New York Times (August 28)
“The Milwaukee Bucks set off a fast-moving wave of protest in professional sports when they refused to play their scheduled playoff game…. The rest of the league quickly joined the strike.” The ripple soon spread to “postponements of games in the W.N.B.A., Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer.” The players “have delivered a message that the entire country needs to hear: When it comes to social justice, it’s better to think and act like a team.”
Tags: Major League Baseball, Milwaukee Bucks, NHL, Playoff game, Postponements, Professional sports, Protest, Soccer, Social justice, W.N.B.A.
WARC (August 27)
“Lockdowns have lasted longer than the 66 days research suggests it takes to form a new habit – so 2020 really will be an inflection point when we witness a paradigm shift.” COVID-19 has overturned our entrenched attitudes and assumptions, “halting much of what we have taken for granted, imposing new ways of living our lives and creating new boundaries.”
Tags: 2020, 66 days, Assumptions, COVID-19, Entrenched attitudes, Habit, Inflection point, Lockdowns, Overturned, Paradigm shift, Research
Chicago Tribune (August 27)
“The middle of a horrendous recession is an odd time to boast about your stewardship of the economy. But it fits with Trump’s habit of taking credit for anything that goes right while taking no responsibility for any bad news.”
Tags: Boast, Credit, Economy, Horrendous, Recession, Responsibility, Stewardship, Trump
Institutional Investor (August 25)
“ESG investments have proven effective at reducing risk and delivering returns comparable to those of non-ESG oriented funds. During the stock market collapse in the first quarter of 2020, Morningstar found that all but two out of 26 ESG indexes suffered fewer losses than their conventional counterparts. Studies from Morgan Stanley and MSCI have found no financial trade-off in the returns delivered by ESG funds relative to traditional funds.”
Tags: Collapse, Effective, ESG, Funds, Investments, Losses, Morningstar, MSCI, Reducing risk, Returns, Stock market, Trade-off
Financial Times (August 25)
“Things are bad. Silicon Valley is choking on wildfire smoke. Louisiana is expected to be hit by two hurricanes this week. Britain had its wettest February on record and faces it lowest wheat harvest since the 1980s…. We either hammer carbon emissions or they will hammer us every year harder and harder.”
Tags: Carbon emissions, Hurricanes, Louisiana, Silicon Valley, Smoke, UK, Wettest, Wheat harvest, Wildfire
Investment Week (August 24)
“Global dividends plummeted by $108.1bn to $382bn in Q2 this year… marking an underlying decline of 19.3% – the biggest fall seen…. All regions except the US suffered a drop in pay-outs, with the UK and Europe seeing the biggest falls at 54% and 45% respectively on an underlying basis.” By comparison, Japan fared well with payouts falling just 3.1% and “four-fifths of companies actually increasing or maintaining their dividends.”
Bloomberg (August 24)
“Many of the governments once lauded for their textbook Covid-19 responses, replete with strict lockdowns, sophisticated contact-tracing apps and clearly articulated policies, got tripped up by something in the end… It only goes to show that there’s no winning the coronavirus recovery.”
Tags: Contact-tracing apps, Coronavirus recovery, COVID-19, Governments, Lauded, Lockdowns, No winning, Responses, Sophisticated, Tripped up
Investments & Pensions Europe (August Issue)
“Credit investors would be wise to reflect upon the growing debt burden weighing on the global economy.” Debt has surged since the pandemic and it was already at high levels. “Global debt rose by $10trn (€8.9trn) in 2019 to $255trn. At the end of last year, global debt stood at 322% of global GDP, or 40% higher than before the 2008 financial crisis.”
Tags: 2008, 2019, Burden, Credit, Debt, Financial Crisis, GDP, Global economy, Investors, Pandemic, Reflect, Surged
Washington Post (August 21)
“In the past century, since the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, Americans developed nuclear bombs, traveled to space and invented the Internet. But the country has not come even close to achieving equal representation for women and men in politics.”
Tags: 19th Amendment, Century, Equal representation, Internet, Nuclear bombs, Passage, Politics, Space, U.S., Vote, Women
Wall Street Journal (August 19)
“Coronavirus infections are surging again across much of Europe and governments are racing to prevent a full-fledged second wave of the pandemic.” Infection levels still “remain far lower in Europe than in much of the U.S. The seven-day average of new daily U.S. cases is running at nearly 150 cases per million people, about five times the number across Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the U.K.”
Tags: Coronavirus, Europe, France, Germany, Governments, Infections, Italy, Pandemic, Prevent, Second wave, Spain, Surging, U.S.
