Quote of the Day
"The bottom line is that the normally-distributed world is not coming back. We need to adjust to a power-law world where lottery winners produce innovations and wealth that benefit everyone else..."
(Dror Poleg)
Chart of the Day

Rising defense spending is buoying defense stocks. (chart via @ycharts)
Markets
- You can safely ignore all the year-end stock market forecasts. (nytimes.com)
- In markets, it's way too easy to kid yourself you saw what was coming down the pike. (wsj.com)
- Sam Ro, "The thing about certain risks is that the become less of a problem for markets the more market participants talk about them." (tker.co)
Finance
- Cryptocurrency is the Segway of finance, heavily hyped and niche-only. (slowboring.com)
- Goldman Sachs ($GS) is cutting jobs. (wsj.com)
Companies
- Lavish Christmas parties are now a no-go in Silicon Valley. (theinformation.com)
- Is Elon Musk's new image going to hurt Tesla ($TSLA)? (daringfireball.net)
ETFs
- The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ($SPY) is the first, and still most liquid, ETF. (pionline.com)
- The number of different ETF issuers in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past five years. (etf.com)
Books
-
The five best economic history books of 2022 including "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century"
by Brad DeLong. (fivebooks.com) - The best fiction of 2022 including "Wolf Den" by Elodie Harper. (pastemagazine.com)
- 22 books on happiness in 2022 including "The Good-Enough Life" by Avram Alpert. (nextbigideaclub.com)
Policy
- The U.S. keeps inventing stuff that gets built somewhere else. (theatlantic.com)
- Falling office building values are a slow moving disasters for cities. (wsj.com)
- The Cherokee nation was promised a delegate to Congress. What happened? (hcn.org)
- Passing the Afghan Adjustment Act is the least we can do. (nytimes.com)
- Why the U.S. should open more consulates in India. (marginalrevolution.com)
Economy
- Is the Fed focused on the wrong stuff? (kyla.substack.com)
- The economic schedule for the coming week. (calculatedriskblog.com)
Earlier on Abnormal Returns
- Top clicks this week on the site. (abnormalreturns.com)
- What you missed in our Saturday linkfest. (abnormalreturns.com)
- Podcast links: poverty in America. (abnormalreturns.com)
- Are you a financial adviser looking for some out-of-the-box thinking? Then check out our weekly e-mail newsletter. (newsletter.abnormalreturns.com)
Mixed media
- A glut of supply has changed the short-term vacation rental equation. (wsj.com)
- Measuring Silicon Valley housing prices relative to tech stocks. (a16z.com)
- Mortgage buydowns are now all the rage. (wsj.com)
- What it's like to live in a super-tall building. (theatlantic.com)
- San Francisco's downtown has emptied out. (nytimes.com)