What we’re reading (6/15)
“Stocks Close At Highest Levels Since 2022” (Wall Street Journal). “Markets have been buoyant in recent weeks, with the three major U.S. stock indexes closing Thursday at their highest levels since 2022. The S&P 500 on Thursday scored its sixth straight session of gains, its longest winning streak since an eight-session run in November 2021, according to Dow Jones Market Data.”
“Artificial Intelligence Already Being Used In Transactional Drafting: An Interview With The CEO Of Spellbook” (Dealbreaker). “Professors worried that no human being would ever bother to write a term paper again. A handful of nerds went all in with the doomsaying and warned that AI has a pretty good chance of killing us all. Probably most presciently, workers, particularly those who write or code or otherwise do things that AI has already demonstrated itself to have some proficiency at, fretted about their future job security. The legal industry has been far from immune.”
“New Report Flashes A Warning Light Over 401(k) Account Balances” (CNN Business). “The average balance in employer-sponsored savings plans last year was $112,572, well below the $141,542 recorded in 2021.”
“From Quiet Desperation to Quiet Quitting: On John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s ‘Henry at Work’” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “Long before ‘quiet quitting’ entered the lexicon, Henry David Thoreau concluded from the shore of Walden Pond that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ His contemporaries’ desperation was but another word for their resignation: not resignation from a life of unhappy, meaningless work ‘in shops, and offices, and fields,’ but resignation to it. In going to Walden Pond, Thoreau himself did the opposite, opting out of the rat race rather than ‘practi[cing] resignation’ and ‘liv[ing] what was not life.’”
“Corporate Discount Rates” (Niels Joachim Gormsen and Kilian Huber). “Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions (i.e., their required returns to capital) determine investment and transmit financial shocks to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how firms’ discount rates change over time and affect investment. We construct a new global database based on manual entry from conference calls. We show that, on average, firms move their discount rates with the cost of capital, but the relation is far below the one- to-one mapping assumed by standard theory, with substantial heterogeneity across firms.”
