What we’re reading (1/26)
“Economists Predicted A Recession. So Far They’ve Been Wrong.” (New York Times). “Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.”
“Cooler Inflation Keeps Door Open For Rate Cuts This Year” (Wall Street Journal). “The U.S. economy notched another month of mild inflation in December, keeping the Federal Reserve on track to deliberate when and how quickly to reduce interest rates later this year. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the personal-consumption expenditures price index, rose 2.6% in December from a year earlier, the Commerce Department said Friday, well below the 5.4% increase at the end of 2022.”
“Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge Falls Below 3% For First Time Since March 2021” (Yahoo! Finance). “The inflation data could fuel expectations that the central bank will soon start cutting interest rates after two years of hikes. During the December Fed press conference, Powell told Yahoo Finance's Jennifer Schonberger that the Fed would want to be "reducing restriction on the economy" well before inflation hits 2%.”
“FTX Was Never Really Bankrupt” (Project Syndicate). “The prosecution in Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial drilled into the jurors’ heads that FTX customer losses exceeded $8 billion, but never substantiated that claim. In reality, the crypto exchange had sufficient assets to make creditors whole all along – a fact that would likely change the public’s perception of its founder.”
“The Media Is Melting Down, And Neither Billionaires Nor Journalists Can Seem To Stop It” (The Hollywood Reporter). “The media sector is facing a crisis unlike anything seen since the 2008 financial mess, with layoffs and cost-cutting at every turn. The cuts have all occurred in the backdrop of declining web readership at many major publishers over the past year, as tech giants like Meta (Instagram, Facebook) and Google try to keep consumers on their own platforms while old standby referrers like Twitter/X no longer deliver as many readers and the social media landscape fractures.”
