The market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has been racking up plenty of firsts. The first NFT artwork to be auctioned by Christie’s. The first Oscar-nominated movie to be released as an NFT. The first tweet by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, sold as an NFT. The first NFT album: Kings of Leon’s When You See Yourself.
“The future for me,” Bob Dylan sang in 2001, “is…a thing of the past.”
For Meghan Markle’s heartache and despair, no drug could be prescribed. But, as British viewers found to their mystification, American TV eagerly advertises pharmaceutical remedies for practically every other imaginable human condition.
The value of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, fed on its oil and gas receipts, is growing so much faster than the country’s GDP that the Norwegian krone may well become the world’s first global currency. Not the world’s most important currency or a reserve currency like the US dollar, but the first currency whose value is determined largely by the movement of global markets and only minimally by its country’s economic activity.
Calling it “the biggest business tax cut in modern history” in his budget speech, Rishi Sunak, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, announced a “super-deduction” for companies, inviting them to spend the mountains of cash they’re sitting on.
As the world warms, the countries that will suffer the biggest losses in industrial productivity are those that need productivity the most, a new paper suggests. These are countries that are already hot, and that are inevitably also among the world’s poorest or most populous: countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa that have historically contributed minimally to a rise in greenhouse gases, and that need surges rather than shocks in their industry.
The US government has spent lavishly to boost the economy during the pandemic, and Americans like it—like it so much, in fact, that history suggests that high levels of public expenditure will continue to be a norm for a long time to come.
For three years now, Jonathan Martin and his wife have been selling home furnishings and decorations. “Tchotchkes, really,” he said, “stuff you put in your home.” Their shop, Sunny Bungalow, not only stayed open every day of the pandemic last year but also saw its sales double. “We’re trying to figure this out ourselves,” Martin said.
As countries unrolled lavish stimulus programs through the pandemic to preserve their economies, government spending has grown in popularity, according to polls and studies.
All over the world, political leaders are steering clear of vaccine-mandate backlash—from anti-vaxxers, libertarians, or religious communities. After he won his election, president Joe Biden confirmed that vaccinations wouldn’t be mandatory in the US. In the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson has explicitly ruled out domestic “vaccine passports”—markers of proof needed for people to enter commercial establishments like pubs. Jens Spahn, the German health minister, gave his word: “no compulsory vaccination during this pandemic.”
Spare a thought for Rishi Sunak. When he became the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer in Feb. 2020, he was known to be a deficit hawk, keen to make sure that his government borrowed and spent with abundant caution.
On Jan. 16, India started its vaccination drive against Covid-19, administering preliminary doses to nearly 200,000 healthcare workers, and reminding them to come back on Feb. 13 for their second shots. But when that date rolled around, fewer than 8,000 returned—a measly 4% of the total.
Going by the spate of recent commentary on the stock market, we’re in the midst of silly season. People bought shares in a video game retail chain on the advice of anonymous Redditors. People are buying crypto because Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, tweets cryptic endorsements of it, or because his company has purchased $1.5 billion worth of it. This is all wild, irrational behavior, many pundits believe—amateur investors showing their amateurishness. “This is just the sort of silliness we need to get used to at this stage of the longest market bull run in history,” the Financial Times columnist Katie Martin wrote.
Our smartphones function like handheld engines of misdirected purchasing: unhealthy food, impulse buys—and also, it turns out, uncommonly risky stocks.
From an all-time high of $347.51 in late January, GameStop shares have started to slide. It seems to signal the waning stages of a tumultuous ride, in which retail investors on Reddit boosted the stock, trying to squeeze short-sellers who were betting against the company. The brief, heady rally made traders sit up and buy GameStop stock the world over. That prompts the question: Could a saga like GameStop ever occur in any other country?
Around 90 years ago, president Franklin D. Roosevelt found the US in a similar state to most pandemic-hit economies today: beset by a severe economic shock and rising unemployment. One of his solutions was a radical one: to ask people to work less, so that more people could work.
Eventually, the party will end. Even enthusiastic members of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets, who have been boosting the stock price of GameStop over the last two weeks, agree that the company isn’t worth its current valuation. Which means the price is likely to drop back down—and drop back rapidly at that.
On Tuesday (Jan. 26), thousands of Indian farmers flooded into Delhi, clashing with police and storming the capital’s historic Red Fort, even as prime minister Narendra Modi attended the country’s Republic Day parade not far away. At least 67 people have died in the farmers’ protests, which have stretched for nearly three months in opposition to a set of controversial new farm laws.
In mid–November, Fage138 bought shares of GameStop, a staple mall tenant that sells electronics and gaming merchandise. The shares cost $13 a unit, and he bought around 50 of them. Then, over the next two months, as he bought a couple of hundred more, he watched the stock price blow up, setting markets afire with controversy and inducing one of the most dramatic short-squeezes in history.
Earlier this month, oil major Total took the unusual step of abandoning the American Petroleum Institute (API), the influential trade group that has advocated for the industry’s interests in Washington for more than a century.
A new corporate principle is: Never say you’re restating anything. The machines will hold it against you.
On Tuesday, the Indian cricket team registered an astonishing result in Australia, not just by winning a game and a series in notoriously hostile conditions overseas but by doing so with what was essentially a second-string side.
Last Tuesday, Delhi deployed teachers from government schools to bird duty—to stand as sentries at border points and check for any illegal transportation of poultry into the city state, in the midst of a spreading outbreak of avian flu. From 8 pm to 6 am, the teachers were instructed to check the birds’ veterinary certificates and to prohibit chicken products from being shipped into Delhi.
The prospectus held no punch line. But the company was LMAO all the same.
