As always credit to the original author, generally being Matt Levine (sign up for his newsletter) and other authors as specified.
“How can a physical artwork become an NFT,” asks Felix Salmon at Axios, but of course Money Stuff readers know the answer. “By lighting it on fire,” is the answer
In other words, by holding back from filling their boots with Apple and Microsoft, active managers leave those companies undervalued. That leaves money on the table, and leads to those stocks subsequently outperforming as investors catch up. Being underowned is bullish. So the nightmare logic is that indexing creates an incentive for active managers to be underweight the biggest stocks — and that by doing this they create the likelihood that they’ll miss out on subsequent returns as money continues to go into passive funds.-John Authers (another free Bloomberg newsletter writer)
This model was wrong in one important respect: People did not buy Omicron because they have nice thoughts about the omicron variant; they bought Omicron because they are having thoughts about it. (Presumably sad thoughts, it being a deadly virus, though who knows.) The thing being traded here is not fondness but attention. Crypto has developed tools to create scarce claims on computerized representations of memes, to create scarce tradable claims on societal attention.[3] This is … extremely, extremely stupid? I think? But what do I know. The point is that it works.
Of all the ways that the world’s leading superpower can conduct foreign policy, “asking a British consumer company to update its U.S. securities filings to add risk factors about its premium-ice-cream subsidiary” is … a weird one? Just, like, there you are in Congress, you have some foreign policy issue that you want to do something about, and the most natural thing to do about it is to send a letter to the SEC. Because U.S. foreign policy, like so much of U.S. policy, is a subset of securities law.