Something for the weekend
(Bloomberg) — Greetings from New York City.
The problems that triggered SVB Financial Group’s death spiral were hiding in plain sight in the firm’s earnings reports. That’s according to short seller William C. Martin, who warned his Twitter followers about the balance sheet issues for almost two months before the parent of Silicon Valley Bank blew up in the blink of an eye this week. The fallout is seeping deep into Silicon Valley, where everyone from wealthy founders to vineyard owners are scrambling to secure funds.
But the bank’s failure doesn’t represent a larger failure of regulation, Bloomberg Opinion’s editors write, and unless markets go haywire—or a lot of other banks prove to be in a similar predicament—the effect on the economy should be minimal. Also: Short sellers minted roughly half a billion dollars in profits but they now face a challenge: how to collect.
Fear of systemic risk still ripped across markets this week, when investors who thought they’d survived the worst of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s war against inflation suffered their biggest stretch of losses in five months. While the jury is out on whether the failure of SVB suggests pervasive risk to the financial system, hints that it did on Friday were enough to strike fear into investors who last month were sitting on gains approaching 10% for 2023.
The 2024 presidential race is well under way: A Democratic super-PAC is coming out early—and big—for the 2024 presidential race, launching ads in battleground states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina to tout President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. Biden hasn’t formally declared he’s running. Nor has Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who on Friday made his first visit to Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucus for Republicans. Donald Trump, who reportedly spends time beta-testing derogatory nicknames for DeSantis, travels to the state on Monday.
Early Sunday morning, the US “springs ahead,” and we all lose an hour of sleep to return to Daylight Saving Time—and to the debate over whether it’s really necessary to keep changing our clocks twice a year. It looked earlier this year like political momentum might be behind making Daylight Saving Time permanent but, as these maps show, that’s not a perfect solution either. Depends where you live: In Williston, North Dakota, for example, the latest sunrise wouldn’t occur until 9:46 a.m.
Bloomberg QuickTake video looks at America’s obsession with gas stoves and the underlying story of a marketing campaign that dates back almost 100 years. Gas stoves are now under fire for potential health risks, especially among children. This set off another skirmish in the US’s culture war but opened a new opportunity: Has the moment finally arrived for the super-efficient induction stove?Last week, Bloomberg readers pondered an age-old question: Do you need to be smart to get rich? We offer a follow-up of sorts: Does money buy happiness? Seems so, and the correlation extends well beyond the $75,000-a-year salary threshold that had been seen as the upper limit for making an impact, according to a team of scientists including the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who introduced the idea of a happiness plateau more than a decade ago.
Finally, consider some time with Bloomberg’s Opinion’s newest podcast, Crash Course. This week: AI has resoundingly arrived—and it’s cool, disturbing, empowering and threatening. The opinion section also looks at five major urban areas—Hong Kong, London, New Delhi, New York and Rio de Janeiro—to ask the question: Are cities more livable after Covid? Not for everyone.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
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