What we’re reading (3/22)
“The New Normal For Mortgage Rates Will Be Higher Than Many Hope” (Wall Street Journal). “The extra yield over Treasurys—or spread—demanded by investors to own mortgage-backed securities issued by government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, known as agency MBS,has come down a bitfrom the highs touched last year. But it still hasn’t narrowed back to historical levels. Wider spreads appear to be a new normal for the mortgage market. That in turn means homebuyers for now can expect to keep paying relatively higher rates.”
“The Trustbuster Who Has Apple And Google In His Sights” (New York Times). “Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, bust criminal cartels and block mergers. To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check’s memo line: ‘Break ’Em Up.’ Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, becoming a lead architect of the most significant effort in decades to fight the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he took his biggest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.”
“Charts Show A Sharp Rise In The Rate Of Young Adults Getting Cancer Before Age 50” (Business Insider). “The rate of young adults being diagnosed with cancer has risen sharply in the past 30 years, particularly in high-income countries. Researchers aren't sure why.”
“Lawyering In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence” (Choi, Monahan, and Schwarcz). “We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed.”
“Little League Scandal Roils Washington, D.C., Elite” (Wall Street Journal). “Emotions can run high in Little League, a touchstone of childhood for millions, and while blowouts sometimes raise suspicions of foul play, most parents keep the speculation to a whisper. That isn’t the case when the moms and dads of Little Leaguers are law-firm partners, lobbyists and other Beltway heavy-hitters.”
