What we’re reading (3/27)
“A Historic And Clubby Group In London Could Face Billions In Claims From The Baltimore Bridge Collapse” (Business Insider). “Analysts with Barclays estimate insurance claims from the bridge itself could total $1.2 billion, with as much as $700 million in claims for wrongful deaths, plus additional costs from business interruptions related to the port closure and bridge reconstruction, Bloomberg reported.”
“The Fight For AI Talent: Pay Million-Dollar Packages And Buy Whole Teams” (Wall Street Journal). “Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers to poach entire engineering teams to draw people with expertise and experience in the kind of generative AI that is powering ChatGPT and other humanlike bots. They are competing against each other and against startups vying to be the next big thing to unseat the giants.”
“The Fallout From A Credit Card Shake-Up” (Dealbreaker). “A long-running fight between the credit card giants Visa and Mastercard and retailers in the United States is nearing an end, with the promise of lower fees for merchants…Visa and Mastercard said on Tuesday that they had agreed to reduce swipe fees, costs associated with the use of a credit card, for about five years. Lawyers for merchants who had brought the case estimate that this could save about $30 billion worth of fees.”
“Tom Hayes Really Wishes He Did His LIBOR-Rigging In New York” (Dealbreaker). “Tom Hayes, the former Citigroup and UBS trader who bore the brunt of the backlash against banks rigging the still-just-breathing London Interbank Offered Rate, will not be going back to jail, where he spent more than five years. But he and his fellow LIBOR-fiddler and formerly imprisoned scapegoat, ex-Barlcays trader Carlo Palombo, won’t be getting their good names (or a load of money) back, either, such as they are…In addition to being weird and winding up in a job where essentially everyone was breaking the law, Hayes can now add to his list of misfortunes being British. After all, if he’d been American, he’d likely never have spent much more than a few hours behind bars, given that, all the sound and fury and convictions notwithstanding, manipulating interest rates isn’t illegal on this side of the pond.”
“Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate Who Upended Economics, Dies At 90” (Washington Post). “Dr. Kahneman took a dim view of people’s ability to think their way through a problem. ‘Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions,’ he wrote in his popular 2011 book, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow.’ ‘They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.’”
