What we’re reading (1/10)
“Tech Stocks Tumble, Extending Last Week’s Losses” (Wall Street Journal). “The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was down 1.8% in afternoon trading. Last week the benchmark posted its biggest one-week percentage decline since February, as rising bond yields punctured tech valuations. The S&P 500 slid 1.3% on Monday, on track for its fifth consecutive day of losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1%, or about 375 points. Chip maker Nvidia, one of 2021’s best-performing stocks, slumped 3.9%, while Facebook parent Meta Platforms retreated 2.7%. Apple, Microsoft and Twitter all declined more than 1%.”
“The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has A Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed” (Politico). “While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system. On all of these points, Hoenig was correct. And on all of these points, he was ignored. We are now living in a world that Hoenig warned about.”
“The Federal Reserve Needs To Get A Lot More Hawkish” (Former NYFRB President Bill Dudley, Bloomberg). “In an economy with above-trend growth pushing unemployment below the level consistent with stable prices, the median forecast has inflation melting away, falling to 2.6% in 2022, 2.3% in 2023 and 2.1% in 2024…[t]his is a remarkable, even surreal forecast: Inflation won’t be a problem, even if the Fed does little to rein it in. How high might rates go? If inflation is running above the Fed’s 2% target, they must adjust both to compensate for higher inflation and to achieve tight monetary policy. So if inflation subsides to 2.5% to 3% as supply chain issues dissipate, then a federal funds rate peak in the 3%-to-4% range seems reasonable.”
“Nearly A Quarter Of Workers Plan To Quit In 2022, Report Shows” (Protocol). “The Great Resignation will likely continue into 2022. About one-quarter of workers are looking to get a new job this year, according to a report from ResumeBuilder.com released earlier this week. Of those employees, some want to move into tech-related industries such as IT, business and finance.”
“My First Impressions Of Web3” (Moxie Marlinspike). “Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms…I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway. Once a distributed ecosystem centralizes around a platform for convenience, it becomes the worst of both worlds: centralized control, but still distributed enough to become mired in time.”
