What we’re reading (3/20)
“Larry Summers Versus The Stimulus” (The New Yorker). “The Biden rescue package will pour out enough sand to fill a hole, and then keep pouring. In Summers’s view, this is economically risky, because it means that the Federal Reserve will probably eventually need to manage inflation, a recipe for a bumpy future. “My reading is that there are roughly zero historical examples where we got inflation to the point where the Fed got nervous and had to tighten and the whole thing happened smoothly,” Summers told me last week.”
“A Return To Wall Street’s Low-Rent District” (New York Times). “Of all the trading manias in recent months — Bitcoin, SPACs, meme stocks, nonfungible tokens — the latest has a long history of fraud and scandal. That’s right, penny stocks are booming, according to The Times’s Matt Phillips, who visited the ‘low-rent district of Wall Street.’ There were 1.9 trillion transactions last month on the over-the-counter markets, where such stocks trade, according to the industry regulator Finra. That’s up more than 2,000 percent from a year earlier, driven in large part by the surge in retail trading[.]”
“5 Big Signs That Travel Is Roaring Back” (CNN Business). “Vacation deprivation is about to be replaced by a travel boom, according to Expedia CEO Peter Kern. He told CNN's Julia Chatterley earlier this week that people are beginning to think about their future travel ‘very quickly.’ Reservations on the travel website for some parts of the United States this summer are ‘all booked up’ and he expects Europe will soon follow as the number of vaccinations grow.”
“Elon Musk Says Tesla Won’t Share Data From Its Cars With China or U.S.” (Wall Street Journal). “Speaking via video link Saturday to the government-backed China Development Forum in Beijing, Mr. Musk said that no U.S. or Chinese company would risk gathering sensitive or private data and then sharing it with their home government.”
“Taiwan Official Urges People To Stop Changing Their Name To ‘Salmon’” (The Guardian). “A Taiwanese official has pleaded with people to stop changing their name to “salmon” after dozens made the unusual move to take advantage of a restaurant promotion. In a phenomenon that has been labelled ‘salmon chaos’ by local media, about 150 mostly young people visited government offices in recent days to officially change their name. The cause of this sudden enthusiasm was a chain of sushi restaurants. Under the two-day promotion, which ended on Thursday, any customer whose ID card contained ‘gui yu’ – the Chinese characters for salmon – would be entitled to an all-you-can-eat sushi meal along with five friends.”
