Our lead article today is about Uber (driving-as-a-service) and Amazon (shopping-as-a-service). It’s the triumph of on-demand everything, that makes both production and consumption an experience.
What do you get out experiential consumption and production?
You get to hold up a card that says, “Yay, swineherding!”
It’s the Weekend Zeitgeist, which means we leave the world of finance behind us to delve into bipartisan distrust of government, local opinion writers’ opinions on packaging materials, Yoopers, F-35 sales to completely trustworthy foreign partners, Fiat Features and the worst thing I ever saw.
Yeah, we’re at that point in the cycle where you will be told about all the wonderful opportunities provided by levered private REITS.
For your IRA.
Because of all this craaaazy volatility in the stock market.
That and the President’s Cheif Economic Advisur tells us why “Dow 36,000” is just the tip of the iceberg.
ET contributor David Salem is back with five core tenets for achieving 5+% real returns over the next few decades.
It’s all a must-read, but I’m gonna highlight #4: “Favor equity investments in companies employing or serving primarily people with abundance as distinct from scarcity mindsets.”
This is the foundation for behavioral economics on a macro scale.
What is the only true superpower? The power to name things.
We name Milken and Boesky as junk-bond kings. We name their actions as a spree. We name their outcomes as devastation. We name their instrument as debt.
Today we name it balance sheet expansion.
Every man a king!
Say what you will about @jack, but he understands the necessary and sufficient condition for being a successful CEO today: create a Wall Street-supported non-GAAP Narrative to describe your company’s financial results.
Tired: MAUs
Wired: mDAUs
All this, plus Russell Wilson continues surfing the Zeitgeist like no one else.
In which Ben and Rusty discuss financialization, the incentivizes of low interest rate policy, the ‘financialization’ of education and the meaning of both for us…
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is back, baby! Just needed a little narrative happy face of “respect for global debt goals” and “promotion of green growth”. That plus multi-billion dollar non-recourse loans at 2% for a high-speed rail to nowhere.
Plus more on Walmart robots, ESG, and of course Free College!
Just another day of you can’t make it up, fresh from the ET Zeitgeist.
Why does it matter whether you think profit margin expansion has been driven more by globalization (Bridgewater) or financialization (Epsilon Theory)?
Because central banks can continue to drive financialization and earnings margin expansion even as globalization collapses.
The Monday Zeitgeist today is about companies actually being allowed to go bankrupt, the usual DB/CBK chatter, money flow cartoons, great moments in bad metagame, and a decent little personal finance column.