Near the foot of San Francisco’s California Street stand the august stone pillars of a bank dating to the 19th century. A few paces away sit the offices of Coinbase, the largest American exchange for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It’s a beehive of software engineers and young marketing executives. There, the worlds of by-the-books banking and crypto-anarchism collide. …
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It’s one of the best articles on psychedelics I’ve seen in years, and it covers a lot of important ground: business, nonprofit, scientific, and investment considerations, among others. As one friend said about the piece: “Finally, this is the article I can send my parents to explain why this is so important.” If the article…
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Here’s the messy inside story of how DC got Beijing to clean up its act for a while. KEVIN AND JULIA Garratt had spent nearly all of their adult lives in China. A devout Christian couple in their fifties with an entrepreneurial streak, they operated a café called Peter’s Coffee House, a popular destination in the…
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In tech circles, it feels like Silicon Valley has been around forever. But in reality, the region’s first big venture-backed tech companies launched barely over 50 years ago. Other global hubs, including Seattle, Bangalore and Beijing, have even shorter track records for startup funding. And tech hotspots like Austin and Sao Paolo, have really taken…
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To the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: Berkshire earned $81.4 billion in 2019 according to generally accepted accounting principles (commonly called “GAAP”). The components of that figure are $24 billion of operating earnings, $3.7 billion of realized capital gains and a $53.7 billion gain from an increase in the amount of net unrealized capital gains that exist…
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Probably you have read it before but still an interesting one: Why Some People Have All the LuckBy Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? A psychologist says he has discovered the answer. Ten years ago, I set out to…
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40% of multinational profits are shifted to tax havens each year Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen estimate that close to 40% of multinational profits (more than $650 billion in 2016) are shifted to tax havens each year. This shifting reduces corporate income tax revenue by nearly $200 billion,…
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HOW DOES THE ECONOMY REALLY WORK?This simple but not simplistic video by Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates, shows the basic driving forces behind the economy, and explains why economic cycles occur by breaking down concepts such as credit, interest rates, leveraging and deleveraging. ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES https://economicprinciples.org
Each year, Jeff Bezos writes an open letter to Amazon’s shareholders. Over the last two decades, these letters have become an unparalleled source of insight into how the world’s richest man — and his company — think about customers, innovation, building products, and more.Today, Amazon is a hugely successful, precedent-breaking company.The online bookseller didn’t turn a…
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This speaks to what can happen when we don’t do a reasonable check on the math. Also a good example of arbitrage. In 1995 Pepsi ran a promotion where people could collect Pepsi Points and then trade them in for Pepsi Stuff. A T‑shirt was 75 points, sunglasses were 175 points, and there was even…
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