Carell tells graduates to be kind, avoid envy and to listen to those around them.

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• The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think: Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades. (Derek Thompson)

• The Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign. Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users. Vulture on the slow realization that the algorithmic feed isn’t curating reality so much as constructing one. A useful frame the next time a “viral moment” looks too clean. (Vulture) see also It Sure Seems Like These Instagram Ads Want You to Do Cocaine: Meta’s ad algorithm apparently decided some Wired writers needed paraphernalia tips. A funny-disturbing reminder of how thin the line is between targeted advertising and being nudged toward narcotics. From designer straws to magnet-sealed leather pouches, the platform is awash in products seemingly built for coke—despite Meta’s policies on drug paraphernalia. (Wired)

• Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence: Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy. Models tuned to be relentlessly agreeable measurably reduce users’ willingness to take socially helpful action — and increase emotional reliance on the bot. (Arxiv)

• Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose: The practice has a name. Mattress retailers call it the “name game,” and it exists to deliberately confuse buyers. The manufacturer makes one mattress, then ships it to ten different retailers with a different cover and a different model name on each. The world’s largest mattress maker now owns America’s largest mattress retailer. The FTC tried to stop them and lost. A funny, angry tour through the enshittification of the mattress business — private equity, foam compression, fake reviews, and the bed-in-a-box pivot to “premium.” You will recognize every move from other industries. (Worse On Purpose)

• Megatrends: AI vs the decade’s structural headwinds: Deutsche Bank research note arguing the productivity dividend from AI may not be large enough or arrive fast enough to offset demographic, fiscal, and geopolitical drags: “Our new AI-powered megatrend model shows that the world faces severe headwinds from several overlapping megatrends that, post-WWII, has only been seen during the 1970s oil crises and the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. In this piece, we explain our new megatrend model and how it uses AI analysis to quantify qualitative signals, filters our proprietary human-created data from dbDataInsights, and layers it all beside traditional data series. In all, we take almost 100 data points and track how each of the six global megatrends have waxed and waned quarterly over the last 70 years. In particular, we focus on the impact of these trends on GDP growth, equity markets and other key economic outcomes. We then use our model to estimate how the most important megatrends will develop over the rest of the decade.” Sober and worth your time. (Deutsche Bank Research Institute)

• Report: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Over $10 Million As “Legal Consultant” The disclosure-versus-recusal gap at the Court keeps widening: Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, made more than $10 million in commissions over an eight-year stretch where she matched top lawyers with elite law firms—including some that had cases before the Supreme Court—according to documents obtained by Insider, as concerns grow about justices possibly having unreported conflicts of interest. (Forbes)

• The Election Deniers Are Winning: The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. On the now-mainstreamed 2020 denialism in elected office: Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. system. Whether ‘winning’ is the right word depends on the time horizon; the trend is unmistakable. The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. (The Atlantic) see also MAGA Isn’t Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do.: A pointed counter to the “victims of propaganda” framing — argues the movement is functioning exactly as designed. The internal left-of-center debate on how to think about MAGA voters keeps getting sharper. The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it. (The Rational League)

• A Different Kind of Fading President: Joe Biden became quieter, while Donald Trump grows even louder. (The Atlantic)

• Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? ProPublica on a US citizen detained three times by ICE while the agency keeps insisting it doesn’t do that. Read it for the specifics, not the slogans. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen whose prior detentions went viral, was recently detained for a third time — and shackled. “I just want to live in peace,” he says. (ProPublica)

• Rupert Murdoch’s High-Stakes Blitz Against the NFL: Murdoch is making a play for live sports rights to keep Fox relevant in the streaming era. Old media still has a few cards to play. Fox founder lobbies Trump to preserve air rights for broadcasters as powerful streamers encroach on their turf (Wall Street Journal)

Video of the day: The Philosophy of a Hitman: Why We’re Obsessed With Cinematic Assassins

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). Thjat’s a Germany-sized electricity grid last year

Source: Our World In Data

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This week, I speak with Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell. He began his career as an engineer with the company in India 37 years ago, and rose through the firm across multiple product groups and divisions.

Kapur explains the logic behind splitting the company into three separate entities. He is (obviously) bullish on the future of automation and AI. We also break down what he expects from AI in the future.

A list of his favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here tomorrow.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our special Masters in Business next week, Remembering Jonathan Clements with Bill Bernstein and Jason Zweig. The two recall Clements’ impact on the investor community; they discuss his posthumous book, “Money and Me.”

Current Reading/Favorite Books

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• Squillions: Where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what? The answer proposed by Bullough is bizarre: nobody knows. ‘The number of banknotes is increasing, and the question of why the value of banknotes has increased so markedly remains unanswered.’ Central bankers don’t have much interest in the question. It is immensely valuable for any country to be able to produce currency that’s in worldwide demand: for the cost of printing a few bits of paper, a developed economy receives billions of dollars of value in pounds, dollars or euros. John Lanchester in the LRB on the new top-of-the-curve wealth — how big the numbers actually are, where the money goes, and what it does to politics and culture. Lanchester on money is always worth your evening. (London Review of Books)

• Sweeping the strait: the companies gearing up to clear the Gulf of mines: Defence companies and marine contractors are preparing to deploy uncrewed mine-clearing systems in and around the Strait of Hormuz, as efforts to reopen the vital shipping lane draw attention to a new generation of naval drones.  A new generation of uncrewed vessels could help restore traffic in vital shipping route. (FTAlphaville free)

• JPMorgan Fights Over Millions of Comic Books Locked in a Mississippi Warehouse: They’re among thousands of characters represented in roughly 8.2 million comics, graphic novels, figurines and table-top games held for months in a 600,000-square-foot warehouse formerly operated by a major comics distributor that went bankrupt in 2025. Publishers have formed alliances to free the items but at least one powerful adversary is impeding them: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Bloomberg free)

• The Empire of Wuxi, China’s Biotech Giant: China wants to be the world’s biotech superpower. But to understand how it got here, it’s best to start with its crown jewel: the WuXi companies. The WuXi companies are the dominant biotech services consortium in China and have become the lightning rod of U.S. political wrath, most notably as an early target of the BIOSECURE Act. ChinaTalk on how WuXi AppTec quietly became the back-end of half the world’s drug pipeline, and what BIOSECURE would actually do to US pharma if it ever takes effect. (China Talk)

• How Digitization Has Created a Golden Age of Music, Movies, Books, and Television: Digitization is disrupting a number of copyright-protected media industries, including books, music, radio, television, and movies. Once information is transformed into digital form, it can be copied and distributed at near-zero marginal costs. This change has facilitated piracy in some industries, which in turn has made it difficult for commercial sellers to continue generating the same levels of revenue for bringing products to market in the traditional ways. A JEP review arguing that, all the bellyaching about streaming aside, we are objectively living through a creative supply boom. A useful corrective to the “everything is mid” narrative. (American Economic Association)

• Google Search as you know it is over: Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs. TechCrunch on the AI-overview pivot quietly cratering publisher referral traffic. The business model underneath most of the open web is being rewritten in real time. (TechCrunch)

• The Vaginal Wellness Boom Is Here: The NYT on the suddenly enormous “feminine wellness” product category and the gap between the marketing and the science. Mostly a story about how easy it is to medicalize a normal body and charge $40 for it. Gaps in women’s health knowledge and care have created a business opportunity. What could go wrong? (New York Times)

• 34 Hours in New York During Art Week: A timestamped trip to New York during May’s wild art week – 4 art fairs, 12 galleries and a few good meals. A breezy dispatch from Frieze and the surrounding fairs. Useful both as an Art Week field report and as a snapshot of where the buying mood is right now. (First Edition)

• Audrey Hepburn’s Sons Recount Her Remarkably Resilient Life: Sean Hepburn Ferrer and brother Luca Dotti have feuded in the past over multiple issues related to their mother—but the books they’ve written about her agree that Hepburn was one of a kind. Vanity Fair on two new Hepburn biographies and the wartime childhood that gets glossed over in the icon version of the story. Surprisingly moving. Sean Hepburn Ferrer and brother Luca Dotti have feuded in the past over multiple issues related to their mother—but the books they’ve written about her agree that Hepburn was one of a kind. (Vanity Fair)

• Stephen Colbert Ends ‘Late Show’ With Joyous Paul McCartney ‘Hello Goodbye’ Performance, as Ex-Beatle Turns Lights Out at Ed Sullivan Theater: Paul McCartney, a surprise guest on the final episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” provided a poignant capper to the series by being given the ceremonial honor of turning out the lights in the Ed Sullivan Theater, a location with which he has plenty of history. The final number had McCartney and Colbert singing the Beatles‘ classic “Hello Goodbye,” accompanied by Elvis Costello, former band leader Jon Batiste and current band leader Louis Cato, eventually joined on stage by a parade of staffers dancing through and around the stag in a line, as the house band finally gave the ’60s tune a New Orleans-style coda. Variety on the Macca-closes-the-Ed-Sullivan-Theater stunt that ended the show. The Beatles bookend was on the nose, but earned. (Variety) see also Stephen Colbert’s Last Show: Laughing Well Is the Best Revenge: The “Late Show” cancellation was a disappointment. But a surreally lovely final episode turned it into a cancellebration. The NYT’s formal review of the finale. The show held its tone to the end, which in 2026 broadcast comedy is itself a small victory. (New York Times) see also The Goodbye Stephen Colbert Wanted to Say: The Atlantic on Colbert’s finale — the segments he picked, the guests he chose, and what the whole valedictory says about what late night was supposed to be. A measured send-off that lands. The late-night host ended his talk show the way he started it—with empathy, and an eye for entertainment. (The Atlantic)

Video of the day: How One of the Universe’s Biggest Secrets Was Discovered

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

Investors see a low bar for Fed hikes

Source: BofA Global Research

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At The Money: Blurring the Lines Between Public and Private Investments with Dave Nadig, ETF.com (May 20, 2026)

There used to be a clear distinction between public and private companies. Firms would take years or even decades to grow, build their revenue and profits, and eventually tap the public markets to go national or even global. This is no longer how it works.

Full transcript below.

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About this week’s guest:

Dave Nadig is President and Director of Research at ETF.com, and he shares with us how investors should navigate all of these new products. Dave helped design and market some of the first exchange-traded funds. He is the author of  “A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange-Traded Funds” for the CFA Institute.

For more info, see:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Substack

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Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify

TRANSCRIPT:

Barry: There used to be a clear distinction between public and private companies. Firms would take years or even decades to grow, build their revenues and profits, and eventually tap the public markets to go national or even global. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore as endless amounts of capital slosh through the system. More and more companies are staying private, but there’s a group of private investors that are accessing public capital through various wrappers, including ETFs.

To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your portfolio, let’s bring in Dave Nadig. He’s president and director of research at etf.com, and he shares with us how investors should navigate these public-private hybrids. Dave is also the author of the book A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange Traded Funds. So Dave, there was once a very bright line between public and private markets. Has that line disappeared, or has it simply moved into wrappers that investors don’t fully grok?

Dave: I think it’s more the latter. The rules haven’t really changed — that’s important to point out here. It’s not like we passed a law that said everybody can get in. What’s changed is that there’s a willingness by the issuers of product to get a lot more aggressive in what they’re positioning as retail-appropriate vehicles. So there’s not a new wrapper here. What there are are new ways of stretching the edges of wrappers that had been around for almost a hundred years at this point.

Barry: So let’s put some numbers on that. Since 2010, private credit has raised something like $1.8 trillion. Every major firm — Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Ares, Blue Owl — is building retail channels. There were 314 interval funds and tender offer funds with $277 billion in assets as of January of this year, 2026. A lot of chatter that private is going after the 401(k) market next. What does all this capital mean to investors?

Dave: You know, the thing investors need to realize is that if you are the one being offered a product, you need to ask yourself why. If somebody’s coming to you and saying, “I want to give you access to private credit or private equity,” it’s very smart to say, who is selling this to me, and why are they selling it to me now? And unfortunately the real answer here is — look, we’re in this incredible bull market, let’s just be really honest. Things have been going up for a very, very long time.

And because of that, there is a lot of money looking for exits. At the end of every cycle in my career, it is retail that is looked at to be the exit. Whether that’s buying Beanie Babies, used cars, or stocks, it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, the retail investor is the one that the quote-unquote smart money, the big institutional money, is looking to unload their positions onto.

So it’s not surprising to me that we’re seeing a lot of discussion around quote-unquote democratizing private investing — whether it’s venture capital or private credit, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same thing. We just have to accept that we are going to be marketed these products, and for the most part, I think investors are not well served by them. But that’s worth poking at.

Barry: So we should all take some advice from that great alternatives investor, Groucho Marx: I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.

Dave: Exactly.

Barry: So let’s talk a little bit about how this used to look. In the old days, historically, companies would go public to raise growth capital. Today it seems like a lot of the best-known private firms can stay private indefinitely, and those that do go public seem just to be reaching for liquidity for insiders. Is that what’s happening with these various ’40 Act funds in all sorts of new wrappers?

Dave: Yeah, there are two things going on here. On the one hand, eventually these private companies go public, and there’s a lot of effort to get investors involved in those IPOs. That’s the end state of what we’re talking about. I want to focus a little bit more on the beginning state, which is how the actual money in private equity gets there.

Historically, how that money ends up in a private company is pretty simple. There’s some pool of assets — generally an LLC or a limited partnership — and it collects a billion dollars of money from a bunch of rich people, endowments, institutions, and financial advisors. That money goes into a pool, which then makes a bunch of small investments in, say, 15 different startups in Silicon Valley. The idea is that one of those hits big, and then the payout from that is either that company gets bought or it goes IPO, and all the investors in that limited partnership get a big check.

That’s the structure. How that little pool of private money gets managed can really vary. It’s very common for it to be literally a limited partnership. But the problem with that is you can only get so many investors into it.

When you want to get a lot of investors, you have to go to some sort of regulated vehicle, and then you end up in usually a closed-end fund of some kind — whether it’s a traded closed-end fund, a non-traded closed-end fund, an interval fund, or a tender offer fund. They’re all versions of the same thing. They’re funds that are roach motels: money goes in, money never comes out.

Barry: Define those various things. What’s the difference between a tender offer fund, a closed-end fund, an interval fund — for people who may not be hip to all these different acronyms? Go through the whole list.

Dave: So really the main structure is the closed-end fund, or the CEF, which is part of the ’40 Act — just like an open-ended fund, which is an ETF or a mutual fund. Same rules, same laws, very similar structures at the very high level. The biggest difference is a closed-end fund is basically subscribed to once, like an IPO. You go out, you say, “I want to raise a billion dollars.” You see if you can get a bunch of people to give you that billion dollars.

Now that is a closed pool of money. And whether or not money ever comes out of that pool again depends on how the rules are written for that fund. In the most investor-friendly version, it tends to be a traded closed-end fund, meaning you can go to the NYSE and get a bid for it, and it may be trading at a discount or not. That’s the version that, for instance, Pershing Square just launched. Pershing Square just filed PSUS, which is a fairly traditional closed-end fund. They raised a bunch of money.

Now it trades in the open market, and much to Bill Ackman’s dismay, it’s trading at a 20% discount to what it’s actually worth. That’s pretty common in closed-end funds, because there’s no liquidity. You can only buy it or sell it from other people who happen to want it or own it.

Barry: And to clarify, PSUS — are the holdings private or public, or both?

Dave: At the moment that’s really going to be public equities. I think what people are trying to buy there is Bill Ackman’s high concentration, use of some leverage to get better exposure, special-situations kind of investing. That was a specific offering that he’s tried — I think this is his third tilt at this windmill — and finally got this one to close, albeit not with the pricing he probably would’ve hoped for. But that’s actually a pretty traditional closed-end fund.

You raise a bunch of money, you trade it back and forth with your friends, maybe it throws off dividends, maybe it throws off a capital gain someday if they have a big win. But you’re never expecting to get your money out. You can do the exact same thing and not have it ever be traded — and that’s a non-traded private equity fund.

That’s a pretty common thing. BREIT, a really well-known REIT fund, is one of those non-traded closed-end funds, and we’ve had a bunch of those launched recently also really targeting private equity. So that’s another very common version of it.

Barry: And full disclosure — what I’m about to talk about is something I own. Boaz Weinstein has an ETF, CEFS, that looks for closed-end funds that are trading at a discount to NAV. He buys them and then either agitates for the manager to buy back enough stock so it’s trading at NAV, or to break it up and just sell all the pieces and return the money or give the stock back to the investors. Why do so many of these closed-end funds trade at such a discount that activists are haranguing management for what essentially is a dollar trading at 75 cents?

Dave: Well, the discount comes because of what you just said. There’s no liquidity in it. There’s no way to ever extract real value from the fund. It’s permanent capital, largely from the perspective of the issuer.

That’s why the issuer loves it. They’re just like, “I have a $2 billion portfolio. I never have to worry about providing liquidity. I’m fine.” So if it trades at a discount, that manager really doesn’t care. They’re still getting paid based on NAV — often paid on NAV that’s been goosed by a bunch of leverage.

So they still get paid. The end investor is the one sitting here going, “Why am I sitting here at a discount?” So arb-ing out of the discount is a classic tale. People have been doing that since the sixties.

Barry: But that’s a —

Dave: — story for closed-end funds.

Barry: Right? With ETFs, the arb means there’s no discount, because you could always buy it, open the wrapper, and sell the stock. So it just seems weird that closed-end funds don’t have the same response to arb.

Dave: It’s like an appendix on regulatory structure, right? It’s this vestigial piece of flesh that’s attached to the ’40 Act. And that’s why, as you mentioned at the top of the show, there are only a couple hundred of these things. Generally people only use the closed-end fund structure when they have one of a couple of problems to solve.

One is they’re buying stuff they literally can’t sell. So in the case of USVC — the one that AngelList’s Naval just launched, I’m still trying to get my money into — the whole idea there is that buying stakes in SpaceX and private companies like that, you can’t just liquidate. They need to be able to close the liquidity gate. That’s usually reason number one.

Reason number two is usually leverage. If you’re trying to do some sort of levering up bonds to try to get 15% returns out of them — those kinds of portable alpha strategies, or risk parity strategies where you really need to be able to go long and short and get lots of leverage — you can do that in the closed-end fund structure where you can’t in a traditional mutual fund or ETF. So it does solve a problem.

The issue is, it’s very rarely a problem the normal investor has.

Barry: So you mentioned PSUS, and I remember that fee was not five bips. What was the fee on PSUS?

Dave: I think it’s 2% out of the gate.

Barry: Oh, that’s a chunk of cash. But no 20 — it’s not a two-and-twenty hedge fund. It’s just a two.

Dave: Yes, exactly.

Barry: And what about products like USVC? By the way, I love that these all have the name “US” in them. I guess the plan is they’ll do an overseas version one day as well.

Dave: Look, all of these funds are generally pretty expensive. Something like USPE, which is the one that’s come from Tap — that’s basically just going to buy a bunch of private stuff that they get access to — is charging 2%, but what they’re buying is other funds. So you get a lot of acquired fund expenses. It’s not uncommon to see these expenses creep up toward 3 or 4% when you start rolling all this stuff together.

Barry: Because it’s fees on fees?

Dave: It’s fees on fees. I should point out, though, that USVC is the one that made a big splash lately because they’re basically saying the limit’s $500 — get your money in now. They’re structuring that as a bit more of an interval fund, where once a quarter they’re saying, “We’ll give 5% liquidity to people who want to get out.” That’s, again, a fairly common structure, although none of those things are written in stone. They can say they’re going to do that and then not do it, and there’s no recourse.

Barry: And USVC does not trade on any —

Dave: It won’t trade anywhere. It’s non-traded. So the only way you’ll ever get your money out of it is either they make a distribution because something big happened in the fund, or you sign up for one of these quarterly windows where you can get 5% of your money out.

Barry: So some of these are private and hold non-liquid assets. Some of these are public and hold public assets. Are there public versions of these that hold private assets?

Dave: Well, the equivalent to that would be something like USPE, which is the one coming from Tap. The idea there is that it’ll be trading on the exchange — no, it’s not an ETF, it’s still a closed-end fund, but it’ll be a traded closed-end fund. So it’ll have its big discounts.

The other version of this is you can take an ETF and use the 15% illiquid bucket that all mutual funds are technically allowed to have, and you can try to use that aggressively. There are ETFs doing that. XOVR is the big one — it has a 15% SpaceX chunk in it. Ron Baron’s fund, BRONB, has a big chunk of SpaceX in it right now. So there are more ETFs and mutual funds trying to do that, but it’s obviously fraught with peril. You don’t want to go too far down that road and then have a giant pile of redemptions you can’t meet.

Barry: So here’s the obvious question. USPE — or even better, Pershing Square PSUS with Bill Ackman — these funds convinced savvy institutional investors and others to put a bunch of money in. They launched at a couple of billion dollars. “Wait, I could buy me some Bill Ackman at a 20% discount.” How come more people don’t see this and say, “Oh, I get to buy a premier hedge fund manager at a discount to NAV”? What’s the disconnect? Why haven’t people themselves just said, “I want some of this”? Is the expectation that, hey, if you want to be in Pershing Square, that’s where all the good stuff has taken place, but the PSUS closed-end fund isn’t going to have the same juice?

Dave: Interestingly, part of the reason Ackman had such a hard time getting this capital raise done over the years was exactly that argument. People were like, “I want to be part of the management company. I don’t want to own this garbage fund.” So what they actually floated was the combo platter, where for every — I think it’s every four or five shares of the fund you get one share of —

Barry: One —

Dave: — of the management company, the big GP, the main vehicle.

Barry: So you’re both an LP and a GP. If this was a hedge fund, you’d be an LP and a GP at the same time. Which is a very clever way to do it. How much of the overall GP did Ackman allow outsiders to buy? Or is it just built into the fund?

Dave: It’s built into the structure of the fund. I don’t know exactly —

Barry: Because you’re not getting 20% of the GP.

Dave: Well, you’re certainly not getting a hundred percent of it.

Barry: You’re getting one out of — well, if you’re buying it, you’re only getting one out of five shares or whatever it is. But he could say, “Oh, we’re going to have a hundred million shares and I’m going to put a million into this,” or whatever the float is.

Dave: Right. This is part of the problem with these kinds of funds. You ask why people aren’t storming the gates to try to get into this thing — well, you don’t know that much about it. You’re not getting regular reporting; it’s not super transparent. You don’t really know what the marks are. Obviously if they’re only holding public securities, you can impute the marks yourself, that’s fine. But on anything that’s private, you’re just kind of guessing and taking their word for it.

So yeah, it’s trading at a 20% discount to what you think it’s worth. But is that really even what it’s worth? And how do you value the GP component of this in that 20% discount? So I think the combo platter of lack of transparency and lack of liquidity is enough to scare most rational investors out of something like this.

Barry: So those are the downsides. There obviously has to be an upside. If someone like Bill Ackman is saying, “I have an idea,” and $2 billion worth of smart money theoretically threw some cash into that — what’s the upside?

Dave: The upside is Bill Ackman could be right. He runs high-concentration, somewhat levered portfolios of, I don’t know, a dozen stocks. That’s a high-conviction bet. If he gets those dozen stocks right, he could absolutely blow away the market. I’ve fully acknowledged that there are investors out there —

Barry: And his track record over the years is not bad. Lights out, right?

Dave: Exactly.

Barry: Not necessarily consistent, but mostly pretty good years and a handful of spectacular ones.

Dave: Some flashes of genius, right? So that’s why people are buying into these things — because they believe, in this case for Pershing Square, in Ackman and his prowess and his access to insight, quote-unquote, that other people aren’t getting. In the case of something like USVC, I think what they’re counting on is, “Oh, those are the AngelList guys. They’re getting to see all of this deal flow from Silicon Valley way before everybody else. USVC is going to get these nice little slugs of whatever the next SpaceX or the next big IPO is way before anybody else.”

That’s not insane. I mean, I have some private investments of my own. I’ve chosen to be much more careful and pick exactly what I want to do, but I’m not going to sit here and tell people private investing is a terrible idea. Lots of people have made lots of money doing it. So that’s the allure: hey, USVC — once they finally let people’s money in and start investing, maybe they will in fact carry the whole tailwind of everything going on in Silicon Valley venture, and your $500 becomes $5,000. It’s not impossible.

Barry: Here’s the math on private investing that I think a lot of people overlook. The median fund does okay — doesn’t do great. You’re better off in the S&P. It’s expensive and illiquid versus the S&P. But a top-decile fund does really well — diversified, non-correlated, and very often outperforms the index. The problem is, unless you get into that — I’ll be generous and say top-quartile — fund, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. I love that expression. So given all of that, how do you think regulators should be treating this private exposure in these various public wrappers?

Dave: So my two big issues are liquidity and transparency. I think we should enforce the liquidity rules. Which means that if you’re sticking something in like an ETF, you should not be able to violate the 15% — if you cannot trade it and get a price on it intraday, it is not liquid, and you should not count it as liquid. So step one: we should actually enforce those liquidity rules.

Barry: Intraday meaning once a day, or anytime throughout the day?

Dave: Well, you’ve got to at least be able to do it once a day. And I would argue, holding an intraday-priced vehicle, you should probably be holding most of your assets in intraday-priced securities.

Barry: 85%.

Dave: 85%, right? So that seems pretty rational. That’s the liquidity side of it.

And then the transparency side. Look, the problem in private equity and private credit — as everybody who’s played in any of this knows — is that the marks don’t matter. We’ve all seen those pitch books that say, “Look, you should invest in privates. They’re so stable, they hardly ever go up or down.”

Barry: I love — Cliff Asness calls that “volatility laundering.” It’s a perfect phrase.

Dave: Right. So you’re taking what would obviously be wildly volatile assets, you’re marking them once a quarter, and you’re marking them based on a lower-vol metric — on what their comps did. So of course those are ridiculous and stupid marks. That would be the next thing I would focus on: independent valuation agents for anything that is going to touch the public hand. If you’re going to touch the 1940 Act, we should have independent verification, and we should at least publish valuation rules. That’s the other big one — they don’t tell you how they value any of these things. The board values whether or not your private thing is worth X or Y. I don’t like that. I would like to know the rules. Why do you think SpaceX is worth $185 instead of $500?

Barry: Really fascinating. Last question: five years from now, how do you think this public-private distinction — these public wrappers around private investments — I love the phrase “liquid alts.” It kind of reminds me of the George Carlin word routine: jumbo shrimp —

Dave: Military intelligence.

Barry: Right, exactly. That’s the exact routine. Listen, either it’s private and illiquid, or public and liquid. But private and liquid doesn’t really — at that point it might as well be public. It doesn’t make any sense. How do you think this distinction is going to show up in the minds of investors and/or regulators?

Dave: I don’t want to be Doomberg about this, but I feel fairly confident suggesting we’re going to have some event in the next couple of years that is going to pull the scales off our eyes around —

Barry: Haven’t we kind of had those sort of events already this year? We’ve had a bunch of privates kind of —

Dave: Oh no, very, very thin — like Blue Owl closing your BDC for redemptions. That’s course of business.

Barry: You’re talking not quite GFC, but in the same neighborhood?

Dave: Yeah, I think we’re going to have a few funds really have to either close — whether it’s a high-profile private equity fund unwinding, whether it’s some of the private credit stuff really coming home to roost. Initially it looks like we may have dodged some of that, like the private credit stuff. There was a lot of concern that that was going to blow up the world. We seem to be being a little more rational about that. On the private equity side, I think most of the money going into private equity is pretty high risk-tolerance money anyway. So until we actually cross that Rubicon of shoving this stuff in 401(k)s — which I think is still going to be a while out, I don’t think that’s happening tomorrow.

Barry: Good. I hope that’s very far out.

Dave: So I think we’ll have some high-profile blowups, but I think they will be good for investors in the sense that they will wake us up and we’ll be more skeptical — which is what’s happened with private credit. There’s not billions and billions and billions of dollars chasing private credit from retail right now. That’s a good thing. I think we dodged a bullet.

Barry: Well, there certainly were billions of dollars chasing it in ’24 and ’25. So to wrap up: for those of you interested in everything from liquid alts to interval funds to M&A funds to what have you — you have to be aware of the downside risks. These things tend to be expensive. They often trade at a discount, assuming they trade at all. They are not especially transparent. There is a lot of good faith in relying on management to tell you what these things are worth.

~~~

Find our entire music playlist for At the Money on Spotify.

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• What’s the Sticker Price of Exorbitant Privilege? A clean Substack walk-through of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” — what reserve status earns the US, what it costs, and what would actually shake it. The de-dollarization chatter usually skips the math; this one shows it. That raises the obvious question: what would it take for the US to lose its privilege now? Where is the tipping point? Is it just about the US fiscal and macro fundamentals? Carolin Pflueger (U Chicago) and Pierre Yared (Columbia) don’t think so. (The Two Cents)

• The Dangerous Brew That’s Rattling Bond Markets: The WSJ on the cocktail of fiscal deficits, sticky inflation, and central-bank cross-pressure showing up in the long end. Read with the WaPo piece on what those yields do to households. A mix of debt, inflation and populism has changed the interest rate landscape since 2020. A mix of debt, inflation and populism has changed the interest rate landscape since 2020. (Wall Street Journal) see also Trump’s war is wrecking Trump’s economy: The U.S. war on Iran has upended energy markets and gut-punched the global economy, especially countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. But the United States is not nearly as immune to the economic fallout from the war as U.S. President Donald Trump seems to think—and it is starting to show. There is a whole slew of economic indicators flashing “check engine” across the dashboard of the U.S. economy that show that the prolonged war in the Middle East is reigniting inflation, fouling supply chains, and dampening hopes of a tax-cut-fueled growth spurt this year. (Washington Post)

• SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought: The prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business. Axios on the leaked SpaceX financials that look a lot less Mag-7 than the secondary market implied. Read alongside the $15B Anthropic deal — both stories are about who is actually paying whom in this AI buildout. (Axios)

• Is Nvidia too big to fail? ‘You’re clearly at the centre of everything’ The global stock market has virtually become “One Big Trade”, according to Goldman Sachs. “AI Is Penetrating Every Corner of Financial Markets”, notes Apollo. Is it really just one big Nvidia trade though? (FT Alphaville free)

• Used EVs Are Now the Most Affordable Cars. Here’s How to Buy a Good One. With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped. The WSJ on the surprising flip: a three-year-old EV with most of its warranty intact is now often the cheapest car on the lot. Useful for anyone with a kid heading to college. Here’s How to Buy a Good One. With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped (Wall Street Journal)

• Why mortgages and car loans are getting more expensive: Yields for some Treasurys hit their highest level since 2007 — and consumers are starting to feel it. A clean WaPo explainer on the long-rate move and what it does to the household balance sheet. Useful for clients who only ever see the headline Fed Funds number. (Washington Post)

• FBI seeks US-wide access to license plate cameras, wants “data in near real time” FBI will pay vendors Flock and Motorola Solutions to help it track and search for vehicles nationwide. Ars on the Bureau quietly asking for a real-time feed from the country’s patchwork of private and municipal plate readers. The surveillance architecture has been built piecemeal for a decade; this is the centralization request. (Ars Technica)

• How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme: The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible. (Quanta Magazine)

• Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame: BBC Future on the postwar Japanese reforestation program — millions of cedars planted for timber, no follow-up plan, and now nationwide hay fever as the karmic dividend. A small parable on policy half-lives. A decision made 70 years ago to reforest vast swathes of Japan with just two kinds of tree has come back to haunt the country. (BBC)

•  Retrospective — The Entire Series of MB&F Legacy Machine Watches: Monochrome runs through every Legacy Machine MB&F has built since 2011. A satisfying tour of one of the few independent watchmakers doing genuinely new things rather than re-issuing the 1960s catalogue. (Monochrome Watches)

Video of the day: The Album That Rewired Modern Pop: Believe (1998)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

America’s Small-Business Boom Comes Without New Jobs

Source: Bloomberg

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• Before you invest in crypto, watch this film: Mother Jones on a documentary diagnosing crypto as a wealth-transfer machine pointed at retail. The OC star turned skeptic remains an unlikely but effective explainer. Ben McKenzie scorches the cult of cryptocurrency. (Mother Jones)

• Nobody Knows Anything: A market-strategy riff on the Goldman line — humility about forecasting as the only durable edge. Always worth re-reading when the consensus gets loud. (TrendLabs) see also Nobody Knows Anything: Derek Thompson on why a piece of AI science fiction rocked the stock market — and what that tells us about how little anyone actually understands about where technology and the economy are heading. (Derek Thompson) see also Nobody Knows Anything: Barry Ritholtz’s Bloomberg classic on the fundamental unpredictability of markets — and why anyone who claims otherwise is selling something. (Bloomberg)

• The Great 2026 Reset… — Deutsche Bank Research Institute: DB’s macro team takes a swing at framing 2026. Read it for the framework, not the predictions. (Deutsche Bank Research Institute)

• Stories vs. Statistics: Ben Carlson on why narrative beats spreadsheet for most investors even when the spreadsheet is right. The behavioral piece behind half the bad decisions our industry sees. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Why Humans Are Obsessed With Numbers Too Big to Understand: Mathematician Richard Elwes discusses humanity’s long-time fascination with ginormous numbers—and what this obsession reveals about us. On our cognitive failure modes around trillions, billions, and parsecs. Relevant to investors, voters, and anyone trying to process the federal budget. (Gizmodo)

• The Iran War Is Crippling One of the World’s Wealthiest Nations: The NYT on Qatar — caught between US bases, Iranian missiles, and a gas-export business that depends on a quiet Strait of Hormuz. Even the rich neighbors are paying for this war. Iranian attacks and the stoppage of seaborne transit have paralyzed Qatar’s vital gas exports, stalling the economic pivots intended to anchor the country’s growth. (New York Times)

• The paradox at the heart of American meat: Vox Future Perfect on the gap between what Americans say about animal welfare and what they buy at the grocery store. The cognitive dissonance is the product. No one likes how animals are treated on factory farms. But no one wants to stop eating them. (Vox)

• The First Atomic Bomb Test in 1945 Created an Entirely New Material: Wired on trinitite — the strange green glass the Trinity test fused out of the desert floor — and what new analysis reveals about its mineral structure. A nice science palate cleanser. The discovery from the Trinity nuclear test site shows how extreme conditions can result in materials never before seen in nature or in the lab. (Wired)

• Everyone Thinks Trump Won Last Night. They’re Wrong: A contrarian read arguing the conventional wisdom missed the actual political signal from last night. Useful as a counterweight regardless of whether the call ages well. Trump’s revenge tour just made the GOP’s midterm problem a whole lot worse.” (The Message Box)

• Jackson Pollock painting sells for record $181 million at auction: Number 7A, 1948, which went under the hammer at the renowned Christie’s auction house on Monday, smashed the previous record for the most a work by the late American artist has taken at auction. The painting, which came from the private collection of media magnate SI Newhouse, is also now the fourth most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, according to ARTnews. (BBC)

Video of the day: Americans Crave Low-Cost Chinese EVs

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

AI Is Fueling a New American Startup Boom

Source: Apollo

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The paperback of “How NOT to Invest” drops this month; to celebrate, I present this excerpt from the book about a BW story that was published exactly 25 years ago!

This short, Apple-related excerpt from the book was a fun chapter to write… Enjoy!

“Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work”

“Few outsiders think new stores, no matter how well-conceived, will get Apple back on the hot-growth path… Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently.”
—BusinessWeek, May 21, 2001

A year after Fortune’s Cisco debacle, BusinessWeek1 published a story on Apple’s foray into retail stores. Not just BusinessWeek, but many naysayers laughed off the inevitable failure of Apple’s push into retail.2 Numerous armchair pontificators freely shared their uninformed opinions as to why this concept was destined to fail. “I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” predicted retail consultant David Goldstein.3

After all, established consumer electronics chains were all in decline, and the writing was on the wall. Gateway would soon close its retail stores (2004), and not long after, CompUSA would shutter its physical locations (2007).

Investors should always be on the alert for structural errors in media stories: Authors operating outside of their expertise; people unaware of recent developments; extrapolators extending present trends far into the future. It is an excellent reminder of exactly the kinds of errors investors should avoid. A fallible human being publishing their uninformed opinion in print should never be the basis for making any intelligent investment decision.

There are many genuinely revolutionary products and services that when they come along, change everything. Pick your favorite: the iPod and iPhone, Tesla Model S, Netflix streaming, Amazon Prime, AI, perhaps even Bitcoin. Radical products break the mold; their difference and unfamiliarity challenge us. We (mostly) cannot foretell the impact of true innovation. Then once it’s a wild success, we have a hard time recalling how life was before that product existed.

The Apple Store was clearly one of those game-changers: By 2020, Apple had opened over 500 stores in 25 countries. They are among top-tier retailers, and the fastest ever to reach a billion dollars per year in sales. They did more in sales per square foot in 2012 than any other retailer.4 By 2017, they were generating $5,546 per square foot in revenues, twice the dollar amount of Tiffany’s, their closest competitor.5 Apple no longer breaks out the specifics of its stores in its quarterly reports, but estimates of store revenue is about $2.4 billion per month.

That guy who wrote, “Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” I wonder what the rest of his portfolio looks like…

Finance seems to encourage this kind of future forecasting. We are bad at this, because we often lack awareness of what we do and do not know about the limits of our expertise; we do not truly understand the present, let alone the future. We often wishfully predict what we want to be true, rather than what will come to be.

We look at the Dunning-Kruger effect later, but the key takeaway is most of us are not very good at metacognition—estimating our own skillsets.

Learning what we do and don’t know—working within our capabilities— that’s challenging enough, without other people’s bad forecasts in our heads…6

Footnotes:
1. Cliff Edwards, “Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” BusinessWeek (May 21, 2001).

2. Nearly a decade and a half later, those naysayers were recounted here: Ana Swanson, “How the Apple store took over the world,” The Washington Post ( July 21, 2015).

3. Jerry Useem, “Apple: America’s best retailer,” Fortune (March 8 2007).

4. Seth Fiegerman, “Apple Has Twice the Sales Per Square Foot of Any Other U.S. Retailer,” Mashable (November 13, 2012).

5. Chance Miller, “Apple again found to be the world’s top retailer in sales per square foot,” 9TO5Mac ( July 29, 2017). See also: Marianne Wilson, “The most profitable retailers in sales per square foot are….” Chain Store Age (CSA) ( July 31, 2017).

6. If you think the Apple Store cover story was bad, just wait until you see what the media had to say about BlackBerry…

The paperback of “How NOT to Invest” is out this week at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-AMillion, Bookshop, Hudson, or wherever you buy your favorite books!

If you want to learn more about how the book was made, any related media appearances or background, get unique bonus material, or just ask a question, you can sign up here: HNTI at RitholtzWealth dot com.

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• Stock Gains Without All the Taxes? How the Hottest Trade on Wall Street Works: The stock-market surge has propelled the use of a new kind of tax-loss harvesting. We break it down. The WSJ on the surge of direct-indexing and Section 351 ETF conversions that let wealthy investors swap concentrated stock into diversified portfolios without triggering capital gains. A useful explainer for clients asking about it. The stock-market surge has propelled the use of a new kind of tax-loss harvesting. We break it down. (Wall Street Journal)

• Trump’s Investments In Palantir And Nvidia Draw Scrutiny—Here’s What Companies Were Traded. President Donald Trump drew scrutiny Friday over millions of dollars of securities trades made in recent months involving companies his administration has also made deals with — though Trump’s son Eric said the trades were made by a blind trust. Forbes lines up the President’s recent trading activity against companies with direct policy exposure. Read alongside the WSJ pieces on his accounts — it’s a single story being told in pieces. (Forbes) see also See How Trump’s Accounts Were Busy Trading Big Tech Stocks: Trump’s investment accounts had a surge in activity, with more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter. The WSJ’s data-driven look at the trading activity reported across Trump-family accounts — well-timed mega-cap entries and exits clustered around policy news. Make of it what you will. (Wall Street Journal)

• New York Real Estate in the Age of Inherited Wealth. NYC housing no longer tracks real estate fundamentals, it tracks equity portfolios and private equity flows, a concentration that feels durable but has never been historically. On the increasingly visible role of parental cash in Manhattan and Brooklyn closings. The first-time buyer cohort is now functionally two markets — those with family equity and everyone else. (Housing Notes)

• Mapping the household-level transmission of monetary policy: The monetary tightening that followed the post-pandemic inflation episode has revived long-standing debates about how monetary policy affects households. This column uses a survey of more than 25,000 US households, combining hypothetical questions with randomised information experiments, to show that monetary policy has a contractionary impact on consumption, but the transmission mechanism differs substantially from conventional theory. VoxEU on micro-data showing rate hikes hit households very unevenly — by mortgage type, age, and income. Useful corrective to anyone still treating “the consumer” as a single object. (VOXEU CEPR)

• LinkedIn Is Doing What Bluesky Was Supposed to Do: Rebuilding a public square on the platform you least expect. For a brief moment about a year ago, it really did look like Bluesky might work. Researchers and left-of-center intellectuals were flooding in, swapping starter packs, reassembling what felt like a nostalgic reunion of old Twitter. Then everyone arrived, and the center could not hold. A sharp argument that the post-Twitter intellectual conversation didn’t move to Bluesky or Threads — it quietly migrated to LinkedIn, of all places. Uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not wrong. (Popular by Design)

• Why are people so excited about Swatch’s Royal Pop watch? Similar to past sales of its kind, some people queued for days to get their hands on one of the eight models. But the ferocity of interest in the product, both online and on the high street, has split opinions about responsible marketing and whether the watches are even worth it. (BBC)

• Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent: Including a back-of-envelope on the climate cost at billion-device scale. The ‘opt-out’ fiction continues. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (That Privacy Guy!)

• Russia’s War Is Going Badly—on the Ground and in the Air. Ukraine’s growing arsenal of long-range drones and domestically produced missiles has been hitting oil infrastructure and military facilities deeper inside Russia. Putin shows no signs he is rethinking his aims The WSJ on a Russian summer offensive that has stalled while drones and long-range strikes are quietly wrecking the air arm. The market narrative on oil and defense names is starting to lag the battlefield. Putin shows no signs he is rethinking his aims (Wall Street Journal)

• New panels produce hydrogen fuel using only water, sunlight and no electricity: This grid-independent system eliminates the need for traditional electrolyzers in green hydrogen production. A direct-solar-to-hydrogen panel design with efficiency numbers that, if they hold up at scale, would matter. Big “if” — but the field has had a quietly good year. This grid-independent system eliminates the need for traditional electrolyzers in green hydrogen production. (Interesting Engineering) see also What It Will Take to Make AI Sustainable? Researcher Sasha Luccioni argues we need better emissions data and a better sense of how people are using AI in the first place. Wired on the brute physics problem the industry is still pretending isn’t one — gigawatt clusters, cooling water, and a power grid that wasn’t built for any of this. Real numbers, no hopium.Researcher Sasha Luccioni argues we need better emissions data and a better sense of how people are using AI in the first place. (Wired)

• US science after a year of Trump: A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce. (Nature)

Video of the day: World War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

Trump’s investment accounts had a surge in activity, with more than 3,700 trades in Q1

Source: Wall Street Journal

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• Words That Mattered: Fed Chair Jay Powell: A close reading of Powell’s most consequential lines, dated and re-contextualized. Excellent reference for the next FOMC parse. (Stay-at-Home Macro)

• How Trump plans to keep tariffs at the center of his economic policy despite stinging court losses: The legal setbacks haven’t shifted the strategy — only the legal authorities being invoked. Tariff policy as a will-to-power exercise. (The Conversation) see also Trump’s Accounts Investment Fund for Babies May Shortchange Them. Here’s a Better Approach.: Barron’s on the so-called MAGA baby accounts and why a $1,000 seed wrapped in fee-heavy mechanics will likely leave kids worse off than a boring old custodial Roth. (Barron’s)

• Under one roof: housing and inflation expectations. Using household surveys for the United States, we find that people tend to overweight their expectations about house prices when thinking about inflation with a coefficient of 25%–45%, significantly above the weight of house prices in the inflation index. Should central banks care about this? The short answer is yes. The Bank of England’s staff blog on how the price of the place you live shapes the inflation you expect. A nice empirical piece for anyone tired of the “inflation is dead” / “inflation is back” pendulum. (Bank Underground)

• A Personal Finance Star on What Millennials Need From Their Boomer Parents: Ramit Sethi in NYT Magazine on the great wealth transfer’s awkward middle act — kids don’t need another inheritance lecture, they need the actual numbers and a willingness to talk before the funeral. (New York Times)

• Kushner Disappoints Mideast Clients Who Spent Millions Seeking Sway: Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE backed Affinity Partners in hopes of gaining White House influence and investment returns. The US war with Iran that they opposed has shown the constraints of that approach. (Bloomberg free)

• CBS Cancels Itself, Not Just Colbert: What I didn’t anticipate was that the foundation of Mr. Colbert’s success was something new to late night: hard-core, point-of-view political comedy. He had developed it while contributing to “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. A broadcast network, steeped in the traditional “both sides” style of Johnny Carson, was going to expect him to drop that as well as the character. The NYT opinion page on a network deciding it would rather not have an audience than have one with opinions. A useful case study in what happens when corporate parents start managing for the regulator, not the viewer. (New York Times)

• Your iPhone Gets Stolen. Then the Hacking Begins: Wired on the international crews who lift iPhones in the West and then phish the owners overseas to unlock iCloud. The hardware was never the real prize. (Wall Street Journal)

• The surprisingly strong case for feeling great about your coffee habit: Another week, another coffee-is-actually-fine review. The effect sizes are real, the mechanism is still hand-wavy. Drink up. (Vox)

• Attenborough at 100 — A Nature Documentary Archive: Sir David Attenborough just turned 100. In recognition of his brilliant career and life, here’s everything he’s ever worked on, in one place. Nearly 5,000 episodes across 90 series — from Zoo Quest in 1954 to Secret Garden in 2026. Search by animal, habitat, location, natural phenomenon, or theme to find exactly the episode you’re looking for.  A loving fan-built archive of David Attenborough’s seven decades of nature programming, organized for browsing. The closest thing to a centralized index of a body of work that quietly shaped how the world sees wildlife. David Attenborough’s life’s work, searchable. (Attenborough at 100)

• How Nicki Minaj Became Trump’s ‘No. 1 Fan’: The WSJ on the unlikely Minaj–Trump alliance and what it says about celebrity-political brand alignment in 2026. Less about the policy than about the audience each side thinks it’s buying. The rap superstar is throwing her weight behind the White House agenda after being courted by Trump’s 29-year-old celebrity whisperer (Wall Street Journal)

Video of the day: How Concerned Should Boeing and Airbus Be About the New Flying V?

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Sheila Bair, former Chairperson of FDIC from 2006-11. She helped steer the agency through worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Her new book is aimed at young adults and teenagers, titled “How Not to Lose a Million Dollars”

Stocks are cheaper, but their prices are higher

Source: Mike WIlson via Sam Ro

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