Weekly Roundup: March 24-30, 2019
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What’s that smell? Perhaps it’s a recession:
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note was a tiny bit less than that of the 3-month US Treasury bill. This is known as a yield inversion, and depending on which article you read, this specific type of yield inversion (10-year minus 3-month) has happened before each of the past 6, 7, or 9 recessions.
Maybe not yet, or maybe not at all:
There have been a few false yield-curve inversion signals in the post-war era, Paulsen wrote, but there has never been a recession that was not preceded by a significant fiscal contraction.
We are not seeing that in this cycle yet.Meanwhile, brick and mortar retail seems to be taking a big hit too, as JCPenny, Payless, and LifeWay announce over 3,000 store closures.
You be your own judge, but be sure to have a plan for whatever happens. Mayhaps it’s time to start making sacrafices.
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In the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve got:
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NIMBYs flex their economic might on the Embarcadero by raising $75k to fight the construction of a homeless resource center which would house 200 homeless residents
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We also don’t want the homeless sleeping in vacant storefronts either, but we also don’t want those stores to be chain stores either:
Residents have to start putting their money where their mouth is — if you want only local businesses in your neighborhood, and you oppose chains, why are you spending all your money on Amazon and staying in every night?
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Speaking of places to stay, last year: American consumers spent more on Airbnb than on Hilton
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The Cluetrain Manifesto turned 20:
In the industrial world, especially the commercial mass media part of that world, shipping was a very appropriate conceptual metaphor. It gave us a useful vocabulary for describing a world where a goods move great distances between a few producers and millions of consumers. The problem is, when you apply that metaphor in a networked world, with its networked markets, you make the mistake of treating in-your-face customers as distant consumers. They aren’t cattle. They fish-like gullets gulping down products that fall off the end of distribution’s conveyor belt. But we still conceive them that way, or we wouldn’t talk about “aggregating” and “capturing” them. We also wouldn’t talk about “moving content” through the Net as if it were just another medium, like TV, radio and newspapers.
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Abigail Disney on what money means in relation to virtuosity:
Money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person. You are who you are and the least important thing about you is what you have.
(emphasis mine)
On feeling worthy:
I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self. That is handing your self-esteem to the world to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to have any. And that’s a dangerous game.