What we’re reading (10/7)
“The Oil Patch Is Primed For An Era Of Megadeals” (Wall Street Journal). “A wave of deals could reshape the U.S. oil-and-gas industry, ushering it from an era defined by relatively small drillers chasing growth to one dominated by the largest Western oil companies. The emerging order could resemble what came out of the industry’s megamergers that began in the late 1990s and included linkups between Exxon and Mobil, Chevron and Texaco, and BP and Amoco, among others.”
“The Great Zelle Pool Scam” (Insider). “Elizabeth Warren, the financial industry regulator banks most love to hate, has been petitioning Zelle to find out exactly how much fraud there is. And the data she's collected suggests there's probably, technically speaking, a whole fucking lot. According to Warren's office, US Bank — a single institution in the consortium — reported 45,000 incidents of Zelle scams last year. That's triple the number from 2021. It's certainly possible, if the criminals keep at it, work hard, and show some grit, they can triple the amount of fraud again by next year.”
“The Lifesaving, Nobel Prize-Winning Discovery That Almost Didn’t Happen” (Vox). “In hindsight, little medical research was of more importance than Karikó’s work at Weissman’s lab on making mRNA vaccines a reality. But at every stage, the research community that should have embraced this research instead stymied it, because of powerful incentives in science toward work that is more fundable and more publishable.”
“Active Success: Still Elusive” (Standard & Poor’s). “Anyone even vaguely conversant with our SPIVA® Scorecards will realize that most active managers underperform passive benchmarks most of the time. This result is robust across geographies and across time, and is reflected in our recently issued mid-year 2023 report for the U.S. market. Although the scorecard covers 39 categories of equity and fixed income managers, the largest and most closely watched comparison is that between large-cap U.S. equity managers and the S&P 500®. Exhibit 1 shows that 60% of large-cap managers underperformed the S&P 500 in the first six months of 2023; not since 2009 has a majority of large-cap managers outperformed.”
“In Provence, Winemakers Confront Climate Change” (New York Times). “The tastes of centuries-old varieties are being altered by spiking temperatures, scant rainfall, snap frosts and unpredictable bouts of extreme weather. The hellish summer was the latest reminder of how urgently the $333 billion global wine industry is being forced to adapt. Temperature records were set in Europe, the United States, China, North Africa and the Middle East as hail, drought, wildfires and floods on a biblical scale inflicted damage.”
