What we’re reading (3/14)
“JPMorgan Makes Bold Push To Offload Huge LBO Debt” (Bloomberg). “JPMorgan Chase & Co. is gearing up to help issuers sell billions of dollars in junk bonds and leveraged loans, with deals to fund the buyouts of Electronic Arts Inc. and Sealed Air Corp. poised to start next week. More merger and acquisition-driven transactions are in the works, including one for software firm Qualtrics International Inc. Those offerings alone total more than $30 billion in debt.”
“The Billion-Dollar AI Startup That Was Founded by Teenagers” (Wall Street Journal). “Instead of paying humans to join focus groups and complete surveys, Aaru uses thousands of AI agents, or bots, to simulate human responses. It feeds demographic and psychographic information into its models to create human profiles that match clients’ needs, and the results those bots spit out are being used for product development, pricing, identifying new customers and political polling. Aaru has done research work or conducted tests for companies including McDonald’s, Boston Beer and film studio A24, according to people familiar with the matter. It is now helping Bayer, the maker of Aleve and Aspirin, test creative copy and ad slogans for some of its brands, the drugmaker said.”
“Why ATMs Didn’t Kill Bank Teller Jobs, But The iPhone Did” (David Oks). “So what happened to bank tellers? Autor, Bessen, Vance, and the like are right to point out that ATMs did not reduce bank teller employment. But they miss the second half of the story, which is that another technology did. And that technology was the iPhone. The huge decline in bank teller employment that we’ve seen over the last 15-odd years is mainly a story about iPhones and what they made possible. But why? Why did the ATM, literally called the automated teller machine, not automate the teller, while an entirely orthogonal technology—the iPhone—actually did? The answer, I think, is complementarity.”
“Why Vlad Tenev Thinks You’ll Want Robinhood’s ‘James Bond’ Credit Card” (Semafor). “‘That’s the heaviest card ever made,’ says Vlad Tenev as he slides a silvery metallic rectangle weighing 50 grams across a conference-room table. ‘You want to be James Bond?’ Robinhood Markets’ CEO asks. ‘This is the card for you. If Sean Connery was still alive, this is the card that Q would give him to put in his wallet.’ The online brokerage debuted its platinum credit card this month, going up against industry stalwarts like American Express and JPMorgan Chase, as part of Tenev’s drive to broaden its reach beyond the meme stock traders and crypto buyers who have driven its growth.”
“Financier Who Offered ‘Guaranteed’ High Yields Pleads Guilty To Fraud” (Wall Street Journal). “Paul Regan pleaded guilty to three felony charges of securities fraud following a series of Wall Street Journal articlesin 2024 on the international financier and his mysterious high-yield investment offerings. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan alleged that Regan defrauded more than 300 investors of at least $50 million based on ‘materially false and misleading’ claims. In an indictment unsealed last September, prosecutors alleged that Regan and his associates ran two investment firms ‘like a Ponzi scheme, using money obtained from earlier investors to pay later investors and to pay commissions to salespeople.’”
