What we’re reading (6/21)
“Under Armour To Pay $434 Million To Settle 2017 Shareholder Lawsuit” (CNBC). “Under Armour on Friday said it has agreed to pay $434 million to settle a 2017 class action lawsuit accusing the sports apparel maker of defrauding shareholders about its revenue growth in order to meet Wall Street forecasts. The proposed settlement, subject to court approval, averts a scheduled July 15 trial in Baltimore federal court.”
“Paul Singer Can Wait.” (Dealbreaker). “Paul Singer has been called a vulture. Told to go fuck himself, and undoubtedly, over a long career triggering migraines in adversaries, much worse. So we doubt that being compared to Yahwa Sinwar, Tim McVeigh and their like is going to do much to move him…In fairness, not everyone would agree that the such a terme de guerre is hyperbolic. And Singer has never been one to bow down before the bigger boys, be they Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett or an actual sovereign nation. So the fact that Veritas’ owner, the Carlyle Group, is a great deal bigger than Elliott Management’s own private equity business isn’t likely to concern Singer much.”
“Will Debt Sink The American Empire?” (Wall Street Journal). “History, however, offers some cautionary notes about the consequences of swimming in debt. Over the centuries and across the globe, nations and empires that blithely piled up debt have, sooner or later, met unhappy ends. Historian Niall Ferguson recently invoked what he calls his own personal law of history: ‘Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the U.S. beginning this very year.’”
“The Economist Who Figured Out What Makes Workers Tick” (Wall Street Journal). “David Autor cut a peripatetic path through most of his 20s as a one-time college dropout and self-taught mechanic, before he stumbled into economics. ‘I fell into it assbackwards,’ he said. Today, his work is helping shape how the White House is approaching the biggest labor issues from responding to the threat of a ‘China Shock 2.0’ to thinking about the economic impacts of artificial intelligence. Autor has shown how the rise of the computer was hurting middle-class jobs. He sounded the alarm that workers in the South were getting pulverized by Chinese imports, years before Donald Trump was elected president, playing off this fear. Now, Autor’s research has taken an unexpectedly optimistic turn: He has shown how, after the pandemic struck, low-wage workers have started catching up. He holds a hopeful view of AI, arguing that it could help low-skilled workers. ‘To me, the labor market is the central institution of any society,’ said Autor, 60 years old. ‘The fastest way to improve people’s welfare is to improve the labor market.’”
“Political Expression of Academics on Social Media” (Prashant Garg and Thiemo Fetzer). “This paper describes patterns in academics' expression online found in a newly constructed global dataset covering over 100,000 scholars linking their social media content to academic record. We document large and systematic variation in politically salient academic expression concerning climate action, cultural, and economic concepts. We show that these appear to often diverge from general public opinion in both topic focus and style”
