What we’re reading (2/25)
“‘I Feel Like I Got Catfished’: Young VCs Who Left Investment Banking And Consulting Jobs Are Having Career Second Thoughts In The Downturn” (Insider). “Young VCs who were formerly investment bankers or consultants told Insider that faltering deal flow and cost-cutting within firms have led to increased competition and stress among their peers. A number of these sources spoke under the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss these internal matters publicly.”
“Americans In Their 30s Are Piling On Debt” (Wall Street Journal). “American millennials in their 30s have racked up debt at a historic clip since the pandemic. Their total balances hit more than $3.8 trillion in the fourth quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a 27% jump from late 2019. That is the steepest increase of any age group. It is also their fastest pace of debt accumulation over a three-year period since the 2008 financial crisis.”
“The Pay Gap Between Hospital CEOs And Nurses Is Expanding Even Faster Than We Thought” (Vox). “The pay disparity between hospitals’ administrative staff and clinical staff is exploding: Some of the individual hospital CEOs covered in the study saw their salaries increase by more than 700 percent in just a few years, while doctors and nurses got a fraction of that salary increase, 15 to 20 percent, across an entire decade.”
“The E.S.G. Fight Has Come To This: Bankers Suing Lawyers” (New York Times). “So what is E.S.G., anyway? As investors rename their firms and their funds in a race to ride the E.S.G. wave, cynics see the debate over the term’s definition as degenerating into everyone seeing gibberish. Because funds can define E.S.G. nearly any way they want, they have come to resemble an extra-strange goulash. Sometimes, these new or newly rebranded operations are just elegantly simple greenwashing and nothing more.”
“Peacetime Would Be A Black Swan Event For Energy” (New York Times). “It is too early to talk about an end to the war, even with a new Chinese peace proposal on the table. All the signs point to Russia and Ukraine digging in for a long battle. But energy companies that are considering pouring billions of dollars into projects with 10- or 15-year time horizons have to consider what might happen to Russian fossil fuels in peacetime.”
