What we’re reading (11/13)
“Silicon Valley VCs Wanted To Believe SBF’s Lies. Now They Want You To Believe Their Excuses” (Los Angeles Times). “Sequoia Capital wants you to know that it was ‘deliberately misled and lied to’ by convicted cryptocurrency scam artist Sam Bankman-Fried during the discussions that led to its $213.5-million investment in Bankman-Fried’s firm, FTX, last year. That’s an extraordinary admission, given that Sequoia is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and largest venture investing firms, with an estimated $28.3 billion in assets under management. Yet that’s what Sequoia partner Alfred Lin, who was involved in advancing the FTX investment, asserted following Bankman-Fried’s conviction on seven fraud counts Thursday. ‘Today’s swift and unanimous verdict confirms what we already knew,’ Lin tweeted that day: ‘that SBF misled and deceived so many, from customers and employees to business partners and investors, including myself and Sequoia.’”
“What Is The Goal Of The 60/40 Portfolio?” (Manhattan Institute). “No one can agree whether the main purpose is to diversify or to reduce risk — and they aren’t quite the same thing. I am not a fan of one-size-fits-all financial strategies. Yes, I see the value of making investment as simple as possible, but the right balance of risk and reward is a personal decision, and the most common strategies are either arbitrary or agnostic about crucial details. Which brings me to the subject of this column: the popular yet endlessly criticized 60/40 asset allocation strategy. With bond prices tanking and correlations flipping, last year the 60/40 portfolio had its worst returns in decades. Then again, maybe that was just a blip and investors just need to wait it out.”
“Strip Clubs, Lewd Photos And A Boozy Hotel: The Toxic Atmosphere At Bank Regulator FDIC” (Wall Street Journal). “A toxic work environment at the FDIC, one of the nation’s top banking regulators, has for years caused employees to flee from an agency they say enabled and failed to punish bad behavior, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation based on interviews with FDIC employees as well as legal filings, union grievances, Equal Employment Opportunity complaints, emails, text messages and other internal documents.”
“Inside The Strange, Secretive Rise Of The ‘Overemployed’” (Insider). “[L]ess than a year into the job at IBM, when a recruiter from Meta came calling, [Bryan] Roque had a thought. The normal thing would be to quit his old job and accept the new position, which was also fully remote. But what if he kept his old job, and secretly took on the new one, too? All he had to do was two-time IBM, and he could double his income as well as his job security.”
“Airlines Predict Record Thanksgiving US Holiday Travel” (Reuters). “Airlines for America, an industry group representing American Airlines United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and others, forecasts 29.9 million passengers between Nov. 17-27, an all-time high and up 9% over the 27.5 million in the same period last year -- and up 1.7 million passengers over pre-COVID record levels.”
