Tariff Tantrum
In June 1931, Ohio Senator Simeon Fess took the stage at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC. President Hoover was running for reelection, and Assistant Secretary Snyder hoped to rile up the convention of Young Republicans. Senator Fess exclaimed from the podium, “When the American people realize what President Hoover
Ideas from Peter Thiel’s Breakfast Table
Until this week it was never quite clear to a considerable body of intelligent citizens why a sufficient plurality of voters in the United States would flock to a reality television star whose casual relationship with the truth would frame a day of riot, rapine, and insurgency at the Capitol
May Day 1975 - The Day the SEC Invented Discount Brokerages
This is a picture of the New York Stock Exchange in 1975. That’s when the SEC abolished fixed trading commissions and invented discount brokerages. The SEC abolished fixed brokerage commissions on May 1st – ending a 183 year old practice of exchange-mandated commission rates. The market would set the commissions,
Taking Control of Cloud Spending
UBS shared a lesson in understatement last week when analyst Karl Keirstead wrote, “Customer efforts to optimize/trim their cloud spend are well beyond any historical norm.” One could almost hear the frenzied IT staff yanking blue cables out of servers and powering down the racks. Amazon and Microsoft all
SVB - Goin’ to the Chapel?
That was fast. I thought for sure that we would get a tough day followed by a shotgun marriage over the weekend. The FDIC has to appreciate how acute the working capital problem is for the vast network of early stage businesses throughout the country. Something like 75% of venture
Nixon, inflation, and the high price of bad analogies
Oil shock. Prices on the rise. A menace in Russia. The US coming off of one war and supporting the under-dog in another. “The ingredients of the 1970s are already in place,” said Niall Ferguson at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy the other week. Says, Niall: Why shouldn’t it
Economic Hurricanes
With Jamie Dimon auditioning for the weather channel, calling for hurricanes, it’s no wonder companies are looking for the keys to the bunker. Memories of the Nasdaq, circa 2000 or the entire market, circa 2008, might make you a bit more frenetic. Who can forget Sequoia’s “RIP Good
Burrow - Making Everyone Comfortable but the Competition
“Does anyone know what JAND is?” Stephen Kuhl and Kabeer Chopra were in Ethan Mollick’s entrepreneurship class at Wharton in 2016 and had no idea what JAND was or what could possibly be contained in the powerpoint professor Mollick was waving in front of the class. It happened to
Sinking into the Casper Mattress Story
The cofounders had been meeting at a co-working space for a while. They were thinking through business ideas, but they always kept coming back to mattresses. Philip Krim, Casper’s cofounder and CEO, had started an ecommerce business while he was at UT. The mattress category was surprisingly successful. He
Pulling Back the Covers on Boll & Branch
Scott Tannen had promised himself and his family some time off. He had recently sold his online gaming business to Publishers Clearing House when tragedy had struck. He was in the middle of the transition, and his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She passed away just as he wound
The hedge fund disruption
Hedge funds went mainstream like a bankruptcy – very slowly and then all at once. The combination of growing macroeconomic pressure on pensions and the success of a charismatic early hedge fund adopter would help drive trillions of dollars into hedge funds at the start of the century. The transition would