My mid-week morning train WFH reads:

• Jay Powell’s Greenspan moment: The Fed is increasingly concerned about “above-trend” growth. In the mid-1990s, Greenspan grappled with it, too, and wisely held off on raising rates. That’s the right move again today. (Stay-At-Home Macro)

• The Gems Hiding in Plain Sight in the Treasury Market: Back in 1994, bonds with fabulous yields were there for the taking. Our columnist doesn’t see treasures like. (New York Times) see also Bill Ackman Wins Even If This Treasury Rout Keeps Going: The investor may have left some money on the table by ending his bearish bet, but he has identified a meaningful shift in the risk-reward on government bonds. (Bloomberg)

• Baby boomers are aging. Their kids aren’t ready. Millennials are facing an elder care crisis nobody prepared them for. (Vox)

• Thanks to Big Data, Landlords Know How to Squeeze the Most Out of Renters: Two firms face allegations that rent-pricing systems facilitate collusion among some big apartment owners. (Wall Street Journal)ž

• Americans Have Never Been Wealthier & No One is Happy. And while net worth grew 37%, total household debt grew less than 4% from 2019-2022. Sign me up for that every three years, please. This is what the change in net worth looks like every three years going back to 1989: (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Leaving Twitter: I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future: Twitter stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all – indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it. (Benedict Evans)

• Barnes & Noble Sets Itself Free: As the bookstore chain mounts a comeback, it’s breaking a cardinal rule of corporate branding and store design: consistency. (New York Times)

• Crypto Is Lobbying Congress Hard. It Wants More Than a Bitcoin ETF. The crypto industry wants laws passed that clarify how it will be regulated. (Barron’s)

• Why the US is the only country that ties your health insurance to your job: Nobody would build a system like America’s on purpose. (Vox)

• How New York City Turned the World’s Biggest Garbage Dump Into a Park: NYC opened Freshkills’ North Park in Staten Island, giving the public access to where the landfill once sat. It’s a lesson for other cities. (Bloomberg Green)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Bethany McLean, contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and author of Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. Her most recent book is The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind, was coauthored with Joe Nocera.

How High Interest Rates Sting Bakers, Farmers and Consumers

Source: New York Times

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