Hi, Quartz members!
This week, strikes and counterstrikes between Iran and Israel sent the global economy skittering. Oil prices spilled over, for one, and a very volatile Bitcoin bounced all around.
But it’s Sunday, and you’ve got some slowing down and reading to do. Here are our favorite stories from last week, along with a bonus listen to get your next week started off right.
5 things we especially liked on Quartz
🫧 The AI craze is no dot-com bubble. For one, AI software is actually boosting profits, unlike the websites of the dot-com boom. The level at which governments, universities, and companies are studying its potential risks also wasn’t present in the 1990s.
🪙 The great Bitcoin halving is finally here. Whatever impact the event has on Bitcoin itself, its performance will almost certainly impact other major cryptocurrencies. We picked out five cryptocurrencies to watch around the changes.
🧐 Net interest income has Wall Street worried right now. Net interest income, or NII, has become one of the most watched metrics on the balance sheet this bank earnings season. But why exactly are analysts grilling CFOs on it? Quartz’s Rocio Fabbro has the insights.
🛥️Superyacht sales aren’t really super anymore. Backlogged waiting lists, rising prices, and oligarch sanctions in Russia are taking wind out of their sales, which are down 17% year over year — and even more for the biggest models.
🤝 The tech market’s latest IPO floored Goldman with its investor meetings. “We had, I think, what Goldman Sachs said was the most investor meetings prior to an IPO that they’ve ever seen in their entire history. We literally had, before the road show began, over 160 investor meetings individually,” Ibotta’s CEO Bryan Leach told Quartz.
1 bonus listen
Whether you’re a dedicated gamer or just have a passing familiarity with Mario and Luigi, you might recognize this game sequence: your character slips off a cliff, or your funny-shaped blocks stack up too high, or you fail to beat the big boss at the end. Maybe you get shuttled back to a checkpoint, or you see the dreaded screen: game over. But you can always start again. You can get another chance. And unlike real life, you can have, well, a do-over.
But do-overs don’t just exist in the playing of video games. They exist in the making of them, too. Remakes and reboots are redefining the game industry. In fact, they’re becoming an industry within an industry, catalyzing their own dedicated developers, and studios, and fans.
Quartz Obsession podcast host Gabriela Riccardi and Kotaku senior editor Alyssa Mercante talk about why improved is better than new (at least for the pockets of the gaming industry) in season 7, episode 5 — Video game remakes: Revival of the fittest.
🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora
👓 Read the full transcript here or read our Weekly Obsession email all about the topic
🗓️ What to watch for this week
Here’s what our newsroom will be keeping an eye on:
- Sunday: Elon Musk heads to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi just as the country begin’s the world’s biggest election.
- Monday: Investors will be watching earnings from Verizon before the market opens.
- Tuesday: New home sales data is out in the U.S, and Stripe Sessions starts in San Francisco for the payment company’s newest products. Plus tons of companies are reporting their quarterly results: Pepsi, GE Aerospace, UPS, and Spotify are before the market opens, and Tesla and Visa report after it closes.
- Wednesday: AT&T and Boeing publish their earnings before the market opens, while Meta, IBM, Chipotle, and Ford come after.
- Thursday: Rubrik’s IPO is expected. It’s also a tech party with Microsoft, Alphabet, and Intel giving their quarterly results after the market closes. Before it opens, Merck, and Comcast are up. The U.S. is also releasing its latest GDP figures.
- Friday: Gas companies ExxonMobil and Chevron report their earnings before the market opens, as does AbbVie.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, and offers for a weekend on your superyacht. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Morgan Haefner and Gabriela Riccardi.