What we’re reading (1/18)
“How Corn Syrup Took Over America” (The Hustle). “ Silos and grain elevators loom over flat prairies at the Archer Daniels Midland processing facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Every day hundreds of trucks haul corn from heartland farms to the facility, where the crop is broken down into starches and liquids before trains with gargantuan tanks ship it out to the rest of the world. The plant opened more than 50 years ago, assembled with modular panels to enable flexibility, cost-savings, and growth. At the time, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) expected expansion, as one of the plant’s main functions was making high fructose corn syrup, a revolutionary product. But today, the saccharine days of corn sweeteners, like those produced by ADM, may be under siege.”
“The Man Making Billions From The Wildest Bitcoin Bet” (Wall Street Journal). “Michael Saylor’s company doesn’t market any hot products or services. What he and MicroStrategy do is sell new shares and debt, at a pace rarely seen in corporate history. Saylor plows all that money into bitcoin, vowing to keep doing it, over and over. MicroStrategy shares are up about 690% in the past year and the 59-year-old executive chairman’s approximately 10% stake is worth about $9.7 billion, while he personally owns an additional $1.9 billion or so of bitcoin.”
“Florida Housing Market Facing 'Widespread Price Declines’” (Newsweek). “Home prices will be falling all across Florida this year, according to real estate analyst Nick Gerli, giving hopes to aspiring homebuyers who had been squeezed out of the market in recent years. ‘Locals are priced out of Florida's housing market, vacation homeowners have stopped buying, investors have stopped buying, and inbound migration has dropped significantly,’ Gerli, CEO of Reventure App, wrote on X earlier this month. ‘And sure enough: the market is now turning down.’”
“Trump Says He Will ‘Most Likely’ Give TikTok A 90-Day Extension To Avoid A Ban” (NBC News). “Trump said he hadn’t made a final decision but was considering a 90-day extension of the Sunday deadline for TikTok’s China-based parent company to sell to a non-Chinese-buyer or face a U.S. ban. ‘I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate. We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation,’ Trump said in the phone interview.”
“Why Elite MBA Graduates Are Struggling To Find Jobs” (The Economist). “In business there is no surer sign of distress than when a firm delays its financial results. That also appears to be true of business schools. Around Christmas—and in many cases behind their usual schedules—America’s leading business schools published their equivalent of annual reports, which include data on the new jobs of graduates from their Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes, typically two-year courses for students with professional experience. We have crunched the numbers. At the top 15 business schools, the share of students in 2024 who sought and accepted a job offer within three months of graduating, a standard measure of career outcomes, fell by six percentage points, to 84%. Compared with the average over the past five years, that share declined by eight points.”
