What we’re reading (12/1)
“Markets Are Shrugging Off Omicron Worries. But The Variant Offers A Lesson Investors Should Heed.” (Washington Post). “Week after week, we’ve seen stocks make one high after another, and people who’ve put every dollar they could lay their hands on into stocks have done extremely well…[t]he market’s drop last Friday shows why it’s wise to keep a reasonable amount of cash on hand — ‘reasonable’ being a flexible term — rather than putting every penny you own and can borrow into stocks.”
“The Internet Is Not The Enemy” (Project Syndicate). “[W]hile many of the harms people ascribe to the internet are neither new nor caused by it, governments are seeking to regulate the internet as though they are. Before heading down that path, we had better be sure we are regulating the right thing.”
“Old Trucks For New Money” (The New Yorker). “While it’s keenly felt in Austin, the hunger for beautiful old trucks is a national phenomenon. Prices for vintage trucks rose more than fifty per cent in the past four years, twenty per cent more than the vintage-vehicle market as a whole, according to data from the collectible-car-insurance company Hagerty. The trend was evident well before the current microchip shortage sent used car prices through the roof…‘Everybody wants to be a cowboy, right?’”
“US Shale Patch’s Lackluster Recovery Is A Problem For The Post-COVID Oil Market” (Commodity Context). “In aggregate, the US shale patch production recovery has notably underperformed the recovery in crude prices. Whether that lackluster recovery has been driven by the fabled ‘producer cashflow discipline’, regulatory burden, or ubiquitous supply chain challenges is a question for a different day but we’ve already seen a considerable regional differentiation. The US shale patch is far from a monolith: in the Permian basin, for example, producers are setting fresh all-time highs, while the rest of the oil-dominant shale regions remain down 20-30%.”
“What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). “The problems with the U.S. approach are now becoming apparent. As I said, there’s no evidence that unemployment insurance has been significantly discouraging work. But where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.”
