What we’re reading (1/25)
“Hedge Funds Lost More Than $200 Billion Last Year” (Institutional Investor). “In the market’s worst year since the financial crisis of 2008, hedge funds lost $208.4 billion, according to an annual report by LCH Investments Chairman Rick Sophers. Almost 9 percent of those losses are attributable to one hedge fund firm — Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global.”
“IBM To Cut 3,900 Jobs Amid Broader Tech Slowdown” (Wall Street Journal). “International Business Machines Corp. on Wednesday joined the wave of companies making layoffs, saying it would cut about 3,900 jobs. The cuts will stem from Kyndryl Holdings Inc., the IT services business that IBM spun off last year, and its healthcare divestiture, from which the company will incur about a $300 million charge, a spokesman confirmed.”
“A Short Seller Takes Aim At An Indian Corporate Giant” (DealBook). “Hindenburg Research, the short seller that rose to prominence by going after unprofitable blank-check firms and crypto companies, is pursuing its biggest targets yet: the Indian conglomerate Adani Group and its billionaire founder, Gautam Adani, whom Forbes ranks as the world’s third-richest person. Just as India’s stock market opened this morning, Hindenburg issued a lengthy report which claims that Adani pulled off ‘the largest con in corporate history.’"
“Does America Have Too Much Debt?” (New York Times). “[M]y view is that we’ll probably be headed back to an era of low interest rates. Markets also expect the Fed to unwind many of its recent rate hikes, although not all of them. This could all be wrong, but if we find ourselves back in a low-interest-rate world, that will also be a world in which trying to reduce the debt would cause a lot of economic problems at a time when the Fed lacked its best tool for dealing with them.”
“The Psychedelic Industrial Complex Is Evil” (UnHerd). “The faith we once put in transcendent states has been swiftly industrialised. A scan of the current psychedelic market reveals a strange mix of Big Pharma and young start-ups, such as ATAI, a Peter Thiel-funded firm. Its founder, Christian Angermayer, has been accused of manoeuvring to dominate the psychedelic market through zealous patenting strategies. He envisions his trials as perpetuations of mystical traditions from Ancient Greece. More than 2,000 years later, though, ‘profane illumination’ is now under the microscope, dissected, refashioned as a tool. Only when validated in scientific, psychiatric discourse is it taken seriously. The industrial boom has happened in tandem with an enormous amount of research, much of it funded (with likely biasing effects) by profit-driven entities.”
