My mid-week morning train WFH reads:

• The End of the Oligarch Era Nears With Putin’s Miscalculation in Ukraine Sanctions are punishing Russia’s wealthiest businesspeople—and the country’s leader—by bringing a cold, hard stop to 30 years of integration with the global economy. (Businessweek) see also The Russian Elite Can’t Stand the Sanctions: The latest measures are far more effective than Western powers’ past efforts to target Russia’s elite. (The Atlantic)

• Zeikel’s Rules: In 1999, Zeikel’s value discipline had fallen out of favor as the Nasdaq’s growth stocks were booming and the investing public became captivated by the siren song of Janus and Munder and Firsthand and a new class of fearless fund families that charged headlong into the bubble. He was replaced by outsiders who were brought in to put Merrill back in the hunt. The new guys went all in just as the dot com bubble was peaking. You know how it went from there… (Reformed Broker)

• Ex-Barclays Quant Wants to Clean Up the $11 Trillion Index Boom Laurence Black goes from making market gauges to rating them; New firm sees trouble in complex and concentrated products (Bloomberg)

• Here’s What Happens When Managers Get Rewarded for Good Performance — But Not Punished as Much for Losses The European Central Bank’s Ellen Ryan calls for regulatory action to prevent potential systemic risks. (Institutional Investor)

• European natural gas imports This dataset aggregates daily data on European natural gas import flows and storage levels. Acute interest has developed in these indicators in response to soaring energy prices which are largely due to a tight natural gas market. The behaviour of Gazprom in using (or not using) specific supply routes and storage facilities has been the focus of public attention. (Bruegel)

• Will Your Rent Keep Skyrocketing? Not If This Billionaire Is Right: Marvy Finger recently sold half his portfolio of Sunbelt apartments for $2 billion, saying the Covid-crazed rental market has peaked. The buyers, pointing to a 20-year low vacancy rate, disagree. (Forbes)

• Five lessons Taiwan is learning from the war in Ukraine Taiwan and Ukraine both have autocratic neighbors with an appetite for their land; people in Taiwan are hoping the similarities end there. (Grid) see also China takes note: Cancellation of Mother Russia Is Underway Underway (New York Times)

• How to Tell News Fact from Fiction (Even During a War) People have been sharing information about the war in Ukraine on social media without verifying it. News-literacy tactics taught in school can benefit many of us (Wall Street Journal)

• Jewish Ukraine Fights Nazi Russia: The absurdities of this historical moment, as embodied by President Zelensky, point us to the deeper truths of Ukraine’s messy identity, which is proving to be a more powerful construction than Putin’s authoritarian nostalgia. “Ukrainians voted for a mixture of Benny Hill and Boris Johnson, and somehow wound up with Churchill.” (Tablet)

• Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-Point Game Changed the NBA For the game’s 60th anniversary, two of Chamberlain’s teammates relived the night that was a touchstone for a transcendent athlete and the white-by-design NBA (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with David Kotok, who co-founded Cumberland Advisors in 1973. The firm manages $4 billion in assets. Kotok is Program Chairman of the Global Interdependence Center (GIC), and was on the Treasury Transition Teams for New Jersey Governors Tom Kean and Christine Whitman, but is probably best known as the creator of Camp Kotok. His recent research includes the Economic Consequences of Pandemicsand What Long Covid Means for Financial Markets.

Terrorism, Nuclear Weapons, China Viewed as Top US Threats

Source: Gallup

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