What we’re reading (11/14)
“‘Buy The Dip’ Investors Save Stocks From A Brutal Week” (Wall Street Journal). “A selloff that thrashed U.S. stocks and extended into international markets ran headlong Friday into one of the most powerful forces in America’s multiyear rally. After the opening bell rang in New York Friday, shares in Nvidia, Oracle and other companies at the heart of the artificial-intelligence boom careened low enough to flash a green light for dip-buyers. Stocks quickly pared much of their losses, clawing back enough ground for major indexes to finish the week mixed.”
“Why Gen Z Hates Work” (The Free Press). “When you spend hours each day watching influencers get rich without much effort, you forget what it takes to succeed in this world.”
“He’s Been Right About AI For 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong.” (Wall Street Journal). “Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been pouring countless billions into the pursuit of what he calls ‘superintelligence,’ hiring an army of top researchers tasked with developing its large language model, Llama, into something that can outperform ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. LeCun, by his choice, has taken a different direction. He has been telling anyone who asks that he thinks large language models, or LLMs, are a dead end in the pursuit of computers that can truly outthink humans…‘I’ve been not making friends in various corners of Silicon Valley, including at Meta, saying that within three to five years, this [world models, not LLMs] will be the dominant model for AI architectures, and nobody in their right mind would use LLMs of the type that we have today,’ the 65-year-old said last month at a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
“‘Take Money Out Of Wall Street’: The Debate Animating The Fed Chair Race” (Politico). “[I]in the race to replace Powell, much of the conversation has focused on something that doesn’t feel particularly Trump-y: limiting the size of the Fed’s financial holdings. Trump, famously, loves low rates. He has said repeatedly that he wants lower mortgage rates and to reduce the amount of interest that the federal government pays on its debt. And yet, momentum seems to be building toward curbing a Fed tool that is aimed at doing exactly that. The reason why the U.S. central bank’s holdings are so large — well in excess of $6 trillion — is that the institution acted during the past couple of crises to stimulate the economy beyond just lowering short-term interest rates to zero. To drive down longer-term rates, which are more important to borrowers looking to finance the purchase of a home or a car, the Fed also grew its balance sheet by snapping up trillions of dollars in U.S. government debt and mortgage-backed securities. Now, Trump allies are debating whether the Fed should do less in the next recession.”
“Norway's Wealth Tax Unchains a Capital Exodus” (CitizenX). “Norway's wealth tax increase, expected to raise $146M, led to a $448M net loss as $54B in wealth left the country, reducing tax revenue by $594M.”
