Economy
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Number Crunch
Forget ‘Titanic’. ‘Ever Given’ is the maritime blockbuster we need
$400 million per hour: That’s the economic cost caused by a quarter-mile-long container ship that has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Wednesday, blocking passage for other ships on one of the world’s busiest trade routes, based on a rough estimate by Lloyd’s List, as reported by Bloomberg.
Rescue efforts have been ongoing, with the cargo ship Ever Given having been partially refloated but still stuck in the middle of the Suez Canal. The canal accounts for roughly 12% of the world’s seaborne trade, which should give you an idea of how much global trade is at a standstill…
NUMBER CRUNCH
The other half of their stimulus will obviously go toward avocado toast
50%: That’s the share of their stimulus checks that half of American 25- to 34-year-olds are planning to spend on stocks, according to survey data cited by Markets Insider. The survey, conducted by Deutsche Bank Research, found that this age group has more aggressive equity plans for any stimulus funds than either older or younger investors — but that significant chunks of every age bracket are eyeing stocks as a place to park at least some of this new cash.
The standout status of that young-adult cohort makes sense, as the survey also found that over the past 12 months…
Number Crunch
Blank-check companies are running out of viable companies to acquire
370: That’s how many “blank-check companies,” otherwise known as special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), are actively looking for a target company to merge with and take public, according to CNBC.
SPACs are companies that raise funds on public markets for the explicit purpose of merging with a private company and taking them public, thereby allowing the target company to bypass the lengthy and expensive process of a traditional IPO. Last year saw a boom in the number of companies that went public via SPAC, with sports betting platform DraftKings and battery company QuantumScape among them.
I Read It So You Don’t Have To
An economist gives a psychological tour through the messy business of numbers
I Read It So You Don’t Have To is a new series that gives you the TL;DR on a new business book you want to read—but will never have time to.
What did I read?
Tim Harford’s new book The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics (published in the U.K. as How to Make the World Add Up)
So who’s this Tim Harford?
He’s a columnist at the Financial Times, a BBC radio host, and the author of several previous books, the most recent of which is Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy and the most popular of which is probably 2005’s The Undercover…
Number Crunch
$359 million worth of GameStop shares failed to deliver because buyers didn’t have the cash or sellers didn’t have the shares
$359 million: That’s the value of more than one million GameStop shares that failed to deliver on January 28 at the height of the “GameStonk” frenzy and on the day Robinhood halted users from buying the stock, according to data from the Securities and Exchanges Commission, per Bloomberg. The shares were stuck in limbo because buyers either didn’t have the money to complete purchases or sellers didn’t have the shares to settle trades.
Last week’s congressional hearings about the GameStop and Robinhood fiasco have illuminated some of the complex dynamics behind the rally that shot GameStop’s share price from $19…
Expect cryptocurrency booms, intrusive biometric tracking, and the mainstream embrace of universal basic income
In the early months of the pandemic, I published my predictions about how the coronavirus pandemic would reshape our lives. While many of these predictions are currently bearing out, it is increasingly clear that the disruptions caused by Covid-19 are only just getting started. The magnitude of any crisis is a function of both its striking force and of the strength — or fragility — of the system it attacks. Long before this pandemic, developed societies were plagued by widening inequalities and staring down a technological abyss. …
Number Crunch
Maybe some more gold plating will help them recover
21%: That’s how much the value of Trump-branded properties in Manhattan fell during Donald Trump’s presidency, according to New York City real estate data firm UrbanDigs, as reported by Curbed.
Manhattan real estate values across the board have fallen by an average of 9% during the same period, with most of that drop occurring during the pandemic, meaning Trump properties have lost more than twice as much value as other Manhattan real estate. …
Object of the Week
The meme investor mob came after a physical commodity, and it didn’t go well
Object of the Week is a new column exploring the objects a culture obsesses over and what that reveals about us.
Over the past week or so, the meme-crazed, Reddit-fueled “stonk market” phenomenon careened in a new direction. Instead of aiming to drive up the share price of yet another business with a dubious financial future, the mob went after silver. This hasn’t worked out — largely because of the nature of silver itself as a physical commodity whose value can be difficult to untether from its materiality.
The run on silver seems to have been sparked by users of…
The Amazon founder shrewdly steps down at the peak of his company’s power
Jeff Bezos, the archetypal daredevil capitalist, spent 27 years charging headlong into industry after industry, seemingly indifferent to the bloodletting and destruction in his wake. Now, at 57, as he plans to step down as CEO this summer, transitioning to the role of executive chairman, he leaves the helm of Amazon like a shrewd championship boxer — with his shaved pate among the most identifiable individuals on the planet, very possibly at the peak of his and his company’s powers, and down possibly the only way to go — on top.
Amid social, economic, and political chaos, regulators and antitrust…
Off Brand
The rebel boot persisted — even when no one was wearing shoes
A hip, young marketer at a hip, young agency once admitted to me something memorable. Getting a cool new brand off the ground wasn’t really the hard part of his job, he told me. What was hard was making that coolness sustainable. He compared it to opening a trendy restaurant: What happens when the trend fades? “There are always lots of new places, and people love to try them out,” he said. “But what you really want to be is the one they keep coming back to, year after year. …
