What we’re reading (10/9)
“A Jittery Stock Market Heads Into Earnings Season” (Wall Street Journal). “The S&P 500 has fallen 24% in 2022 as the central bank ratchets up rates and investors attempt to reassess stock valuations and the durability of corporate profits. The third-quarter earnings season that kicks off in earnest this week will give analysts the broadest look yet at how business has held up as costs continue to rise, higher rates threaten demand and a strong dollar squeezes overseas income.”
“‘Last Year Was The Party. This Year Is The Hangover.’” (Tech Crunch). “[According to Mark Goldberg, partner at Index Ventures:] ‘The crude analogy I’ve been using internally is last year was the party and this year is the hangover. That’s really how it feels to me — that we’re starting to understand the excesses of last year. We’ve seen now the retrenchment period after the fact. At Index, we’re probably more aggressively investing in what we think the next generation of fintech companies is going to be right now.’”
“‘Deer In The Headlights’: Young Bankers On Wall Street Have Had It Easy For Years — But They're About To Face A Bloodbath” (Insider). “Merger and acquisition deals for the first nine months of this year are down by 34% compared with the same period last year. And dozens of huge US companies have cut earnings guidance, citing heightened uncertainty due to, well, everything.”
“Risk Of £50bn Bond Sale Sparked Emergency Bank Of England Move” (BBC News). “The aftermath of the mini-budget could have seen a £50bn fire sale of UK government bonds by funds connected to the pensions industry, the Bank of England has said. There was risk of a downward ‘spiral’, it said, as increases in the cost of government borrowing hit the funds. The Bank feared these funds would be forced to sell their government debt holdings, adding to the market turmoil. The cost of borrowing saw record increases for two days, the Bank said. The rise in borrowing costs over four days was ‘three times larger than any other historical move’.”
“The Secret Microscope That Sparked A Scientific Revolution” (Wired). “1674, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, a fabric seller living just south of The Hague, Netherlands, burst forth from scientific obscurity with a letter to London’s Royal Society detailing an astonishing discovery. While he was examining algae from a nearby lake through his homemade microscope, a creature ‘with green and very glittering little scales,’ which he estimated to be a thousand times smaller than a mite, had darted across his vision. Two years later, on October 9, 1676, he followed up with another report so extraordinary that microbiologists today refer to it simply as ‘Letter 18’: Van Leeuwenhoek (lay-u-when-hoke) had looked everywhere and found what he called animalcules (Latin for ‘little animals’) in everything.”
