Economy

Wealth comes from ownership. Being involved in the financial industry for nearly thirty years, and spending the past dozen-plus years in the media helping people create economic freedom and wealth for themselves and their families, I know that wealth being derived from ownership is an indisputable truth. More concretely, wealth comes from the ownership of assets that increase in value over time. Ownership is a subject people tend to greatly misunderstand. We misconstrue where wealth comes from, and we misinterpret the benefits of hard work and taking risks. You can meet a poor construction worker putting in eighty hours a week for someone else. You can find professional athletes declaring bankruptcy as soon as their multimillion-dollar contracts end.

Walmart has reportedly stopped using Yellow as the shipping company stares down bankruptcy and a major strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Craig Fuller of FreightWaves tweeted that Walmart was one of Yellow’s largest customers, meaning their exit will cost the company dearly. The implosion of Yellow could magnify the impact of any potential IBT strike against UPS, which alone could have ground the US economy to a halt. Yellow had received a $700 million federal loan during the Covid pandemic, but has run into challenges paying it back, and the New York Times reports that the company had $1.5 billion in debt in March 2023.

Over the years since the financial crisis, economic power and wealth has become ever more concentrated in fewer hands. This is something leaders have acknowledged, and policymakers have tried to do something about. And yet, despite brave talk of breaking up mega-giant companies, anti-trust efforts have been anemic, as most recently demonstrated by the failure to stop Microsoft from swallowing game maker Activision. The future looked a little brighter in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. There were signs of a grassroots resurgence, with a strong uptick in new business formations in the United States. But since then, as interest rates have risen and regulatory pressures have increased, there has been a slackening off of new firms.

Most of the attention paid to sovereign wealth funds inevitably lands on the Middle East. But it’s Norway’s $1.4 trillion national investment fund that is actually making the most noise.   Case in point: in April the fund’s CEO, Nicolai Tangen, said he believed global “authorities and governments should regulate” the use of artificial intelligence. “We are not seeing a pipeline of regulation coming yet,” Tangen lamented, without specifying the precise guidelines he’d like implemented. But no matter; he then added that Norway’s trio of SWFs — the world’s largest — are developing operational protocols for companies using AI which will be folded into the larger ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) efforts that power their entire operation.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led many observers to worry that computers will soon replace far more jobs than imagined just a few years ago. The World Economic Forum now predicts that over 85 million positions could be lost to automation by the year 2025, many in law, medicine, accounting and other fields once thought immune to electronic substitution. Industry experts like IBM CEO Arvind Krishna argue that the worries about this dramatic change are vastly overblown. Like every past technological innovation, he says, AI will eventually create many more employment opportunities than it eliminates, producing jobs in which a person’s productivity will be enhanced by his or her ability to use smart and dexterous machines.

Airbnb is in trouble. Nick Gerli, CEO of real estate consulting firm Reventure, reports, “The Airbnb crash is real,” along with a list of the top ten cities where the company’s revenue has collapsed. “Watch out for a wave of forced selling from Airbnb owners later this year,” Gerli forbodes. https://twitter.com/nickgerli1/status/1673774695693385728 Last month the Wall Street Journal reported, “Airbnb reported higher revenue and profit in the first quarter, but customers reserved fewer-than-expected stays and the company gave a mixed outlook for the second quarter, spooking investors.” And while Investors Business Daily this week forecast “a new, more promising comeback attempt” for Airbnb stock, murmurings of an “Airbnbust” are hard to ignore.

Nike. Ulta. Bud Light. Anthropologie. Target. My boycott list is growing larger by the day. For the record, I’m pretty darn good at shopping according to my values. I haven’t purchased a single Nike product since the company pulled a planned shoe line featuring the Betsy Ross American flag because anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick convinced them it was racist. I quickly pivoted to purchasing Adidas products instead. Well, that is until Adidas started advertising women’s swimsuits using male models. Sigh. This boycotting business can be tough, especially when it means forgoing otherwise quality products or paying a higher price for alternatives.

“Chill, bitch, shut your ass up,” graciously replied a shoplifter to former Lululemon assistant manager Jennifer Ferguson earlier this month, when she told him and two accomplices to stop robbing the suburban Atlanta store where she worked. Ferguson and her colleague Rachel Rogers had good reason to be fed up. The same trio, which was arrested the following day after bystanders reported a separate robbery to the police, had allegedly burgled the same store a dozen times in recent weeks. When Ferguson told them “No, no, no, you can march back out,” the alleged thieves had already raided the store’s shelves yet again and were preparing for a second round, which they then carried out.

Coca-Cola is kicking off Pride Month by sponsoring events for preteens that are taught by Native American "Indigiqueer" and two-spirit artists. On the first day of Pride Month, Coca-Cola is partnering with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to bring workshops from “across the Western Hemisphere working towards equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples” to middle- and high-school students. “Fashion is often used to confirm identities, challenge social structures and display personalities,” the event description reads. “Discover the joy of fashion in our conversation celebrating PRIDE month.” There are four panelists.

Karens are, to use a leftist term, “problematic.” In use as a pejorative for four or five years now, “Karen” appropriates a common Generation X girl’s name to refer to an entitled middle-aged woman who demands exceptional treatment, undeserved deference and unearned “privilege” to make her way through life or to express power through unwarranted concern for others. Karens are generally believed to be middle-class or slightly above, sport an unsmiling no-nonsense mien and favor a pert bob hairdo that stylists now routinely call the “speak-to-the-manager,” after a request Karens commonly make when they encounter disappointment.

Last year, Austin scored a major coup when it landed Consensus 2022, a big in-person conference focused on the digital finance industry, specifically cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. CoinDesk, a news and research company focused on the cryptocurrency industry, chose the Texas capital for its return to an in-person conference and it arrived splashy and huge, taking over not only the Austin Convention Center but several adjacent hotels and event spaces, its 17,000 attendees swarming downtown. This was June of last year. Three months earlier, South by Southwest, the city’s long-running big tech and culture conference had been a veritable playground for NFT enthusiasts, and dozens of panels hyped the transformative importance of the blockchain.

Remote work isn’t just killing productivity, according to Elon Musk: it's morally wrong. In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Musk accused at-home workers of hypocrisy for expecting those in service and manufacturing industries to go into work. The “laptop class” needs to get off its “moral high horse” with its “work-from-home bullshit,” Musk said.  "You’re going to work from home and you're going to make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? You're going to make the people who make your food that gets delivered that they can't work from home? The people that fix your house — they can't work from home? But, you can? Does that seem morally right?" Musk asked. “That’s messed up.

The downtowns of America’s biggest cities are facing a crisis as thousands of office buildings sit vacant. They were abandoned first by occupants forbidden from gathering during the Covid pandemic — and they remain empty as many took a liking to remote work that enables them to “stay home in [their] pajamas all day,” as New York City mayor Eric Adams describes it. Building owners are no doubt panicking as the value of their real estate continues to plummet, as are those affected by all the lost tax revenue. (A recent study, “Work from Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse,” found a 39 percent decline in long run value of New York City offices.

Work is hard, no matter what form it takes. I’ve toiled away as a waitress at a busy chain restaurant and I’ve also worked in the biggest newsroom in London. Both were highly stressful, both had me swearing like a sailor — and both were more fun when it was hectic. Silence is far more anxiety-inducing than marginally-orchestrated chaos.  Tucker Carlson, fired from Fox News last week, has been chastised for his office etiquette after videos surfaced showing him bantering with colleagues and guests.

Four years after he died in jail, stories about Jeffrey Epstein continue to surface. Cockburn took in the Wall Street Journal’s deep-dive into the demonic sex offender’s emails, which reveal that Epstein was meeting with even more well-known and influential people than previously thought. From top government officials to leaders in the banking world, Epstein was never far from the corridors of power. The question is why these people would have any interest in meeting with someone like Epstein. CIA director Bill Burns and Epstein had multiple meetings around the time the then-deputy secretary of state was leaving government. Three meetings are recorded in the documents seen by the Journal, one at a law firm and two at Epstein’s Manhattan residence.

Travelers road-tripping across Pennsylvania this summer, take heed: a war is brewing in the center of the state. Buildings have been flattened. Families have been torn apart. The threat of an emerging third power regularly captures headlines and fuels the local rumor mills. I am referring to the competition among three gas stations-cum-convenience megastores — Sheetz, Rutter’s and Wawa. It is said to be the “most heated food rivalry in the country.” Food? A lot of what these places pass off as “food” is up there with the cosmic chicken sponge found at airports. Nonetheless, the rivalry is real. It’s palpable. It’s all-American. And as for the rural places benefiting from this capitalism, as the kids like to say, we’re here for it.