What we’re reading (1/23)
“How Much Stock Is Too Much in Retirement?” (New York Times). “[Vanguard] now says that some investors who have already entered retirement may be better off if they keep their stock holdings fairly high, retaining a 50 percent allocation to equities. The 50 percent stock retirement portfolio will be a new option available to companies with Vanguard target-date retirement funds in their plans. That is a big increase over the current allocation: just 30 percent stocks and 70 percent bonds.”
“Tech Rout Fueled By Bond-Market Turn” (Wall Street Journal). “Often referred to as real yields, yields on TIPS have been deeply negative since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, helping to fuel outsize stock-market gains by pushing investors into riskier assets in search of better returns. Even today they remain below zero, meaning holders are guaranteed to lose money on an inflation-adjusted basis if they hold the bonds to maturity.”
“Is The Market Crashing? No. Here’s What’s Happening To Stocks, Bonds As The Fed Aims To End The Days Of Easy Money, Analysts Say” (MarketWatch). “Underpinning the shift in bullish sentiment is a three-pronged approach by the Federal Reserve toward tighter monetary policy: 1) tapering market-supportive asset purchases, with an eye toward likely concluding those purchases by March; 2) raising benchmark interest rates, which currently stand at a range between 0% and 0.25%, at least three times this year, based on market-based projections; 3) and shrinking its nearly $9 trillion balance sheet, which has grown considerably as the central bank sought to serve as a backstop for markets during a swoon in March of 2020 caused by the pandemic rocking the economy.”
“How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted To Work” (Insider). “The way we glorify work in the United States is both a historical and geographical anomaly, a recent American invention. In Europe, industrialized nations have found a way to marry robust economic growth with dramatically shorter workweeks. And before you try to explain this away with some version of well, that's Europe, it's worth noting that from 1870 to the 1970s, Americans actually worked less than the Germans and the French. ‘While it may seem today that differences in work patterns are eternal aspects of European and American lifestyles,’ a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research observed in 2005, ‘these differences are modern in origin.’”
“The Forgotten Medieval Habit Of ‘Two Sleeps’” (BBC). “Biphasic sleep was not unique to England…it was widely practised throughout the preindustrial world. In France, the initial sleep was the ‘premier somme’; in Italy, it was ‘primo sonno’. In fact, Eckirch found evidence of the habit in locations as distant as Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and the Middle East.”
