What we’re reading (6/9)
“Ben Bernanke Talks About Bank Runs, Inflation, A.I., Market Bubbles And More” (New York Times). “Mr. Bernanke said he still ‘monitors the Fed very carefully,’ and in a wide-ranging interview, he discussed many thorny issues, including bank runs, inflation and threats to financial stability.”
“How Can We Possibly Be In A Bull Market Right Now? Two Letters: AI” (CNN Business). “The bear market is over. But the bear economy isn’t. The eurozone has sunk into recession and some economists fear the United States is next. We’re worrying about rate hikes, inflation, lower spending, layoffs, surging mortgage costs and a war in Europe. That’s a strange place to find a bull market.”
“The Real-Estate Market Caught In A Tangled Web Of Ownership And Debt” (Wall Street Journal). “One of the world’s most overstretched real-estate markets has a knotty problem. Many of its top property tycoons own stakes in rival companies—and when one firm wobbles, others can feel the pain. The market is Sweden[.]”
“Does CNN’s Turmoil Mean There’s No Room On Cable For Independent News?” (New York Times). “The Warner Bros. Discovery chief, David Zaslav, was clear from the day he took control of CNN in 2022 about what he wanted for the cable news network. Publicly and privately he told associates, reporters and whoever else might care that he wanted to move the network away from what he viewed as left-leaning ‘advocacy’ and toward more ‘balance.’ His CNN would not be anti-Trump, and would be more welcoming for Republicans.”
“War Discourse And The Cross-Section Of Expected Stock Returns” (Hirshleifer, Mai, and Pukthuanthong, NBER Working Paper). “A war-related factor model derived from textual analysis of media news reports explains the
cross-section of expected asset returns. Using a semi-supervised topic model to extract discourse topics from 7,000,000 New York Times stories spanning 160 years, the war factor predicts the cross section of returns across test assets derived from both traditional and machine learning construction techniques, and spanning 138 anomalies. Our findings are consistent with assets that are good hedges for war risk receiving lower risk premia, or with assets that are more positively sensitive to war prospects being more overvalued. The return premium on the war factor is incremental to standard effects.”
