What we’re reading (9/22)
“Here’s Why Top Economics Are Not Worried About The National Debt, Now Worth Over $26 Trillion” (CNBC). Great quote from Krugman in this article: “Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was not impressed with the current choices of government spending, he was not concerned with the spending itself. He said ‘even though we’ve been running budget deficits that are kind of stupid, if you were going to run budget deficits, you should be using the money to build infrastructure to help education, to work on the future. And instead, we’ve been using it to get big windfalls to corporations and rich people.’”
“Banks’ Airtight Compliance Procedure Involves Laundering Money, Sending Report That Won’t Be Read, Collecting Fees, Laughing All The Way Back To Themselves” (Dealbreaker). Big news about big, big banks’ anti-money laundering compliance failures yesterday: “As we and everyone else who looks at them have noted, banks could really do a much, much better job of detecting, reporting and preventing money laundering. Well, BuzzFeed has got its hands on 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by those banks, demonstrating that they have a pretty good handle on how and when $2 trillion worth of money laundering is happening. It’s just that, aside from filing those SARs, they don’t do anything about it, because, well, they don’t have to.” Wall Street at its finest.
“TikTok’s Zero Hour: Haggling With Trump, Doubts In China And A Deal In Limbo” (Wall Street Journal). “After months of maneuvering over the future of TikTok, it took a pair of 11th-hour phone calls with two of America’s most powerful executives to persuade President Trump to agree to a tentative deal.”
“Six Months Into The Pandemic, The US Economic Outlook Is Getting Gloomier” (CNN). “Six months. It may feel like an eternity, but that's how long it's been since states started enacting stay-at-home orders. We now know those actions were at least partially successful in slowing the spread of Covid-19. They also triggered an economic downturn deeper than any recession on record since at least the Great Depression.”
“Here’s What Wall Street Is Saying About Nikola Founder’s ‘Shocking’ Departure” (MarketWatch). It’s seem like plagiarizing (basically) the name of a company in the same business should generally be cause for concern. But setting that aside, watching some big-shorters come up big on what looks and walks like a fraud is always gratifying: “Milton’s departure comes roughly two weeks after a scathing report earlier this month by short seller Hindenburg Research that roiled the company’s shares, accusing Nikola of being an ‘intricate fraud’ built on lies told by Milton. The electric-vehicle maker fired back by saying the report was ‘false and misleading.’”
