What we’re reading (12/4)
“Is Private Equity Overrated?” (DealBook). “[P]rivate equity has become the hottest home for institutional money, whether that of pension funds, endowments or sovereign wealth funds…[b]ut private equity’s returns increasingly may not provide the stellar performance that investors have been sold — and the returns can be misleadingly calculated in a way that overstates success.”
“Personal Data Is Worth Billions. These Startups Want You To Get A Cut.” (Wall Street Journal). “In his [Frank McCourt’s] vision, blockchain software, not owned by any individual, would store indelible information about users’ social connections. After getting permission from users, social-media companies would draw from this same pool of data about users’ connections and interactions. Theoretically, this would allow users to move their data between networks and prevent a single company from becoming too powerful. Users could get paid in a cryptocurrency for the use of their data.”
“Traders Signal Fed Overshooting Outlook For Interest-Rate Hikes” (Bloomberg). “In one corner of the U.S. rates market, traders have begun to contemplate the possibility of Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2025. That’s what the eurodollar futures market is predicting, as short-term interest-rate traders are pricing in a substantially lower peak for the Fed’s policy rate than the central bank expects. In other words, they are saying that the U.S. economy can’t cope with the number of rate hikes Fed officials are forecasting.”
“More Than $100 Million Of Metaverse Land Was Sold In The Last Week Alone. The Co-Founder Of A Virtual Real Estate Company Breaks Down Why The Opportunity In Digital Properties Could Rise 200x In 16 Months.” (Insider). “The sudden boom in virtual real estate investing strikes many investors as speculative and unsustainable, yet [Metaverse Co-Founder Michael] Gord said the trend is early enough that purchasing virtual lands is almost equivalent to buying pixels of a website in the early days of the internet, which was not possible.”
“How To Generate Better, Cheaper, More Abundant Random Numbers” (The Economist). “Randomness is a valuable commodity. Computer models of complex systems ranging from the weather to the stockmarket are voracious consumers of random numbers. Cryptography, too, relies heavily on random numbers for the generation of unbreakable keys. Better, cheaper ways of generating and handling such numbers are therefore always welcome. And doing just that is the goal of a project with the slightly tongue-in-cheek name of coinflips, which allegedly stands for Co-designed Improved Neural Foundations Leveraging Inherent Physics Stochasticity.”
