What we’re reading (10/5)
“JPMorgan Probe Revived By Regulators’ Data Mining” (Wall Street Journal). “Investigators probing whether traders at JPMorgan Chase & Co. rigged silver prices seven years ago decided there was no case to bring. Last week, the same agency hammered the megabank with a $920 million fine…[the settlement] shows the advances government has made in using data to uncover market manipulation, said James McDonald, enforcement director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The data needed to uncover the eight-year market manipulation scheme came from Chicago-based CME Group Inc…The volume of data—including trades, orders and other messages flooding into CME’s computers—is so massive the CFTC couldn’t store or use it when Mr. McDonald began seeking it in 2017, he said. Five years of complete CME trading data amounts to 1.7 terabytes, or 127 million pages of information[.]”
“Walmart Signs Trio Of Drone Deals As It Races To Play Catch-Up With Amazon” (CNBC). “Over the past month, Walmart has announced three deals with drone operators to test different uses for the drones…[d]rones, once seen as futuristic or a novelty, have gained traction as a potentially mainstream way for retailers to deliver purchases to their customers. Growing e-commerce sales have intensified pressure on retailers to speed up deliveries and use quick turnaround times as a differentiator. More Americans have gotten used to drones, as they have seen them in the sky or bought a hobby drone of their own. And pandemic-related trends, such as shopping from the couch instead of the store aisle and limiting contact with strangers, could broaden their appeal, too.”
“The Owner Of Regal Cinemas Is Closing Its U.S. Theaters, With 40,000 Jobs At Stake” (New York Times). “The plight of the entertainment industry deepened on Monday as the British company Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas in the United States, said it would temporarily close all 663 of its movie theaters in the United States and Britain. The move was expected to affect 40,000 employees in the United States and 5,000 in Britain.”
“The Crypto State? How Bitcoin, Ethereum, And Other Technologies Could Point The Way To New Systems Of Governance” (City Journal). “Throughout history, world powers—Spain, the Netherlands, France, Britain—have found themselves routinely replaced by more dynamic rivals. Today, many speculate about whether the United States will cede place to China as the global superpower. What if this is the wrong way to look at the question, though—and what if we’re living through a more radical transition? What if all contemporary states are in the process of being replaced by a new kind of “state,” as different from existing governments as they themselves differed from ancient empires or primitive tribes? […] In an essay published in 2017, Mark Zuckerberg offers a philosophy of history to explain the rise of Facebook. The arc of that history moves from tribes to cities to nations—and now to something beyond.”
“The Sackler Family’s Plan To Keep Its Billions” (New Yorker). “Many pharmaceutical companies had a hand in creating the opioid crisis, an ongoing public-health emergency in which as many as half a million Americans have lost their lives. But Purdue, which is owned by the Sackler family, played a special role because it was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown. With the launch of OxyContin, in 1995, Purdue unleashed an unprecedented marketing blitz, pushing the use of powerful opioids for a huge range of ailments and asserting that its product led to addiction in “fewer than one percent” of patients. This strategy was a spectacular commercial success: according to Purdue, OxyContin has since generated approximately thirty billion dollars in revenue, making the Sacklers…one of America’s richest families.”
