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New pressure to cut interest rates as revised figures show UK on the brink of recession
The Guardian 23/12/2023
Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic have come under renewed pressure to cut interest rates early in the new year after official figures showed an increasing likelihood of a recession in the UK and a drop in inflation in the US.
Analysts said the US Federal Reserve would struggle to resist calls for lower interest rates in the first half of 2024 after the central bank’s preferred measure of inflation fell to 3.2% in November from 3.4% in the previous month.
The Bank of England was also expected to face demands to lower borrowing costs after official figures released yesterday appeared to show a tightening of monetary policy this year had pushed the economy to the brink of a recession.
An assessment that gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.1% in the third quarter – down from the previous estimate of no growth – will be a blow to Rishi Sunak, who promised to get the economy growing as one of his five pledges to voters before an expected general election next year.
GDP for the second quarter was also revised down to zero growth, from a previous estimate of 0.2% expansion, while the latest assessment of the economy showed it shrank 0.3% in October and inflation fell to 3.9% in November.
An economy is considered to be in a technical recession after two consecutive quarters of contraction in GDP, and a further contraction in the fourth quarter would push the UK into that category.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said poorer than previously assessed performances by small companies and sectors including film production, engineering, design, telecommunications and IT accounted for much of the revision.
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said he believed the economy was poised to rebound: “The mediumterm outlook for the UK economy is far more optimistic than these numbers suggest.
“We’ve seen inflation fall again this week, and the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] expects the measures in the autumn statement, including the largest business tax cut in modern British history and tax cuts for 29 million working people, will deliver the largest boost to potential growth on record.”
His Labour counterpart, Rachel Reeves, said the latest figures were an example of Sunak’s record of failure as prime minister. “He failed to beat Liz Truss, he failed to cut waiting lists, he failed to stop the boats and now he has failed to grow the economy,” the shadow chancellor said. “Thirteen years of economic failure under the Conservatives have left working people worse off, with higher bills, higher mortgages and higher prices in the shops.”
City analysts were agreed that an already weak performance by the UK economy this year had been found to be worse than previously thought, despite a larger rise in consumer spending than earlier estimates showed. They also expected the Bank of England’s 14 interest rate rises over the past two years, taking the cost of borrowing from 0.1% to 5.25%, to have taken a bigger toll on the corporate sector and household spending than previously thought.
Separate figures for UK retail sales volumes in November provided a lift, beating City forecasts of a 1.3% fall to register a modest 0.1% increase year on year after a 0.3% increase since October. Black Friday sales proved to be better than City forecasts, and discounting on furniture, carpets and other household items drew shoppers back to the high street.
However, the retail analyst Nick Bubb said he remained sceptical that the ONS had a strong grasp of trends in retail spending, which other surveys showed remained weak going into the festive period.
The weaker GDP data came the day after Hunt told the Financial Times: “If we stick to the course we’re on, we’re able to bring down inflation, the Bank of England might decide they can start to reduce interest rates.”
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FTC Proposes Curbing Kids’ Advertising
JOHN D. MCKINNON
The Wall Street Journal 21/12/2023 Agency wants to protect children from invasive online surveillance tactics
WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission proposed new limits to protect children from what it says are tech companies’ increasingly invasive surveillance tactics.
Wednesday’s move is the latest effort by FTC Chair Lina Khan to use her legal authorities to rein in often lightly regulated tech companies, including YouTube-owner Google and Meta Platforms, owner of Instagram.
Relying on a 1998 law, the agency would require that ads targeted to children be turned off by default, would limit push notifications by online services, and would restrict what it called “surveillance” in schools, among other steps.
The announcement marks an early step in the development of a proposed new rule, which would amend an existing children’s privacy rule. The FTC will take public comment for 60 days on its proposed rule before making it final, which would have a good chance of passing in the Democratic-led agency.
If adopted by the commission, the rule “will enter its second quarter-century stronger and better prepared to protect children online,” commissioner Alvaro Bedoya wrote in a statement.
The FTC said its proposal “aims to shift the burden from parents to providers to ensure that digital services are safe and secure for children.”
“Kids must be able to play and learn online without being endlessly tracked by companies looking to hoard and monetize their personal data,” said Khan. “By requiring firms to better safeguard kids’ data,
our proposal places affirmative obligations on service providers and prohibits them from outsourcing their responsibilities to parents.”
Major tech companies including Meta and Google either declined to comment or didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite widespread praise for the proposal among children’s advocates, some suggested the impact could be limited. The statute that forms the basis for the FTC’s proposed rule, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, also called Coppa, is now 25 years old and showing its age, many children’s advocates say.
Among other things, Coppa requires parental consent for companies to collect personal information on users under the age of 13. But it lacks sufficient teeth in forcing platforms to verify the ages of younger users, advocates have said.
Coppa’s sponsor, Sen. Edward Markey (D., Mass.), said the law should be updated to ban targeted advertising to children and teens. But progress on Markey’s Coppa 2.0 legislation to expand children’s privacy has been slow in a sharply divided Congress.
Some advocates also worry that the FTC’s proposed new changes to its Coppa rule need to be clarified so that it covers cutting-edge surveillance tactics that rely on artificial intelligence to better target children.
The FTC last made changes to its Coppa rule in 2013.
It has been weighing the Coppa changes for several years, in light of evolving marketplace practices, including new educational technology and big platforms hosting child-directed content.
One major change in the proposed new Coppa rule would be to require websites and platform operators to obtain separate, verifiable parental opt-in for targeted advertising. Businesses wouldn’t be able to condition access to services on disclosure of children’s personal information to advertisers.
The proposal also reinforces an existing prohibition on conditioning participation in an activity on the collection of personal data.
In addition, the proposal puts new limits on nudging children to stay online through push notifications.
It also aims to prohibit tech providers from making commercial use of students’ personal information.
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Today’s Economy Mirrors the Old One
Greg Ip
The Wall Street Journal 21/12/2023
Suppose you’re an economist who issued a forecast in January 2020 of where the U.S. economy would be in December 2023, then promptly fell into a coma.
This month, you woke up and glanced at the latest economic data. You might not suspect we had been through a traumatic pandemic.
That’s the vibe that comes from comparing the Congressional Budget Office’s predictions from January 2020, shortly before the pandemic, with the forecast it released last week. In the current quarter, the economy will be almost exactly the same size (measured by inflation-adjusted gross domestic product) it predicted four years ago. Well, 0.3% larger, to be precise. Growth averaged 1.8% during the past four years, exactly as predicted. The epic collapse of output in early 2020 and gyrations since canceled each other out.
How about unemployment? CBO figures it should average 3.9% this quarter, a tad lower than the 4.2% projected four years ago.
Surely inflation is higher. But no: CBO thinks the consumer-price index will be up 2.5% annualized in the current quarter, lining up nicely with the 2.4% penciled in four years ago. (The 12-month inflation rate is still higher, at 3.1%; I’ll return to this.)
So, did the pandemic that was supposed to change everything change nothing? Yes and no. The broad contours of the economy indeed changed little. Beneath the surface, though, what we consume, how we work, and where inflation and interest rates will settle have changed, with profound impacts.
When the pandemic first hit, the only useful precedents were natural disasters. As the economy reopened, the supply chain disruptions and labor shortages drew comparisons to the shift from a military to civilian economy following World War II and then back when the Korean War broke out.
While no natural disaster or supply chain disruption compares to the pandemic and its aftermath, the analogies have proved apt, foreshadowing that once the disruptions were over, the economy would go back to the way it was.
At times, the pandemic seemed like it might permanently alter the path of growth. The digitization of work, commerce, medical care and so on offered the potential to boost productivity and long-term growth. In the end, it did not.
There were fears social distancing and virus variants would corrode productivity and drive millions out of the labor force for good, stunting long-run growth. That didn’t happen, either.
The CBO and Federal Reserve now put long-run U.S. growth around 1.8%, close to what they saw four years ago. The transformative potential of artificial intelligence has buoyed stocks but, so far, not productivity.
Not long ago a repeat of the 1970s seemed possible when supply shocks, empowered workers and inflationary psychology kept pushing inflation higher, forcing the Fed to tighten until a recession began.
In fact, it looks like the pandemic caused a spectacular one-time rise in the level of prices but no wage-price spiral or de-anchoring of inflation expectations, both necessary for a sustained higher inflation rate (how fast prices rise per year).
To be sure, inflation hasn’t been defeated; in the year through November, it was 4% excluding food and energy. Yet in a year, markets expect inflation to hit 2.3%, then average 2.2% through 2030, based on the yields of regular and inflation-indexed bonds analyzed by Barclays. The simple explanation: The Fed insisted it would eventually return inflation to its 2% target, and investors believe it.
Inflation dynamics have changed in one critical way. Between the global financial crisis in 2008 and the pandemic, inflation averaged 1.6%—well below the Fed’s target. Markets believe those days are over. This also explains one glaring difference Rip Van Economist would have noticed upon waking this month: interest rates. The Fed’s target rate, at
5.3%, is 3 percentage points higher than he predicted four years ago, and bond yields are more than a point higher (which is why mortgage rates are higher and houses so unaffordable).
Last week the Fed signaled it would start to cut interest rates next year. To determine where they end up, Benson Durham of Piper Sandler breaks down yields on Treasury securities, adjusts them for technical factors, and concludes the market sees short-term interest rates settling around 3% by 2029, higher than at any point in the decade before the pandemic.
This suggests that the decade before the pandemic was an anomaly as depressed demand after the financial crisis kept inflation and interest rates near zero. The pandemic jolted the economy out of that stagnation, returning inflation and interest rates to a low, but not abnormally low, path.
These macroeconomic data points, of course, obscure huge changes in the nature of economic activity and work. People are more likely to work remotely, from home, and for fewer hours. This has profoundly changed social relationships, family priorities and even how we spend: Consumption today is more skewed toward goods than services. The virus no longer controls our lives but it’s still with us, as is the knowledge of how easily everything we take for granted can be turned upside down.
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This is a tough one for me. I'm lucky to have sold a company that I started with a friend from nothing. It's my greatest professional / entrepreneurial success.
Unfortunately, I am worried a) I sold right as the company was transitioning from the pre-product market fit phase into the growth phase - leaving tons of value on the table; b) that I won't be able to build another company like my last one, and will regret not sticking with this one; c) that I played this exit poorly, and let my pride get the better of me.
I'm posting this because I want to share my story to hopefully help anyone that has or might go through something similar, and because I'd love to get some takes on the story from the community. I need to move on, and am hoping this discussion will help. Lastly, it would be great to get some ideas on next steps for me.
I'll keep this as short as possible without leaving out important details. I am limited by confidentiality, so none of the names and/or identifying details are real.
Here it goes:
The story:
- from 2011, I built a transportation business (bootstrapped) with an environmental spin. Revenue was 2011 $10k, 2012 $30k, 2013 100k, 2014 200k, 2015 320k, 2016 380k, 2017 540k, 2018 630k. Profit went back into the business, and my co-founder and I took what little we could out of the business to pay our living expenses.
- I was going to buy out my 50/50 partner, but we couldn't agree on terms (he wanted a personal guarantee on the purchase price, and I didn't want to risk it), and I decided that, being quite technical, I wanted to stop working on this logistics business (my job had become keeping trucks running and getting drivers to do their job), and move to building software companies.
- We decided to sell the company, and serendipitously quickly found a HNWI, Tom (not real name), to buy the company for 290k (cash and debt free) + 200k earnout over 2.5 years if company grew by \~20% YOY.
- Tom convinced me to partner up on the acquiring company, and gave me 35% of the new company + 60k/year salary. The way this worked was that the money used to buy the company was treated as debt earning 12.5% interest. I was President, responsible for running the entire thing. I had a lot to learn from Tom's experience and was very excited at this point.
- Right as we were closing the deal, one of our competitors approached us to buy them out, which Tom mostly financed on my recommendation. I put in 35k of my sale cash to support the 210k purchase (no earnout). This further increased Tom's debt on the company we were partnered in.
- Post transaction (2019), the company was doing around 900k/year (including revenue from purchased competitor).
- 1 month in, Tom insisted we change the earn out target since we purchased pretty much all the growth needed to hit the target via the competitor acquisition. My previous partner and I accepted this change, but didn't really feel it was entirely fair, given we expected Tom to invest in the business.
- 6 months in, Tom gives me a 2/5 performance review, wants to demote me to head of sales, and change his debt to a convertible note. I reject this proposal, feeling he is using the performance review to heavily reduce my value in our agreed deal. I also point out Tom's failings to date, feeling very defensive at this point. I don't think I was exceptional during this period, and we did have challenges as a company, but I did put the company on my back to integrate the two companies, and did my best to make the company better and grow.
- 12 months in (2020), I have completely upgraded the company (with advice and support from Tom and others), and we are up to $1.6m/year revenues, approaching 2m quickly. I get another negative performance review and Tom wants to buy my share out for $350k in capital contributions without any interest (my understanding is that I have no way of actually getting this money out of the business?), move me to head of corporate development, 75k/year salary, and 10% profit share with my vesting starting over and lasting for 4 years. Tom says the company is valueless when factoring in the debt it owes to him, and he's doing me a huge favor.
- I once again reject his offer, feeling like he is massively eroding my value. His premise is that I am not fit to run the company, so he needs to step in, and wants to take the majority (if not all) of my equity away for his troubles.
- At this point, I don't trust him. We agree to part ways, and being at my wits-end, accept a 120k cash buyout of my 35%. Tom had also proposed a 40k/year part time consulting role post exit, which never came to anything. Note that my 35k investment is still in the company at this point.
- 5 days after deal is signed, Tom tells me I have materially failed the company, and we need to renegotiate my buyout price. He thinks it should be near $0. Failures included things like not optimizing the routes well; not sharing freebies from our vendors with employees, damaging employee moral; deciding to build our own crm software rather than using an off the shelf option; etc, and about 8 other similar points.
- I sue him and end up settling on about 95k out of the 120k.
- Tom withholds my partner and my final earnout payment of 100k for around 6 months due to covid.
- My total legal fees for everything above were around 55k
- 2022 - Tom's company raises 5.5m series a at around a 36m valuation; probably somewhere around 8-10m in annual revenues and 10-20% profit margin
What I've done since:
- 2021 - taught myself to code and am now a decent full stack developer, having built 2 revenue generating products (around 10k/year total arr - includes the company below)
- 2020-2022 - gotten a top 20 MBA to level up my skills and network to be able to take my next company further (I feel it was definitely worth it, btw)
- secured a 500k pre-seed investment to build my current b2b saas company; product is live, I have 15 customers, 8k in ARR, growing by \~$500 ARR every few months (i.e. painfully slowly); I have been pushing sales since Sep of 2023, but my initial base of 10 customers came a year before that, while I was getting my MBA. Only a few very small new customers since then, and I'm worried that I've built custom software rather than an exciting, generalizable product. I am desperate to get some sort of consistent growth, but my last business started as b2c, and b2b just seems to be much slower. I do have a handful of what could be massive opportunities, but at this point the likelihood of landing them is rather uncertain.
I'm committed to entrepreneurship and making my next company a huge success, but it's been four years since I've left the company I sold, and I haven't come close to building a sustainable company yet. I obviously have a lot of angst about the past 5 years, and would love to hear any and all thoughts and ideas from the community.
Thanks for reading!
Drug to halt menopausal flushes approved in UK
The Guardian 18/12/2023
A “gamechanging” drug that prevents hot flushes and could benefit hundreds of thousands of women has been approved in the UK.
Veoza, also known as fezolinetant, was given the go-ahead in the UK after the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, authorised it in May. Hot flushes, also called vasomotor symptoms, affect about 70% of women going through the menopause. Women can suddenly and overwhelmingly feel hot, which often has an impact on quality of life, exercise, sleep and productivity. As many as one in five women affected describe them as “near intolerable”.
However, despite the enormous numbers of women affected by hot flushes, for decades there have been few safe and effective treatments.
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is the most effective but for hundreds of
thousands of women in the UK, the drugs are unsuitable. Such women include some with a history of breast or ovarian cancer, blood clots or who have untreated high blood pressure. There are also women who experience side effects or who would prefer a non-hormonal alternative.
Speaking to the Guardian yesterday, Julian Beach, the interim executive director of healthcare quality and access at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said they were “pleased to have authorised Veoza (fezolinetant) for hot flushes and night sweats caused by menopause via our reliance procedure”, adding: “No medicine would be approved unless it met our expected standards of safety, quality and effectiveness and we continue to keep the safety of all medicines under close review.”
Veoza has been approved with immediate effect. However, it has not been studied for safety and efficacy in women over 65, the MHRA said, so no dose recommendation can yet be made for this age group.
The drug is prescription-only and will initially be available privately from 5 January, according to officials at Astellas, which makes it. The company has begun applying to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to enable women to access the treatment on the NHS.
The price of Veoza has not yet been approved by the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, Astellas said .
Veoza is a non-hormonal menopause drug that acts directly on the brain to prevent hot flushes. It works by blocking a brain protein called neurokinin-3, which plays a unique role in regulating body temperature.
Marci English, vice-president and head of biopharma development at Astellas, said: “We are proud to have developed an innovative treatment option for a condition that has lacked scientific advancement for too long.”
Speaking after the US approval, experts said it could be transformative for hundreds of thousands of women in the UK for whom HRT is not suitable.
“This is going to be a completely blockbuster drug,” said Prof Waljit Dhillo, an endocrinologist at Imperial College London who led a trial in 2017 that paved the way for the drug’s development.
“It’s like a switch. Within a day or two the flushes go away. It’s going to be completely gamechanging for a lot of women.”
A large clinical trial of fezolinetant published in March showed that, after 12 weeks of use, it reduced the frequency of hot flushes by about 60% in women with moderate or severe symptoms, compared with a 45% reduction in those who received a placebo. Women also said the drug reduced the severity of hot flushes and improved quality of sleep.
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Conservative Hollywood
Economist (Asia Pacific) 16/12/2023
AN ORDINARY MAN goes up against a powerful nemesis with unlimited resources. This is the pitch of “The Shift”, a sci-fi film that was released on December 1st. But it could also describe its distributor, Angel Studios, run by brothers who call themselves simple “farm boys from Idaho” and are on a crusade to remake Hollywood.
Angel, an independent studio, is at the forefront of an important trend in American entertainment. Conservatives, who decry Hollywood for becoming not a dream factory but a “wokeness” factory, are writing and producing their own films and series, catering to viewers who do not share the left’s views on gender, race and political correctness. Call them “conservative Hollywood”, or the “alt-write”.
Their biggest hit is “Sound of Freedom”, an action thriller from Angel, which will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on December 26th. It raked in $184m in ticket sales in American cinemas, outgrossing the latest instalments in the “Indiana Jones” and “Mission: Impossible” franchises. (It also outperformed abroad, where it grossed $63m.)
“Sound of Freedom” is “Dirty Harry” for the Donald Trump era. The plot appeals to Republican viewers: an American lawman sees evil, tries to defeat it and comes up against a heartless government bureaucracy, so he takes the law into his own hands and saves the day. The film fictionalises the life of Tim Ballard, a controversial campaigner against sex trafficking. In the film, he is portrayed as a righteous federal agent, who catches paedophiles sharing child pornography online. Bent on saving more children, Mr Ballard is told by his supervisor he cannot go on a dangerous rescue mission to South America. He hands in his badge and sets off anyway.
Among the film’s fans is Mr Trump, who has said, “This is a very important film and very important movie, and it’s a very important documentary all wrapped up in one.” Ahead of the election in 2024, Mr Trump wants to show support for combating sex trafficking, which many evangelical voters care about and some conspiracy theorists exaggerate in ridiculous ways.
Other firms heard the fireworks of “Sound of Freedom” and showed up for the party, including the Daily Wire, a media outlet founded by Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit, and Jeremy Boreing, a filmmaker. (“It’s time to blow up the Death Star that is the left-wing monopoly on entertainment,” Mr Shapiro has proclaimed.) The Daily Wire’s films and series come out on DailyWire+, its streaming platform, which claims 1m subscribers.
The latest is “Lady Ballers”, a comedy directed by Mr Boreing. It follows lousy male basketball players who become transgender to compete in a women’s league and enthusiastically lampoons the liberal orthodoxy around gender identity. Unsurprisingly, it has not scored well with liberal viewers. One progressive commentator dubbed it “‘Mrs Doubtfire’, but evil”.
“Lady Ballers” might not sound like a Hollywood film, but it looks like one. Slicker production has increased the appeal of conservative studios’ offerings, and streaming has helped them reach more viewers. This represents a dramatic shift. For decades, conservatives’ attempts to compete with mainstream Hollywood
films were dismal. “Left Behind”, an apocalyptic film trilogy from 2000-05 reimagining the Book of Revelation, is a good example: an aspiring thriller franchise, instead the films resemble amateur, rejected submissions from film-school applicants. (They were released straight to video.)
Today’s “alt-write” offerings fall into three categories. The first, most predictably, involves woke-bashing. “Lady Ballers” is the prototype: it takes a hot-button issue and satirises it. The result boosts Republican politicians’ talking points. (“Lady Ballers” features a cameo from Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas.) Daily Wire recently announced a new adult animated comedy series, “Mr Birchum”, about a teacher who “attempts to navigate a world he doesn’t understand or approve of”. The voice cast includes Roseanne Barr, a Trump-supporting comedian, and Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor.
The second category is religious, or “faith-based”, content. Neal Harmon, the boss of Angel, says his studio wants to tell stories that “amplify light”. For example, “The Shift”, Angel’s newest film, is inspired by the biblical story of Job. One of its biggest successes is “The Chosen”, a series based on Jesus’s life, which has been streamed more than 500m times. The firm is currently fundraising for an animated movie about David.
Counterintuitively, the third category of content eschews politics altogether. Take, for example, Amanda Milius, a former State Department official under Mr Trump, who shot to fame with a documentary on the Trump-Russia dossier. Among her current array of projects is a biopic of John McAfee, a larger-than-life computer programmer. “It’s a bunch of hookers and cocaine on a yacht. I can’t really pitch that to conservative America,” she quips.
Ms Milius is adamant art must trump partisanship: “If you’re going to be on the right and you’re going to say, ‘Oh, Hollywood is overtaken by the left,’ don’t make the same mistakes, and don’t lead with your ideology…lead with the story and lead with the aesthetics,” she says.
Others are doing the same. Daily Wire’s non-political films include a Western, “Terror on the Prairie”; a thriller, “Shut In”; and a quirky comedy, “The Hyperions”. In October the studio launched Bentkey, a platform for kids, with the mission of depoliticising children’s entertainment.
But even in “depoliticised” films, politics are palpable. Bentkey launched amid a row over Disney’s remake of the cartoon “Snow White” from 1937. The lead actress, Rachel Zegler, has promised a modern take: “It’s no longer 1937,” so Snow White is “not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love”. In response, Bentkey is making a version of “Snow White”, which claims to be a more faithful remake and “a tale of timeless truth”. (It comes out next year.)
Mr Boreing is clear-eyed about the wider market for Daily Wire productions, even ostensibly non-political ones. “I think the idea that you can make ‘mainstream content’ and draw people left and right to view right now is a bit naive,” he admits. America has split into two tribes—liberal and conservative—who consume different products, different news sources and, increasingly, different entertainment.
Does that mean that conservative films will be relegated to audiences of true believers? The broad success of “The Chosen” suggests not. Streaming, whether through studios’ own platforms or through popular ones like Netflix, will give films and tv series a wide reach in America.
And there is a potential for reaching
global audiences, too. Once again, “Sound of Freedom” is a harbinger. The film performed well in South America, where it tapped into a network of conservative movers and shakers. In Brazil, the sons of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president and an ally of Mr Trump, went to the premiere. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the president, encouraged Salvadoreans to see the film.
Europe could also become an important market for American conservative content. Across the continent politicians on the right are ascendant, and battles from America’s culture wars have spread there, too. In France, le wokisme is a major topic of discussion. Only last month, Europe 1, a leading radio station, ran an editorial slamming Disney for embracing the “woke revolution”, which it hotly described as “a deconstruction of our childhood dreams”. It sounded a lot like Mr Boreing’s sales pitch for Bentkey. ■
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LondonThe Economist (Asia Pacific) 16/12/2023 Invincible city
IT WAS NOT an auspicious time to open a pub in central London. When Michael Belben and his business partner took over the Eagle on Farringdon Road, Britain was in recession. Undeterred, they bought mismatched crockery from car-boot sales, removed the fruit machine and darts board and installed an open-plan kitchen and a blackboard menu. The pub was relaunched in January 1991.
In the decades since, the struggles and success of the Eagle—reputedly Britain’s first “gastropub”—have encapsulated those of London itself. At first its Mediterranean dishes were novel; but as the city’s tastes and population diversified, its formula of refined but affordable grub was widely imitated. The Eagle was unruffled by the financial crash of 2007-09; it scraped through covid-19 and its devastating social-distancing rules. For a venue that has always hired migrants from Europe, says Mr Belben, Brexit may prove “a dreadful problem”. But not yet.
“It’s amazing how resilient we are,” he concludes. The same can be said of London. In the early 1990s a city that had seemed to be on the skids was rejuvenated. After shrinking by over a fifth since the second world war, the population began to grow. Enterprising foreigners poured in. The economy boomed, fuelled by financial deregulation, European integration and communism’s collapse. By the time it hosted the Olympic games in 2012, London had a fair claim to be the capital of the world.
Cue a perfect storm of woes that threatened to capsize cities in general and London in particular. Already its mercantile heart had been shocked by the financial crisis. Then a cosmopolis that runs on immigration faced the shuttering of Brexit and the pandemic barred tourists from one of the planet’s most visited places.
Yet like the Eagle, London is thriving—a hardiness that holds lessons for cities everywhere. Its globalised economy has weathered Britain’s exit from the European Union far better than doomsayers had predicted. For all the political bluster on immigration, it remains a magnet for ambitious newcomers. And it is better-placed than many cities to absorb the disruptions of covid-19. Traverse London from south to north and west to east, and you find that its biggest challenges are the results of its dynamism rather than decline. Begin in the south London neighbourhood of Peckham.
A regal woman in ceremonial Yoruba attire rides a horse down Peckham’s high street. Youngsters playing basketball and shoppers at west African grocers watch in wonder (with classic London insouciance, some don’t bat an eyelid). Adeyemi Michael’s short film, recently on show at the South London Gallery in Peckham, honoured the Nigerians who began thronging to this part of the capital in the 1970s, earning it the nickname “Little Lagos”.
Southern crossroads
You can still eat knockout jollof rice at Lolak Afrique, a café just off Peckham’s main drag. But the neighbourhood, and London’s Nigerian community, are changing. As cocktail bars and sushi restaurants have moved in, the Nigerians have spread out, their numbers falling in Southwark, the borough which includes Peckham, and ris
ing elsewhere. London has never been as ethnically segregated as some American cities; as analysis by Gemma Catney of Queen’s University Belfast shows, it has become progressively less so over the past few decades, the black African population dispersing especially fast.
As it spreads, London’s Nigerian population is growing. In the past couple of years post-Brexit immigration policies have admitted many more students and workers (largely in health care) from beyond Europe. In the year to June 2023, 141,000 Nigerians moved to Britain, more than the total from the entire EU, to which there is now net emigration.
On December 4th the government announced plans to cut immigration. But so far, at least, the fear that Brexit might stem the flow of migrants to London has not been realised. In one of Brexit’s ironies, other arrivals have more than compensated for the shortfall of Europeans. Partly as a result, London’s population, which dipped during the pandemic, is nudging 9m and is expected to hit 10m by 2040. Taking into account the inflow of skills and students, says Jonathan Portes of King’s College London, Brexit’s effect on the city “has if anything been positive”, in terms of immigration, at least. It remains “a roost for every bird”, as Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1870.
Nor does the latest influx into what was already a spectacularly diverse city seem to have stirred much tension. According to Ipsos, a pollster, Londoners are more than twice as likely as Parisians to say immigrants have had a positive impact on their home town. Suella Braverman, twice forced out as home secretary in Conservative governments, recently claimed multiculturalism has “failed”. She is walking proof of the opposite: a Buddhist brought up in London by parents from Mauritius and Kenya, she found a Jewish husband and rose to one of the highest offices in the land. The London dream, you might call it.
In another widely predicted way, Brexit has indeed bruised London: by damaging the City, an engine of growth already beleaguered by the financial crisis and the rise of other hubs. Yet as at the Eagle, the consequences have, so far, been manageable.
Brexit’s overall costs will be felt as much in things that don’t happen—internships forgone, romances that never blossom—as in those that do. The same goes for its impact on the City, says William Wright of New Financial, a think-tank. He points to the hundreds of new jobs created in Paris by American investment banks, which in different circumstances would probably have come to London. As for things that have happened: London’s share of new listings, and of trade in European equities and derivatives, has dwindled.
Still, relatively few existing jobs have been relocated from the City because of Brexit. The latest estimate by EY, a consultancy, is around 7,000, far lower than the tens of thousands once anticipated. The City will no longer be the default financial centre for Europe, predicts Mr Wright; but because of its status in global financial markets, it is set to remain the dominant hub in Europe. It is big enough to cope.
Besides sheer size, the City and the rest of London enjoy two other advantages in Brexit’s aftermath. The first is that they already did lots of business with the world beyond Europe, receiving copious foreign direct investment (FDI) from America especially. London has become even more reliant on American investment since Brexit, observes Riccardo Crescenzi of the London School of Economics (lse). Worryingly, when downsizing and divestment are included, in 2021 there was a net outflow of foreign capital from both London and Britain for the first time since 1984. Even so, says Professor Crescenzi, London is still the top city in Europe for new FDI projects.
The other plus is that the industries in which London specialises—not just finance but law, accounting, consulting, the media and higher education—have been less hampered by post-Brexit rules than other sectors. Between 2016 and 2021 London’s exports of services grew by 47%, notes Emily Fry of the Resolution Foundation, another think-tank; for the rest of Britain the rise was just 4%. Places that import parts and export goods have suffered more Brexit-related costs and bureaucracy.
The momentum of the tech scene, in particular, is too strong to be “stopped in its tracks”, insists Brent Hoberman, a tech guru and investor. Because of Brexit “we have to be more paranoid” about competition, but, he reckons, London remains the best place to start a tech firm in Europe. American venture capitalists are still keen. The record supports his confidence: London has produced more tech unicorns than its three nearest European rivals—Berlin, Paris and Stockholm—combined.
Unhobbled hub
Its perennial virtues—the time zone, English language and rule of law—are reinforced by the proximity of top universities and an abundance of skills and capital. Babs Ogundeyi, the founder of Kuda, a fintech firm based in London, says savvy local angel investors helped attract more capital. Kuda runs a digital-only bank in Nigeria and a remittance service for Africans in Britain. For all Brexit’s hassles, Mr Ogundeyi notes, it has led to closer ties to Africa.
The upshot is another irony of Brexit;
you might also call it karma or poetic justice. London, the only region of England that in the referendum of 2016 voted to stay in the EU, has fared better than regions that wanted to leave. For overlapping reasons, it has bounced back faster from the pandemic. Head to north London to see why.
Sally north
On a chilly evening at Arsenal’s football stadium, the club’s new anthem rings around the ground: “North London for ever/Whatever the weather/These streets are our own.” It is a sentimental but affecting tune, especially after the lockdown months in which spectators were barred. Now the stadium is packed; Gunnersaurus, the team’s mascot, is high-fiving young fans. The faithful are loudly outraged by lunging tackles on their hero, the winger Bukayo Saka (he duly scores).
Like the carousing at the Eagle, London’s entertainment economy is buoyant again after the deathly doldrums of covid-19. Its seven Premier League football clubs project soft power around the globe. Tourism has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels, boosted by a rise in American visitors. The Society of London Theatre says audiences are up. On some weekends the Tube is busier than in 2019.
All told, London’s nimble economy has recovered much more strongly than has the rest of the country’s. Like other cities, it faces obstacles in the post-covid world. But it is better equipped for them than many.
Already under pressure from online shopping, some retail districts are struggling—notably Oxford Street, which this year looks somewhat bedraggled beneath its Christmas lights. Along with a rise in rough sleeping, vacant shops have contributed to a dilapidated air in parts of central London. By some accounts, however, the main threat to its pizzazz is Londoners’ reluctance to return to the office full-time.
One Triton Square, an office tower a mile from the Eagle, near Regent’s Park, is an emblem of this trend. It stands in a snazzy development with all the modish appurtenances of a modern office complex, including a climbing wall and an art gallery. But the building is empty. Lights blink eerily in the dark atrium; the escalators are frozen. Earlier this year Meta, the parent company of Facebook, paid a whopping fee to cancel its lease on the tower before it even moved in.
The ghostly building is not unique. Vacancy rates in commercial property in central London are high, in part because—as elsewhere, only more so—people are loth to kick the working-from-home (WFH) habit acquired during the pandemic. A recent survey for the Centre for Cities, also a think-tank, found that, on average, workers in central London were in the office 2.3 days per week, less than other Britons. Of 32 countries surveyed for research by Nick Bloom of Stanford University, British workers stayed home more than any bar Canadians. Taken together, these findings imply Londoners are among the most absent workers anywhere.
Face-to-face interactions are good for productivity, already stalling in London before the pandemic. Low office attendance could in time deter foreign investors. Then again, in a WFH future, London has enticements that other places lack.
A three-days-a-week office will have to look different from the antediluvian sort: more flexible and alluring. Yet networking, transport and entertainment possibilities mean the case for keeping a central-London HQ is stronger than for having a satellite office. Notably, the WFH culture has not led armies of Londoners to retreat beyond striking distance of the workplace. Most inner Londoners who moved home between the summers of 2021 and 2022 circulated around the city, rather than fleeing it.
Like the nosh at the Eagle, London is appealing enough to sustain footfall even as other downtowns stumble. As Jonathan Seager of BusinessLDN, a lobby group, puts it, “If you’re a company that needs space, London is still the place for you.”
It has brushed off another crisis that some thought would nobble it: the war in Ukraine and ensuing sanctions on Russia’s elite, who had brought joy to London’s libel lawyers, estate agents, PR firms and football fans. For all their notoriety and flamboyance, their largesse was always less important than that from China and the Middle East, says Oliver Bullough, author of “Butler to the World”, an exposé of Britain’s services to kleptocracy. In any case, plenty of other high-rollers still call London home, or one of them. (For an Ozymandian monument to London’s indulgence of oligarchs, stroll west from Harrods and look out for a disused Tube station. In 2014 the government sold it for £53m—$87m at the time—to Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon wanted in America on charges of alleged corruption, which he denies.)
London, after all, has absorbed all manner of shocks in its 2,000-year history. Its most precarious period, considers Tony Travers of the lse, came after the Romans left in the fifth century AD. The Black Death killed much of its population in the 1340s; the Great Fire of 1666 razed swathes of it. A port city that adapted to the decline of its port, it was also an imperial capital that acclimatised to the loss of empire. It defied the Blitz of 1940-41—when, rather than sheltering in the Tube as urban myth has it, most Londoners simply slept at home.
That phlegmatism is one of London’s abiding traits. Its biggest worries now may not be external threats but the repercussions of success. Moscow, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo: other cities dominate both the politics and economies of their country. Even so, London stands out for its grip on government, finance, media and the arts (worlds that collide at the Eagle, a watering hole for moneymen and media types and home to an art gallery). Equally glaring are the differences in the demography and outlook of Londoners and their compatriots.
At the last count, disposable household income per person was 43% higher in London than in the country as a whole. Londoners are younger, more left-wing and far more diverse: ethnic minorities account for 46% of residents, over double the proportion in England and Wales. Two-fifths of Londoners were born abroad. Contrary to its reputation in the shires as a latterday Gomorrah, on average London is slightly more socially conservative and less boozy than other regions.
For that, thank its immigrants, many of whom are devout. They have also helped raise standards in London’s schools, which this century have been transformed from the worst-performing of any English region to the best. For a close-up look at that
phenomenon, go west.
Known as “Little India”, the western suburb of Southall is studded with Punjabi and Afghan restaurants, mosques and Sikh temples. Nathan Walters, head of the local Featherstone High School, says 85% of its pupils use another language at home. Almost a third receive free school meals (a standard measure of poverty). Whether or not they speak English themselves, parents are “unfailingly positive” about education; results far outstrip the national average. Proximity to opportunity is a motivation, says Mr Walters. Pupils “can almost see it from their bedroom windows”.
London’s dominance, and voracity for people and capital, have been concerns for centuries. Over 400 years ago King James I griped, “Soon, London will be all England.” In the 19th century it was dubbed “the great wen” (cyst). These days polling finds other Britons view it as crowded and expensive and its denizens as arrogant and insular. Many think it is favoured by policymakers and the exchequer, though it contributes far more than it gets back. London’s net fiscal contribution per head is over £4,000.
That sort of resentment has fed populism across the West. In Britain it coloured the Brexit referendum. Yet since then, the divide—in wealth, diversity and opportunity—has grown (see chart 1 on prior page).
In its bid to narrow the gaps, the current government, like its predecessors, has recycled failed ideas. As a recent parliamentary report noted, for instance, schemes to shift civil-service jobs to the regions are reliably launched every ten to 15 years. Often such efforts involve constraining London’s growth in hope of diverting it elsewhere. A good example was a misguided rule of 1964 (since discarded) that in effect banned new office developments in central London.
Too often, policies have corseted the capital without boosting other places— and have wound up punishing everyone. The other big cost of London’s appeal has proved just as hard to tackle. This distress cry comes from inside the house.
“Affordable housing isn’t always as nice as this,” a resident of McGrath Road says with droll London understatement. Home, for her, is one of 26 houses in a beguiling development in Stratford, in the east London borough of Newham. Set amid unlovely 20th-century estates, the units, some of them public housing, form what looks like a Moorish citadel, with turrets and crenellations but also welcoming arches, balconies and a tree-lined central courtyard. Walk up to the railway tracks and you spy the glinting towers that were part of the regeneration spurred by the Olympics.
Peter Barber, the architect of McGrath Road, says a lot can be learned from the compact cities of north Africa and the Middle East. Newham’s council, he recalls, initially expected a design for a block of flats. Instead he emulated the Georgian terraces that are the acme of efficient London housing, with a distinctive twist.
Clogged roads, air pollution, long and pricey commutes, a discredited police force—inevitably London suffers from many big-city ailments. Compared with their compatriots, Londoners report a low sense of neighbourhood belonging; as is common amid such hurly-burly, life can feel lonely and atomised. (“It is strange with how little notice”, wrote Charles Dickens, “a man may live and die in London.”) But the most acute problem, and most enduring, is the scarcity and cost of housing—and it is sharpest, and most intransigent, in the East End.
Orient compress
In late Victorian times the East End was known as “the empire of hunger” and “the city of dreadful night”. Today overcrowding in Newham runs at double the rate for the city, itself more than double the national average. The basic causes of the shortage are a failure over decades to provide sufficient new homes and to use space as imaginatively as does Mr Barber.
The result has been at once inevitable and stunning. James Carville, an American political strategist, once joked that he’d like to be reincarnated as the bond market, because then he could intimidate everybody. Another good choice would be to come back as the London house price: perhaps only the city’s brazen foxes can match its indestructibility. True, a finance-driven boom that lasted two decades has recently flattened, but at a dizzying plateau.
In 2020 the average house in the capital sold for over 13 times average earnings, almost double the ratio two decades earlier (see chart 2 on previous page). A two-bedroom flat near the Eagle will set you back around £1m. Since 1981, meanwhile, the share of Londoners living in public housing has fallen from over a third to a fifth. Rents in the private sector have soared: in 2022 the median rent was 35% of median income. As Jack Brown of King’s College London says, the city “has never been quite this big or quite this expensive”.
All this means the perception of Londoners as wealthy is incomplete. It is a rich city with many poor people. Factor in housing costs and the poverty rate is higher than in the rest of England. Eight times as many London households live in temporary accommodation as in the country overall. The most affluent decile has nearly ten times the income of the poorest. Because of London’s unusually integrated economic geography, deprived and wellheeled families rub shoulders more than in Paris or New York, pound shops abutting artisan bakeries on the high street.
Complaints about how packed London is, notes Professor Travers, recall the old joke of the restaurant that is so crowded, no one wants to go there any more. Still, the pandemic may open up solutions to this age-old problem. In a place with an oversupply of offices and a deficit of homes, it would make sense, where possible, to repurpose commercial buildings as residential ones. More than ever, in an age of hybrid work it is time to build on some of the protected land of the “green belt”, starting with existing commuter corridors.
Something like this happened after crises of yore. Christopher Wren reimagined the city in the ashes of the Great Fire. Idealistic urban planners did so again in the rubble of the Blitz. The evidence of the past few years, and of the past two millennia, is that London—one of the world’s greatest cities, and perhaps its most resilient—will find a way to cope, and to thrive. ■
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What to do before the Fed lowers rates
Wall Street Journal 14/12/2023
Playing it safe paid off for investors in 2023 better than it has in years. Now, it could be time to take more risk with your money.
Americans piled into the safe, guaranteed return provided by cash and cash-like investments in the past year. Money-market funds and high-yield savings accounts each had inflows with households, adding more than $651 billion to money-market funds in the second quarter compared with last year, according to Federal Reserve data.
Driving the decision to take money out of stocks and bonds and into cash was the Fed. A campaign of interest-rate increases from the central bank pushed the returns of money-markets and similar securities higher. In many cases, investors figured grabbing an easy and guaranteed 5% annual return on their money was a no-brainer.
On Wednesday, the Fed held interest rates steady for the third consecutive policy meeting and opened the door to rate cuts starting next year. While there is no guarantee the Fed will cut rates in the next few months, history suggests it pays to make moves now.
Stocks and bonds both tend to perform better in a pause before rate cuts than after, according to an analysis from BlackRock.
Since 1990, stocks purchased in the six months after the first rate cut in a cycle have returned an annualized average of 15%, compared with a 21% return for investments made during the pause. Bonds returned an average 15% in the pause before the cuts and 7% afterward.
The statements released by the Fed on Wednesday are the clearest sign yet that the Fed may be done hiking rates, said Kristy Akullian, senior iShares investment strategist at BlackRock.
“We’re even more confident now that we’re in [the pause period], and so there is more urgency to start acting before the Fed does start to cut rates,” she said.
Poor performance in both the stock and bond markets led some financial advisers and analysts to warn earlier this year that the standard portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds might no longer be effective.
More recently, stocks and bonds both rallied in November.
And while that return might not last, financial advisers said most people can benefit from the same advice: You are probably holding too much cash.
Eric Leve, chief investment officer at investment firm Bailard, is advising clients to move more of their money into stocks and longerterm bonds before the new year. A longer-term bond is any bond that matures 10 years or more from the current date. So, if you buy that bond today, you are guaranteed the same annual yield for years to come.
To make these investments, Leve suggests selling short-term securities, including money-market funds, high-yield savings accounts and even short-dated Treasurys.
The problem with these securities is that at some point in the near future, they will expire and pay investors back. This means investors will then have to reinvest their money when the return on these products has declined.
“Those short-term yields that people are getting are going to go away,” he said.
There are signs that some investors have already started making this move.
Total money-market fund balances recently dropped by about $3 billion since peaking in early November, according to data from the Investment Company Institute. BlackRock said more individual investors are moving from short-term bond exchange-traded funds to longer-duration funds.
Cash still has an important role in investment portfolios, advisers said. For example, it is important to keep a few months’ worth of expenses before increasing your investments. That said, if your emergency fund is shored up, you can probably afford to put more money into stocks and bonds, Leve said.
Many investors are still keeping too much of their assets in cash, advisers said. Households held 17% of their financial assets in cash or cash-like investments such as money-market funds or certificates of deposits in 2022—the highest share since 2012, federal data show.
Regular investors have a poor history of trying to time the market and often pull money out just in time to miss sustained growth. The case for holding stocks long term is that over the past centuries, it has provided the best opportunity for investors to build wealth.
“It’s too risky to be out in the long term,” Leve said.
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Turning a Person’s ‘Delulu’ into RealityBY ANN-MARIE ALCÁNTARA
The Wall Street Journal 11/12/2023
When she applied for a job at a creative agency that worked with the snack maker Mondelez, Kyra James wanted to throw in something sweet.
A big fan of the company’s Sour Patch Kids, James mocked up a screenshot of a video call with some of the tart, sugar-encrusted gummies. The colorful waifs waved back at her. The Atlanta-based social-media producer says she wanted recruiters to see she already had buy-in from a key stakeholder: the Kids themselves.
Some might call it guts, or say James was making her own luck. The 27-year-old calls it something different: being “delulu,” online shorthand for the word “delusional.” The term has exploded on social media to describe leaps that are riskier than what most would take in their careers, relationships and other parts of their lives.
James, who is from the British Virgin Islands, says delusions are necessary sometimes. “When you come from a tiny, tiny, tiny speck on the map,” she says, “sometimes the idea of manifesting your dreams internationally—you have to be a little delulu to believe it.”
People are embracing and documenting their delulu online—as well as the catchphrase “delulu is the solulu”—as a way to challenge themselves.
Delulu is taking off in the workplace. People are seeking jobs that pay more in the midst of inflation, the return of student-loan payments and the dream of owning a home. And some like James are rethinking their career paths, aiming for new industries or roles.
James never got a response from the agency, but that creative spark has become a guiding light. “It certainly inspired me to see where there is room for me to flex my creativity when applying for jobs,” she says.
Jumping tracks
Quynhthy Tran has officially been a stockbroker for about five months. A year ago, the 28-year-old was a teacher in Dallas.
Tran, who graduated from college in pandemic-plagued 2020, spent her first year teaching asynchronously to homebound students over video, as well as in the classroom. She quickly started to burn out.
Two months into her third year, she decided to resign. She applied for a job at a brokerage firm. Though she had zero experience, she got an offer. There was just one catch: She had to pass three license exams.
She failed the first one. When she managed to pass that, she failed the second one.
“This is true delusional,” she says. “I’m trying so hard to make it into an industry that I know nothing about.”
It took her five total test attempts, over about eight months, to become a stockbroker.
Tran says her delulu episode gives her more confidence. “If there’s something that I want to pursue— whether it’s like stand-up comedy or a different career transition—I feel like I’m capable of doing that.”
The internet’s most-celebrated case of delulu was also the result of a career dead end.
Sabrina Bahsoon, who lives in London, graduated this past June with a law degree—and zero passion for it. Instead, she applied to various fashion and marketing internships. On a whim, the 23-yearold began filming TikToks in the London Underground, with wind blowing in her hair as she lipsynced to the likes of Nicki Minaj and Tate McRae.
The videos went viral and earned her the nickname “Tube Girl.” Soon, she was attending fashion weeks across Europe, and even hit the catwalk for the makeup brand MAC.
“Staying delusional is a way of just not letting yourself get into that negative mindset of ‘You can’t do this,’ ” she says.
‘Everyone should be delulu’
Tasha Mwafulirwa was studying social anthropology and social policy at her university in Scotland. The 24-year-old wasn’t feeling it. She decided to give coding a try.
“Some people told me that you have to go to school to learn how to code, you can’t just learn in a boot camp, and I was like, ‘I’m going to try anyway, and I’m going to apply for jobs that I’m not qualified for,’ ” Mwafulirwa says.
She learned the skills necessary in three months and started applying for developer jobs with only those classes as her experience. She started a job in June 2022, and now leads a section of the engineering team.
Deja White took her own delulu dreams on the road. While holding down a full-time remote job, the 28year-old left the confines of Atlanta to wander Central and South America. For five months, she bopped around, from Mexico to Colombia.
After returning to the U.S., she embarked on another journey into the unknown: She started an online pilot program to coach people on their careers. It’s nothing like her previous roles as a content manager and marketing consultant.
“Embracing something like ‘Being delulu is the solulu’ is a good way to wake you up a little bit,” White says, who now lives in Tulsa, Okla.
She recently secured her first client.
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DANIEL MICHAELS AND ALISTAIR MACDONALD —James Marson contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal 09/12/2023 A resurgent Russia, bickering allies and sagging morale are weighing on Ukraine
LYMAN, Ukraine—Ukraine is going on the defensive.
A costly, monthslong campaign aimed at driving back invading Russian forces has culminated with little shift in the front lines. Economic and military support from the U.S. and Europe are in doubt. And domestic political fissures are widening as morale sags.
Kyiv’s forces are digging in for what could be an extended period of just trying to stop more Russian advances. Western diplomats and military strategists say a depleted Ukraine needs time to rebuild, and that it might not be able to mount another significant counteroffensive until 2025.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has ordered the construction of an extensive network of battlefield fortifications to help troops hold the line. On Armed Forces Day on Dec. 6, Zelensky acknowledged the difficulty of the fight to regain occupied territories but urged perseverance. “Is there really an alternative? No.”
It is a sharp shift in sentiment from earlier this year when Kyiv—buoyed by successes rolling back earlier Moscow advances and with an infusion of Western arms—set out to eject Russian troops from the nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory they occupied. Ukraine’s allies hoped it could inflict sufficient damage on Russian forces that President Vladimir Putin would see the war as futile and acquiesce to negotiations acceptable to Kyiv.
The operation foundered against Russian defensive fortifications. Since then, U.S. political unity over Ukraine has ebbed amid partisan disputes, while war between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has claimed world attention.
Ukraine’s ability to regain much more of its territory is in doubt. Putin’s reorientation of his economy to a war footing has strengthened his hand on the battlefield and, more recently, diplomatically.
Western leaders, meanwhile, have swung from pledging victory on Ukraine’s terms to simply keeping it in the fight. The White House said Monday that the U.S. will be unable to continue providing weapons and equipment to Ukraine if Congress doesn’t pass new funding this month.
Stopping U.S. supplies “will kneecap Ukraine on the battle- field, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.).
Congress, rather than heed the warning and approve new aid, recently sank deeper into a partisan fight linking Ukraine assistance to paying for more U.S. border enforcement.
The U.S. funding fight is deepening as European countries struggle to secure fresh aid for Kyiv. An expected European Union support package for Ukraine’s national budget, valued at about $54 billion, likely faces delay or cuts when EU leaders meet soon. The EU is unlikely to agree on a military-assistance package before year-end.
In Kyiv, sniping between Zelensky and his top general has increased as military fortunes darkened. More recently, a feud between Zelensky and his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, showed signs of flaring.
On the battlefield, some Ukrainian troops are husbanding ammunition, unsure how long supplies will last. Soldiers fighting in the Donbas area say rationing artillery shells makes it difficult to hobble Russian units bearing down on them.
Russia, meanwhile, has caught up to Ukraine in drone warfare, a domain where Kyiv’s forces held an edge. Ukrainian troops also say Russians have better antidrone and electronic-warfare capabilities.
Moreover, Russia shows no sign of abandoning its war aim of taking over Ukraine.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview that any pause in fighting would give Russia a chance to regroup and prepare for fresh military action. “The only outcome would be Russia shaking off the losses and the troubles it faced in Ukraine and making another assault,” he said. “We are setting our brigades for new counteroffensive and defensive operations.”
Some of those defensive operations were evident recently on a hilltop overlooking forested plains near the small eastern city of Lyman. About 12 miles from the front line, two civilian workmen operating industrial excavators sliced trenches into the chalky earth.
The trenches, each about onethird of a mile long, 5 feet wide and over 6 feet deep—or big enough to protect a significant number of troops—mark a new approach for Ukraine’s military. Since the war’s early days in 2022, Kyiv’s skirmishing troops have striven to mount mobile-defensive operations, staging hit-andrun attacks on Russian troops.
Military analysts say that shifting to a stationary, defensive position doesn’t mean the war is over. At a recent meeting of North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers in Brussels, some NATO diplomats reflected that during the war’s early days, most observers expected a long fight.
Ukraine’s Western backers have worked to put a brave face on Kyiv’s shifting fortunes, highlighting its successes on the Black Sea and elsewhere.
If Ukraine and its allies can work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging bestcase scenario among Western strategists is that 2024 becomes a year of rebuilding for Kyiv’s military. The hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay, allowing NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals.
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ENTREPRENEUR SUPERPOWER
Wall Street Journal 09/12/2023
What the CEO of the year’s most successful company wouldn’t do
WHEN HE SAT DOWN in a booth at his local Denny’s and began plotting out the business that would change his life, Jensen Huang didn’t know that his startup would one day be worth $1 trillion. In fact, the only chief executive in Nvidia’s history didn’t know much of anything about what he was getting himself into.
But if he had known three decades ago what he knows today, he never would have founded one of the world’s most valuable companies.
“The reason for that is really quite simple,” Huang said recently. “Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected.”
Nvidia was the stock market’s big winner of 2023, when the chip maker cracked $1 trillion in value. That would have seemed impossible 30 years ago, and it wasn’t especially probable just one year ago, before the AI boom made Nvidia worth more than Netflix, Nike and Novo Nordisk combined.
So why wouldn’t he do it again?
“If we realized the pain and suffering and how vulnerable you’re going to feel, the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame and the list of all the things that go wrong,” he said, “nobody in their right mind would do it.”
The candor from one of tech’s longesttenured CEOs wasn’t just eye-opening. Huang’s comments were also a rare peek into the mind of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation, someone who took an idea hatched over Grand Slam breakfasts and Super Bird turkey sandwiches and turned it into a trillion-dollar company. Along the way he learned an important, counterintuitive lesson.
Everyone in Silicon Valley knows they have to be resilient. Huang knows it also helps to be ignorant.
“I think that’s kind of the superpower of
an entrepreneur,” he said. “They don’t know how hard it is. And they only ask themselves: How hard can it be? To this day, I trick my brain into thinking: How hard can it be?”
Really hard, as it turns out. He didn’t know that the original business plan had no chance of success. He didn’t know how many times he would fail. And he didn’t know just how much he didn’t know. But just because the 60-year-old billionaire says he wouldn’t do it again doesn’t mean he’s telling other people they shouldn’t. In fact, the opposite:
Only they have the advantage of being undaunted by the difficulty of building a company.
Huang made his comments in a recent interview with Acquired, a tech podcast hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, who might know more about Nvidia’s history than anyone who didn’t live through it. After releasing three deeply researched, delightfully wonky episodes about the company’s strategy, the podcasters were invited to Nvidia headquarters for an interview with the CEO himself. (Huang declined to comment for this article.)
Huang has been running the company since his silvery hair was the color of his signature black leather jacket. Even after three decades on the job, Huang remains actively involved at Nvidia. He still manages 50 senior executives who report directly to him and attends product meetings with junior employees who weren’t alive when the company was born. There has never been a business worth so much that people know so little about. But the more the podcasters studied Nvidia’s success, the more they credited one person.
“That company him,” Rosenthal told me. “He does everything but sweep the floors—and he may sweep the floors.”
So when it came time for one final question, they were curious: If he were 30 years old today, sitting in that Denny’s again, what kind of company would he be starting?
He said he wouldn’t start one at all. He might as well have said Nvidia’s chips were made of Doritos.
But his response began to make sense when he reflected on the wrenching years before this year. There are only five American companies worth at least $1 trillion right now. Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet’s stock prices have never dropped 85% from high to low. Amazon had one such drawdown. Nvidia survived two.
Those excruciating stretches in 2002 and 2008 now look so insignificant that you can barely see them on Nvidia’s historical stock chart. They didn’t feel that way at the time. And he got an unwelcome reminder of that feeling when the company lost half its value last year.
But after sputtering in 2022, Nvidia exploded in 2023. That’s because there has never been so much demand for GPUs, the advanced chips that provide oxygen for artificial intelligence, powering almost every piece of technology the nerdiest person you know is psyched about, and Huang’s company controls the supply. AI models require tens of thousands of these graphics-processing units that can handle lots of computational tasks at the same time, and they’re made almost entirely by Nvidia because Huang invested in GPUs long before there was a roaring market for them.
Nvidia’s central role in the AI economy is the reason it has tripled in value and beat every other company in the S&P 500 this year. It’s on pace for the best annual performance of any major stock in the past decade.
Which made the recent comments from one of the world’s richest men all the more curious.
Huang had a better year than anyone this side of Taylor Swift.
But even at the height of his company’s success, he remains haunted by the prospect of failure. According to the New Yorker, Nvidia’s unofficial motto is his mantra from the startup’s early, uncertain years: “Our company is 30 days from going out of business.” At this point, Nvidia is worth more than the other American chip giants put together, and AI would have to destroy the world for Huang’s company to be out of business in a month. But he’s still driven by that fear.
“You’re always on the way to going out of business,” he recently said at Columbia Business School. “If you don’t internalize that sensibility, you go out of business.”
The moments when his company nearly crashed are burned into Huang’s memory as permanently as the Nvidia logo tattooed on his arm.
When the world’s most valuable chip maker was founded in 1993 by Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, the only people paying attention to them were the waiters of a Denny’s in San Jose, Calif. There was no reason to suspect three lousy customers guzzling too much coffee were laying the foundation of a revolutionary company. And when Huang told people he was making graphics cards for videogames, his own mother told him to get a real job.
But the secret to Nvidia’s early success wasn’t the people involved or the industry they set out to conquer. It was the unusual, informal governance structure they chose for their startup.
Huang was always in charge, and Malachowsky and Priem reported to him, but they made a deal that each founder would have authority in his own fiefdom.
“We would talk or argue over each other’s decisions, but we would default to the final decision of the person who had the expertise in that area,” Priem told me.
“It wasn’t ‘agree to disagree.’ The decision terminated any disagreements and became the direction we were going.”
Their arrangement made Huang responsible for business operations and finding partners to manufacture its chips. But that was a huge burden for one person, which
Priem learned the one time he told Huang what he thought he should do. “He unloaded on me,” said Priem, “telling me all the responsibilities he had and all the things he was juggling.” He was stunned: Huang had kept the pressures of his job to himself. “It was an ohmy-God moment for me to understand how alone he was in his role,” Priem told me.
A trillion dollars in market value hasn’t made Huang’s job any easier. These days, his company must navigate tight U.S. regulations meant to stifle China’s access to powerful chips, not to mention increased competition from rivals at home desperate to pierce Nvidia’s dominance.
But it was much harder when Nvidia wasn’t as successful.
After the company released its first product, a graphics card that flopped, Huang laid off half the workforce. Running out of money, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he bet the company on the 1997 chip that saved Nvidia. But the decade after Huang’s company went public in 1999 would bring two more brutal stretches during the dot-com bust and global financial crisis. Even when markets rallied, Nvidia didn’t. From 2008 to 2013, when the S&P 500 was up 25%, Nvidia was down 50%.
The whole company was worth less than the $6 billion that Huang personally made in a single day of trading this year.
Nvidia stagnated as Huang plowed money into a new platform for accelerated computing, one that would allow developers to do anything they wanted with GPUs. Wall Street was skeptical of his vision of the future. But there was one group of people who could see it: AI researchers. Once they began using Nvidia’s chips to train neural networks, they realized the transformational potential of Huang’s tools.
And then he decided to put his chips on the table again.
The initial breakthroughs in deep learning compelled Huang to make another bet-the-company move on AI. Nvidia began work in 2012 on the system that would become its first AI supercomputer. Huang delivered it four years later to OpenAI, whose researchers would use Nvidia’s GPUs to educate ChatGPT, which became the hottest app in tech history when it was released last year.
But this was the year those chips became the picks and shovels of a gold rush.
Now there are young entrepreneurs sitting in their own metaphorical Denny’s, dreaming about building companies and completely unaware of how hard it’s going to be.
Because how hard could it be?
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