What we’re reading (1/22)
“Nasdaq 100’s Unrelenting Declines Ring A Dot-Com Bust Alarm Bell” (Bloomberg). “[T]he Nasdaq 100 just did something it hasn’t done since the aftermath of the internet bubble: fall more than 1% in every session of a week. It doesn’t count as a superlative because Monday was a holiday. But for investors caught up in the selloff, it felt like something shifted…[i]nvestors appear to be paying up for near-term hedges as share prices spiraled down. The CBOE NDX Volatility Index, a gauge of cost options tied to the Nasdaq, jumped 8 points over the four days to 34.06, the highest level since last March.”
“Summers Says He Doubts U.S. Inflation Will Slow To 2% This Year” (Bloomberg). “Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said he remains worried that policy makers are complacent about inflation and he doubted U.S. consumer prices will return to a 2% pace of increases by the end of this year. With investors expecting the Federal Reserve to next week signal plans to raise interest rates in March, Summers said that ‘the gravity of our situation is still understated’ and that bottlenecks in China, rising oil costs, more expensive housing, tightening labor markets and low borrowing costs all pointed to continued price pressures.”
“Silicon Valley Won’t Own Up to Its China Problem” (Vanity Fair). “Over the weekend he [Chamath Palihapitiya] seemingly took his hell-raising a step too far when he said on his All-In podcast, in the midst of a discussion about human rights, that he simply didn’t care about the genocide of the Uyghurs, China’s predominantly Muslim minority group. ‘Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay,’ he said…[i]t’s estimated that China has secretly imprisoned at least a million Uyghurs in forced labor and prison camps. In December of last year, a public tribunal established by a prominent British human rights lawyer reportedly found that China had engaged in ‘crimes against humanity’ in its treatment of the Uyghurs, including ‘rape, enforced sterilization, torture, imprisonment, persecution, deportation, and enforced disappearance.’”
“What Happened (and Didn’t) When Davos Disappeared” (New York Times). “For the second year in a row, the annual in-person meeting in Davos was scrapped because of the pandemic. An IRL gathering was announced for late May, but the relatively last-minute cancellation makes it easier to assess what has until recently been a hypothetical debate: Would it matter if Davos just went away?”
“The Nanotechnology Revolution Is Here—We Just Haven’t Noticed Yet” (Wall Street Journal). “For decades, computer scientists and physicists speculated that, any minute now, nanotechnology was going to completely reshape our lives, unleashing a wave of humanity-saving inventions. Things haven’t unfolded as they predicted but, quietly, the nanotech revolution is under way. You can thank the microchip. Engineers and scientists are using the same technology perfected over decades to make microchips to create a variety of other miniature marvels, from submicroscopic machines to new kinds of lenses.”
