Hello, Quartz members, and welcome to Sunday Reads!
This was the week that Hurricane Milton hit Florida, Elon Musk pranced around a Trump rally, and the Department of Justice said it might try to break up Google. But it’s Sunday, and time to shift your gaze to some hand-selected reads. Here are some of our favorite Quartz stories from the week, plus a sneak peek at one story coming next week to get your day started.
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5 things we especially liked on Quartz
💰We are family… offices? As the ranks of the world’s wealthiest swell, so do the ranks of family offices, those boutique advisors who act as an investment committee for a private fortune. And as the world’s wealthiest look for ever higher returns, their investments are getting riskier. Madeline Fitzgerald takes a look at the investment plans of the rich and private.
📉 Flying blind: Hurricanes Helene and Milton are not only causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to the southeastern U.S., they are wreaking havoc on the data the Federal Reserve uses to make decisions about monetary policy. The sudden cessation of economic activity when a hurricane hits — and the rash of reconstruction activity a few months later — makes it hard to tell which way the overall economy is moving, as Quartz’s Rocio Fabbro explains.
💉 Weight a minute! Companies that have been selling off-brand versions of Eli Lilly’s popular weight loss drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro don’t want to halt production now that supplies of the drug are stabilizing, and a fight is brewing. Bruce Gil explores a little-known loophole that encourages the production of drugs when there’s a shortage on the market.
🛒 Costco’s conundrum: As Costco ventures further into e-commerce, it faces the challenge of expanding its online presence without sacrificing the treasure-hunt shopping experience that defines its warehouse stores. Francisco Velasquez goes for a walk down the aisles.
🚗 Goodbye Maybach, hello Honda: Sales of cars priced at more than $100,000 have fallen by 46% in the past year, while there’s been a surge in sales of cars priced between $20,000 and $30,000. William Gavin examines our declining vehicle expectations.
One sneak peek
All that baggage: Sure, the most important thing when you travel is getting to your destination swiftly and safely. But then comes the line at the baggage carousel, and the very long wait for the bag that just doesn’t show up. Quartz’s Melvin Backman crunches the numbers to find the airlines with the worst record of having baggage lost, damaged, delayed, or pilfered. Visit qz.com on Monday morning for a look at the future of... everything.
What we’re watching this week
- Monday: The New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are open on Columbus Day, also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Bond markets are closed.
- Tuesday: It’s a big earnings day for banks and healthcare companies, with reports from Citi, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America, as well as Johnson & Johnson, UnitedHealth Group, and Walgreens.
- Wednesday: Morgan Stanley reports earnings.
- Thursday: TSMC, Netflix, and American Airlines report earnings, while OenAI CEO Sam Altman headlines a livestream event with digital identity guru Alex Blania.
Thanks for reading! Here’s to the week ahead, and don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, feedback, joy, or hurricane warnings. Sunday Reads was brought to you by Peter S. Green and Audrey McNamara.