What we’re reading (4/27)
“Investment Firm Head Arrested On Charges Of Multibillion-Dollar Fraud And Racketeering” (CNN Business). “Federal agents arrested Archegos Capital Management founder Sung Kook ‘Bill’ Hwang on Wednesday morning on fraud charges, roughly one year after the investment firm's spectacular meltdown sent shock waves through Wall Street.”
“Stock Rout Is Fed’s ‘Best-Case Scenario’ As Powell-Put Era Ends” (Bloomberg). “Financial conditions -- a cross-asset measure of market health from equities to fixed income -- have finally started to tighten over the past week in sympathy with the recent plunge in equities, led by richly priced technology companies.”
“Judge Rules Elon Musk Didn’t Act Unlawfully In SolarCity Takeover” (Wall Street Journal). “Elon Musk won a major victory in Delaware court on Wednesday, when a judge ruled the Tesla Inc. chief executive didn’t act unlawfully in the electric-vehicle maker’s roughly $2.1 billion takeover of SolarCity Corp.”
“Michael Lewis On Why Americans Don’t Trust Experts” (Vox). “Why don’t Americans trust the experts? One answer is that experts get a lot of things wrong and often they pay a big price for those mistakes. From the forever wars to the 2008 financial crisis to the botched pandemic response, it seems Americans are constantly careening from one avoidable catastrophe to another. Another answer is…[that] [t]he digital revolution has transformed the information space in ways that have empowered individuals and undermined the dominant institutions in society — government, media, the academy — and the elites who run them.”
“Mom And Pop Investors Took A Billion-Dollar Bath Trading Options During The Pandemic” (Yahoo!Finance). “Turns out, taking leveraged flyers on meme stocks mentioned on Reddit’s WallStreetBets trading forum is harder than it looks. New research from economists at the London Business School found that mom-and-pop day traders managed to lose more than $1 billion during the bull market. The bill climbs to $5 billion when the cost of doing business with market-makers is factored in.”
