What we’re reading (6/24)
“Hedge Funds Made A Killing On FTX—Then It Got Complicated” (Wall Street Journal). “Hedge funds and other distressed investors rejoiced last month when bankruptcy managers said the corporate carcass of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange, had enough assets to more than make its creditors whole. Since FTX’s 2022 implosion, hedge funds had scooped up the rights to customers’ frozen accounts for pennies on the dollar, with five firms alone buying claims with a combined face value of about $2.4 billion. That meant a huge payday was in store. But collecting these winnings won’t be straightforward. Investors are mired in legal battles with some of the original owners of the claims. They allege those former FTX customers abruptly reneged on trades and are suffering from an age-old affliction: seller’s remorse.”
“After Surpassing Microsoft, Can Chipmaker Nvidia Remain World’s Most Valuable Company?” (New York Post). “This week, chipmaker Nvidia soared to a market capitalization of more than three trillion dollars, surpassing Microsoft as the most valuable company on the planet. The historic run-up has drawn comparisons to the headier days of the dot-com era nearly three decades ago. Are they correct? When it comes to Nvidia, we’re probably not in a bubble — at least not yet. Indeed, investors have good reason to remain optimistic about the chip-maker’s prospects.”
“Nvidia’s Shares Are On Fire. The Broader Market Looks Less Rosy” (CNN Business). “The S&P 500 index has jumped nearly 15% so far in 2024, notching 31 new peaks along the way. Much of those returns have been driven by the mega-cap Magnificent Seven stocks, which have seen explosive growth as investors pour cash into the burgeoning artificial intelligence boom. But beyond that cohort of tech stocks, the market is looking less rosy. The S&P 500 equal-weighted index, which gives every stock the same weighting, has risen just 4% this year.”
“Uh-Oh: A Story Of SpaghettiOs And Forgotten History” (Snack Stack). “Beyond the shape, the new products sold well because they capitalized on the broader trend of Italian (and Italian-inspired) foods made for an American audience. Goerke was surfing that wave. A decade earlier, newspapers identified had identified part of the rising fad of “Continental” food, and pizza and pasta and their ilk were becoming ubiquitous. (Go read Ian McCellan’s Red Sauce if you’d like a deep dive.)”
“One Index, Two Publishers And The Global Research Economy” (David Mills, Oxford Review of Education). “The emergence of a global science system after the second world war was spurred by transformations in academic publishing and information science. Amidst Russian-American technological rivalries, funding for science expanded rapidly. Elsevier and Pergamon internationalised journal publishing, whilst tools such as the Science Citation Index changed the way research was measured and valued. This paper traces the connections between the post-war expansion of academic research, new commercial publishing models, the management of research information and Cold War geopolitics. Today, the analysis and use of research metadata continues to revolutionise science communication. The monetisation of citation data has led to the creation of rival publishing platforms and citation infrastructures. The value of this data is amplified by digitisation, computing power and financial investment. Corporate ownership and commercial competition reinforce geographical and resource inequalities in a global research economy, marginalising non-Anglophone knowledge ecosystems as well as long-established scholar-led serials and institutional journals. The immediate future for academic publishing will be shaped by a growing divide between commercial and ‘community-owned’ open science infrastructures.”
