scoring a richly deserved professorship at the London School of Economics. Debt continued his work at the juncture of anthropology and economics that had begun with Theory of Value. The two disciplines overlap, after all, in being concerned with the nature of exchange, the origin of money, and in describing structures of inequality, among other matters. The book had a remarkable reception; never before has an anarchist been enthusiastically blurbed by the editor of the classic capitalist organ Financial Times.”
“A Colorado Pastor Says God Told Him To Launch A Crypto Venture. He’s Now Accused Of Pocketing $1.3 Million From His Followers” (CNN). “After months of prayers and cues from God, he was going to start selling cryptocurrency, he announced in a YouTube video last April. The Signature and Silvergate banks had collapsed weeks earlier, signaling the need to look into other investment options beyond financial institutions, he said. With divine wisdom, he said, he was ‘setting the rails for God’s wealth transfer.’ Shortly afterward, Regalado and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, launched a cryptocurrency, INDXcoin, and began selling it to members of his Victorious Grace Church and other Christian communities in the Denver area. They sold it through the Kingdom Wealth Exchange, an online cryptocurrency marketplace he created, controlled and operated.”
“The Late Charlie Munger’s Final Stock-Portfolio Update Is Out - And It Shows His Iconic Approach To Investing” (Business Insider). “Remarkably, Daily Journal held the exact same amount of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and US Bancorp shares a decade later, on December 30 last year. While it slashed its Posco position to 9,745 shares in the fourth quarter of 2014, it didn't touch it again until the fourth quarter of 2022, when it exited the holding.”
