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Obama has been like a foreign policy version of Warren Buffett, a proudly pragmatic value investor less concerned with appearances and the whims of the moment, focused instead on making solid investments with an eye to long-term success

think back to 2008, with the U.S. economy shedding as many as 500,000 jobs a month and on the cusp of a second Great Depression, the U.S. military was stretched to the breaking point through fighting two wars, and many parts of the world associated the United States with militarism, Guantanamo Bay and torture. The picture looks very different today.

Considering the extent of today’s global disorder, it is tempting to succumb to a narrative of grievance and fear — sharpening the divisions between “us” and “them,” building walls longer and higher, and lashing out at enemies with force. Or to think it better that, to reduce exposure to such geopolitical risk, the United States should divest from its alliances. Despite all the talk of “strength,” what these impulses reflect is a core lack of confidence.

As Obama’s presidency nears its end, the state of the world is indeed tumultuous and ever changing, but we have good reason to be confident. The United States’ global position is sound. The United States has restored a sense of strategic solvency. Countries look to it for guidance, ideas, support and protection. It is again admired and inspiring, not just for what it can do abroad but also for its economic vitality and strong society at home.

Chertoff told Biern, according to attendees, that if the Justice Department “can’t bring these cases because it may bring harm, then maybe these banks are too big.” In the end, though, Chertoff and the Justice Department blinked.

From 2004 to 2012, the Justice Department reached 242 deferred and nonprosecution agreements with corporations, compared with 26 in the previous 12 years, according to a study by David M. Uhlmann, a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Michigan. And while companies paid large sums in the settlements — the days of $7 million cost-of-doing-business fees were over — several veteran Justice Department officials told me that these settlements emboldened defense lawyers.

Indeed, the department now effectively outsources many of its investigations of corporate executives to outside firms, which invariably produce reports that exculpate those at the top.

Over the years, the KPMG debacle and the corporate revolt would lead the Justice Department to roll back the Thompson memo to nearly the point of reversal. Today prosecutors are prohibited from even asking companies to waive their attorney-client privilege. They are also prohibited from pushing a company to cut off the legal fees for indicted executives or pressuring it to forgo joint defense agreements.

In the decade since, the courts dulled other prosecutorial tools.

Breuer may have come with the right pedigree, but he now faced troubles that hurt as much as the debacles of Arthur Andersen and KPMG, or the retreat from the Thompson memo: austerity. The department faced periodic hiring freezes. The F.B.I., which assigned dozens of agents to Enron, had shifted resources to terrorism. The Postal Service wound down an elite unit that had specialized in complex financial investigations. President Obama’s Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, which was designed to give hundreds of millions to prosecute financial criminals, was able to deliver only $65 million in 2010 and 2011. Prosecutors reporting to Breuer proposed setting up a mortgage-fraud initiative, a “Prosecutorial Strike Force,” as one July 2009 memo put it, but the Justice Department dithered. Finally it set up the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an enormous coordinating committee with essentially no investigative operation.

American administrations were often stocked with Southerners in key positions like secretary of state, secretary of the navy and president, and they refused to take serious action against the foreign slave trade. Thus they tacitly allowed the Stars and Stripes to be used as a cover. In the absence of a treaty the British were reluctant to interfere with American shipping; only American naval ships could stop this practice, and even when they acted officers would usually detain a ship only if slaves were on board (thus ships heading to Africa, even if they were obviously slavers, were let go).

The use of the American flag ended only after the Civil War began. In 1862, with Southern politicians finally gone from national politics, the United States at last signed a treaty with the British providing for mutual right of search on the high seas, an equipment clause and joint Anglo-American joint courts (called Courts of Mixed Commission) for adjudicating detentions. The fact that those courts never heard a single case detracts not at all from their impact.

By the start of the 19th century, slavery and cotton had become essential to the continued growth of America’s economy. However, by 1820, political and economic pressure on the South placed a wedge between the North and South. The Abolitionist movement, which called for an elimination of the institution of slavery, gained influence in Congress. Tariff taxes were passed to help Northern businesses fend off foreign competition but hurt Southern consumers. By the 1850s, many Southerners believed a peaceful secession from the Union was the only path forward.

By war’s end, the Confederacy had little usable capital to continue the fight. In the conflict’s waning days, it is believed that Confederate officials stashed away millions of dollars’ worth of gold, most in Richmond, Virginia. As the Union Army entered the Confederate capital in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and millions of dollars of gold escaped to Georgia. What happened after that is disputed, the subject of many myths and legends.

Li Shimin became Emperor Taizong and reigned for many years. He expanded China’s rule westward; in time, the area claimed by the Tang reached the Caspian Sea.

Chang'an welcomed traders from Korea, Japan, Syria, Arabia, Iran, and Tibet. Li Shimin also put in place a code of law that became a model for later dynasties and even for other countries, including Japan and Korea.

This period is considered the height of the Tang Dynasty. Peace and growth continued after Li Shimin’s death in 649.

a powerful general named Li Yuan defeated his rivals; captured the capital city, Chang’an (modern-day Xi'an); and named himself emperor of the Tang Dynasty empire. He created an efficient bureaucracy

Also in the mid-750s, the Arabs attacked from the west, defeating a Tang army and gaining control of western Tang lands along with the western Silk Road route. Then the Tibetan empire attacked, taking a large northern area of China and capturing Chang’an in 763.

Although Chang’an was recaptured, these wars and land losses left the Tang Dynasty weakened and less able to maintain order throughout China.

One result was the emergence of a merchant class, which grew more powerful due to weakening of the government’s control of industry and trade. Ships loaded with merchandise to trade sailed as far as Africa and Arabia. But this did not help to strengthen the Tang government.

During the Tang Dynasty’s last 100 years, widespread famine and natural disasters, including massive floods and severe drought, led to the deaths of millions and added to the empire’s decline.

The Tang Dynasty had a major influence on the culture of Asia. This was particularly true in Japan and Korea, which adopted many of the dynasty’s religious, philosophical, architectural, fashion, and literary styles.

The auction was but a chapter, albeit a devastating chapter, in their long history extending backwards to the African continent and forward to the present. The auction block neither erased that history nor eradicated their future.

In my study of census records, birth and death certificates, I found 15 percent of the original group sold on the auction block in the historical record. I also found several of their living descendants. Some moved West or during the Great Migration of the 1920’s, moved North in an attempt to make a new life.

ass incarceration and its disproportionate effect on Black and brown populations, in particular, is a legacy of this past. From the perspective of prisoners, perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of incarceration is the separation of families.

In the 21st century, they are still making strides towards that city called Freedom. They have not reached there yet, as many of today’s sports heroes on bended knee are daring to say, but they are determined to get there on this side of heaven or the other.And as they press toward that mark, they inspire us with their gift of resilience.

“What we saw was the single largest demand event in history,” said Peter Keavey, managing director for energy products at CME Group, owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where U.S. crude futures trade.

Prices have since somewhat recovered. But those jarring moves of the spring added urgency to arguments about whether benchmarks used since the 1980s adequately reflect the modern oil market

The crash rippled through the physical market, where, for example, Saudi Arabia sets prices for exports to the U.S. using an assessment tied to futures prices.

The pricing system based on three benchmark crudes—West Texas Intermediate in the U.S., Brent in Europe and Dubai in the Middle East—has broadly stayed the same.

Crude oil comes in dozens of varieties that differ by density and sulfur content. WTI, Brent and Dubai act as reference points against which other grades are priced. They also are the basis for financial contracts that allow players in the oil market to hedge against and speculate on price swings.

That means the price of the contracts typically converges with oil prices at Cushing in the run-up to their last day of trading.

“We need to open up the benchmarks to be more reflective of global oil prices,” said Greg Newman, chief executive of U.K.-based Onyx Capital Group, which specializes in oil swaps. “How can it be accurate if you’re focusing on one tiny localized area?”

Even before coronavirus, there was growing interest in assessing the price of crude at the Gulf Coast, home to other U.S. trading hubs.

there has been a boom in U.S. oil exports since a four-decade embargo on its shipments ended in late 2015.

WTI futures show no sign of being displaced as the primary gauge of U.S. crude prices, said CME’s Mr. Keavey. “Crude-oil infrastructure in the U.S. still revolves around Cushing,” he said. “The Gulf Coast is certainly an emerging price point, but it is still a secondary benchmark.”

“Benchmarks always reflect flows,”

The proposed change was meant to reflect the growing importance of U.S. exports in global energy markets.

The changes also were due to affect contracts known as cash BFOE, which reflect the forward price of crude that doesn’t yet have a specific loading date. Making sellers responsible for freight costs in the cash BFOE market would have transformed a pillar of the North Sea’s vast and complex crude-oil market, analysts said.

The proposed changes initially sparked a big rise in the price of swaps that traders use to hedge positions in the physical market, as they sought to factor in the price of freight.

Platts signaled Wednesday that West Texas Intermediate will still be added to its Brent calculations at some point in the future.

In the UK, protesters directed their anger at the country's elite institutions of power, some such as monarchy which date back to colonialism and beyond, and the systems of class and race they perpetuate in modern-day Britain. In Bristol, southwest England, last June, activists pulled down a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, and dumped it into the harbor, igniting a national conversation on race and history in the UK.

'How many times we need to rebuild?' Well, you know what? We are going to rebuild, and rebuild, and rebuild until it is rebuilt. Because when the foundation is broken so are we,

"The British like to think of themselves as quite liberal and the British get quite offended if they are accused of racism," Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to the UK's Parliament, told CNN in an interview last year.

"It can often be thought in British society if you don't say insulting words than it's not racism," royal historian Kate Williams told CNN. "But the coverage [of Meghan] was very different -- what other women in the royal family were celebrated for Meghan was criticized for in the papers."

Meghan's entry into the royal family brought diversity and with it the possibility of change, but that institution prides itself on remaining unchanged and steeped in traditions that date back to the British empire and beyond.

Indexing has gone big, very big. For nine in 10 companies on the S&P 500, their largest single shareholder is one of the Big Three. For many, the big indexers control 20 percent or more of their shares. Index funds now control 20 to 30 percent of the American equities market, if not more.

One primary concern comes from the analysts at Bernstein: “A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active, market-led capital management.”

Passively managed investment options do not just outperform actively managed ones in terms of both better returns and lower fees. They eat their lunch.

Let’s imagine that a decade ago you invested $100 in an index fund charging a 0.04 percent fee and $100 in a traditional mutual fund charging a 1.5 percent fee. Let’s also imagine that the index fund tracked the S&P 500, and that the mutual fund ended up returning what the S&P 500 returned. Your passively invested $100 would have turned into $356.66 in 10 years. Your traditionally invested $100 would have turned into $313.37.

Actively managed investment options could make up for their higher fees with higher returns. And some do, some of the time. Yet scores of industry and academic studies stretching over decades show that trying to beat the market tends to result in lower returns than just buying the market. Only a quarter of actively managed mutual funds exceeded the returns of their passively managed cousins in the decade leading up to 2019,

What might be good for retail investors might not be good for the financial markets, public companies, or the American economy writ large, and the passive revolution’s scope has raised all sorts of hand-wringing and red-flagging. Analysts at Bernstein have called passive investing “worse than Marxism.” The investor Michael Burry, of The Big Short fame, has called it a “bubble,” and a co-head of Goldman Sachs’s investment-management division has warned about froth too. Shortly before his death in 2019, Bogle himself warned that index funds’ dominance might not “serve the national interest.”

The problem is that the public markets have been cornered by a group of investment managers small enough to fit at a lunch counter, dedicated to quiescence and inertia.

Active managers direct investment dollars to companies on the basis of those companies’ research-and-development prospects, human capital, regulatory outlook, and so on. They take new information and price it into a company’s stock when buying and selling shares.

Passive investors, by contrast, ignore annual reports and market rumors. They do nothing with trading-floor gossip. They make no attempt to research what to invest in and what to skip. Whether holding international or domestic assets, holding stocks or bonds, or using a mutual-fund structure or an ETF structure, they just mirror the market. Big U.S.-stock index funds buy big U.S. stocks just because they’re big U.S. stocks.

At least in a Soviet-type centrally planned economy, apparatchiks would be making some attempt to allocate resources efficiently.

Passive management is merely a giant phenomenon, not an all-encompassing one. Hundreds of actively managed mutual funds are still out there, as are legions of day traders, hedge funds, and private offices buying and selling and buying and selling. Stock prices still move around, sometimes dramatically, on the basis of new data and new ideas.

Still, passive investing may well be degrading the informational content of the markets, messing up price signals and making business decisions harder as a result.

When one of these commodities ends up on an index, the firms that use that commodity in their business see a 6 percent increase in costs and a 40 percent decrease in operating profits, relative to firms without exposure to the commodity, the academics found

the price fluctuations of a newly indexed stock “magically and quickly” change. A firm’s shares begin to move “more closely with its 499 new neighbors and less closely with the rest of the market. It is as if it has joined a new school of fish.”

More broadly, the Bernstein analysts, among others, worry that index-linked investing is increasing correlation, whereby the prices of stocks, bonds, and other assets move up or down or sideways together.

Their theory is that ETF trading shifts prices in subtle ways, making it harder for businesses to know when to buy their gold and copper. Corporate executives “are being influenced by what happens in the futures market, and what happens in the futures market is being influenced by ETF trading,”

A far bigger concern is that the rise of the indexers might be making American firms less competitive, through “common ownership,” in which the mega-asset managers control large stakes in multiple competitors in the same industry. The passive firms control big chunks of the airlines American, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United, for instance

The rise of common ownership might be perverting corporate behavior in weird ways, academics argue. Think about the incentives like this: Let’s imagine that you are a major shareholder in a public widget company. We’d expect you to desire—insist, even—that the company fight for market share and profits. But now imagine that you are a major shareholder in all the important widget companies. You would no longer really care which one succeeded, particularly not if one company doing better meant another company doing worse. You’d just care about the widget sector’s corporate profits, which would go up if the widget companies quit competing with one another and started raising prices to pad their bottom line.

one major paper showed that common ownership of airline stocks had the effect of raising ticket prices by 3 to 7 percent.

A separate study showed that consumers are paying higher prices for prescription medicines because generic-drug makers have less incentive to compete with the companies making name-brand drugs.

Yet another study showed that common ownership is leading retail banks to charge higher prices.

Across firms, executive compensation seems to be more closely linked to a company’s performance when its shareholders are not invested in the company’s rivals, the study found. In other words, firms stop paying managers for performance when owned by the same people who own their rivals.

The market clout of the indexers raises other questions too. The actual owners of the stocks—not the index-fund managers but the people putting money into index funds—have little say over the companies they own. Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, not Mom and Dad, vote in shareholder elections

In fact, the Big Three cast roughly 25 percent of the votes in S&P 500 companies.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the chief executive officer of State Street said he thought it was “almost inevitable, when you see this kind of concentration, that it probably will make sense to do something about it.”

But figuring out what the appropriate restrictions are depends on determining just what the problem with the indexers is—are they distorting price signals, raising the cost of consumer goods, posing financial systemic risk, or do they just have the market cornered? Then, what to do about it? Common ownership is not a problem the government is used to handling.

, thanks to the passive revolution, a broad variety and huge number of firms might have less incentive to compete. The effect on the real economy might look a lot like that of rising corporate concentration. And the two phenomena might be catalyzing one another, as index investing increases the number of mergers and makes them more lucrative.

In recent decades, the whole economy has gone on autopilot. Index-fund investment is hyperconcentrated. So is online retail. So are pharmaceuticals. So is broadband. Name an industry, and it is likely dominated by a handful of giant players. That has led to all sorts of deleterious downstream effects: suppressing workers’ wages, raising consumer prices, stifling innovation, stoking inequality, and suffocating business creation

The problem is not just the indexers. It is the public markets they reflect, where more chaos, more speculation, more risk, more innovation, and more competition are desperately needed.

But the world’s demand for spices grew throughout the Roman era and into the medieval period, defining economies from India to Europe.

This demand gave rise to some of the first truly international trade routes and shaped the structure of the world economy in a way that can still be felt today.

“This is very much the start of globalisation,” says Van Der Veen. “We see that even more significantly in the medieval period.”

But more importantly, spices became another way to define what it meant to be wealthy and powerful. This came with a profound social, emotional and economic impact in Europe

“The consequences of these trivial products – trivial in that you don't need them for nutrition – are cataclysmic,” says Paul Freedman, a historian at Yale University. “They were the first goods to have such dramatic and unanticipated consequences.” 

The process was not always smooth, particularly in terms of its cultural impact. In its early days, the spice trade led to bloodshed and conflict, as well as bringing wealth. One hard-to-ignore legacy of the spice trade is colonialism,

The search for a direct route – i.e. no middlemen – to find the source of spices stimulated European voyages that turned into colonial conquests

American adults say they're drinking 14% more often during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report in the journal JAMA Network Open. The increase in frequency of drinking for women was more pronounced, up 17% compared to last year.

Stores sold 54% more alcohol in late March compared the year prior, according to Nielsen.

"Alcohol compromises the body's immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes," the WHO stated. "Therefore, people should minimize their alcohol consumption at any time, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Two weeks after the killing of George Floyd, crowds inspired by Black Lives Matter protests in America marched to the statue of a slave trader named Edward Colston in the center of the English port city of Bristol. They wrapped ropes around the neck of the bronze effigy, pulled it to the pavement, rolled and dragged it through the streets, and then pushed it into the harbor.

Colston was Bristol's biggest philanthropist. His name adorned the city's concert hall, an office tower, as well as schools and streets. The plaque beneath the statue, which was erected in 1895, called him "one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of Bristol. What it failed to mention – and what angered the protesters – is that Colston made much of his fortune with the Royal African Company, which shipped tens of thousands of enslaved people across the Atlantic to work on plantations during Colston's tenure. An estimated one in five people died during the crossing.

A reader poll in the Bristol Post found about 60% of respondents backed protesters pulling down the statue, while around 40% thought it shouldn't have been toppled.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who has lived in Washington and Philadelphia, has had his own unnerving experiences with American police. He said he was flabbergasted when a cop in the U.S. once threatened to arrest him for jaywalking

After that, Rees says, he changed the way he dealt with police in the U.S. When asking for directions in New York City one day, he made sure to speak as he took care to approach an officer from the front.

Some white residents were doubly angry. They were still mad that the Colston statue had been pulled down illegally and that another statue had gone up without government authorization or public input.

"I think it's beautiful," Aidid said. "It stands for so much that Bristol has needed. When I walked past here today, I finally felt like it's not a direct insult to my humanity, to my life."

The next morning, government workers unbolted the statue and took it down, leaving the pedestal empty, once again.

In July, a London sculptor had his own statue hoisted up on the pedestal. It depicted a Black female protester holding her fist up in a Black power salute.

One of the book’s authors, Neil Howe, 71, has become a frequent podcast guest. A follow-up, “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” comes out this month.

The book’s outlook on the near future has made it appealing to macro traders and crypto enthusiasts, and it is frequently cited on the podcasts “Macro Voices,” “Wealthion” and “On the Margin.”

He described it as “this almost fun theory about history,” but added: “And yet there’s something deeply menacing about it.”

Mr. Arbery, who said he does not subscribe to the theory, sees parallels between the fourth turning and other nonscientific beliefs. “I modeled the way that Teresa talks about the fourth turning on the way that young liberals talk about astrology,” he said.

The play’s author, Will Arbery, 33, said he heard about “The Fourth Turning” while researching Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing firebrand and former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, who is a longtime fan of the book and directed a 2010 documentary based on its ideas.

“I’ve read ‘The Fourth Turning,’ and indeed found it useful from a macroeconomic investing perspective,” Lyn Alden, 35, an investment analyst, wrote in an email. “History doesn’t repeat, but it kind of gives us a loose framework to work with.”

“The Fourth Turning” captured a mood of decline in recent American life. “I remember feeling safe in the ’90s, and then as soon as 9/11 hit, the world went topsy-turvy,” he said. “Every time my cohort got to the point where we were optimistic, another crisis happened. When I read the book, I was like, ‘That makes sense.’”

“The Fourth Turning” was conceived during a period of relative calm. In the late 1980s, Mr. Howe, a Washington, D.C., policy analyst, teamed with William Strauss, a founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.

Their first book, “Generations,” told a story of American history through generational profiles going back to the 1600s. The book was said to have influenced Bill Clinton to choose a fellow baby boomer, Al Gore, as his running mate

when the 2008 financial crisis hit at almost exactly the point when the start of the fourth turning was predicted, it seemed to many that the authors might have been onto something. Recent events — the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol — have seemingly provided more evidence for the book’s fans.

Historically, a fourth turning crisis has always translated into a civil war, a war of great nations, or both, according to the book. Either is possible over the next decade, Mr. Howe said. But he is a doomsayer with an optimistic streak: Each fourth turning, in his telling, kicks off a renaissance in civic life.

In the new book, he describes what a coming civil war or geopolitical conflict might look like — though he shies away from casting himself as a modern-day Nostradamus.

“This big tidal shift is arriving,” Mr. Howe said. “But if you’re asking me which wave is going to knock down the lighthouse, I can’t do that. I can just tell you that this is the time period. It gives you a good idea of what to watch for.”

— what exactly was the meme?

Cryptocurrency is little more than a decade old, and yet it has passed through several reputational phases: first, as the lawless province of black marketeers and hard-core libertarians obsessed with escaping government oversight; then as a speculative market in which many of those people made an astonishing and enviable amount of money; then as an investment sector for adventurous normies who might previously have turned to simple day-trading; then as an “asset class” eyed by big-money investors and establishment banks

it was very tempting to believe, and nobody was trying to look all that closely, it turns out — not the editors who put him on the covers of Forbes and Fortune; not the traders who trusted him with billions in daily trading volume; not the recipients of his philanthropic pledges, many of which will now go unfulfilled; and most conspicuously, not the investors who handed him millions without seeming to even bother checking the books.

To investors and legislators, he looked like the potential face of a new era for crypto, poised to legitimize through transparency and regulation what had always been an enormously shady, if often quite lucrative, sector.

To progressives, he looked like our kind of oligarch, a sort of boy wonder who seemed capable of conjuring up world-changing billions guiltlessly, effectively out of thin air.

And he had promised to give that magic internet money away just as quickly

It was part of his DGAF brand, like the unkempt hair and cargo shorts he wore onstage alongside Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

As recently as July 2021, FTX raised $900 million from, among others, Sequoia Capital, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and SoftBank Vision Fund, which had previously written down billions of dollars in investments in Uber and WeWork. In January, a Series C round raised an additional $400 million.

In a now-legendary profile published on the Sequoia website just weeks before the collapse, almost every paragraph contained what should have been a red flag but was presented instead as a mark of Bankman-Fried’s special genius — and Sequoia’s, for endorsing it

The death of FTX has been called crypto’s “Lehman moment,” but it was not the first such collapse — it follows the implosions of Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Terra and Luna, among many others. But it’s fitting that Bankman-Fried will now always be remembered as this crypto crash’s central figure, because he postured as someone who could rewrite not just the rules of the financial system but its morality as well.

Now the comparisons are less flattering: to Bernie Madoff, of course, and to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, even though Bankman-Fried has not been charged with any crimes; also to Adam Neumann of WeWork, Travis Kalanick of Uber and the other iconic start-up hucksters of this strange venture-capital era.

those founders were, for all their delusions and sociopathy, pitch-deck visionaries — persuasive proselytizers for not just new products but whole new worlds that could be simply invested into being.

In his self-presentation, Bankman-Fried seemed to be pitching something else: an outward indifference approaching disdain. His serious-seeming commitment to effective altruism underlined the impression: If he was earning his billions only to donate them, he represented a very different case study in the morality or moral potential of unregulated markets

he flatly described the crypto markets as pointless speculation bordering on fraud — one of the interviewers paraphrased Bankman-Fried’s summary as “I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good” — it wasn’t a misstep

What stage of capitalism is this?

in the world of big money he was a genuinely new archetype: a smugly superior Gen X slacker and an entitled, world-changing millennial at once

it has also been the source of a lot of reflection and debate, about whether it had been at all reasonable to treat what made him distinct as a basis for lionization.

He said in the Sequoia profile, for instance, that no book was ever really worth reading, and he told the economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that faced with a coin-flip game in which half the time he’d double the value of the world and half the time he’d destroy it, he’d choose to play again and again

he revealed himself to be wasn’t a singular bad actor but a representative one. Blockchain technology may well offer meaningful uses for the wider world in the future, but as of now, it is most significant as the basis for a realm of pure and unregulated speculation.

The volatility was not some deep secret only now revealed. It’s an almost inescapable aspect of a financial subculture erected outside the oversight and control of the law on the principle that they weren’t necessary

The world’s second-largest crypto exchange has gone belly-up, but the crypto market as a whole is down by only about 20 percent. For many speculators, it seems, collapses like these were already priced in.

Naturally, Gen Z has picked up on them too, and the mockery that was once reserved for Boomers is now coming for me. “The way the quintessential Millennial behaves online is basically a bunch of silly little nuances strung together to create a personality that is very giddy and excitable about the normal or mundane,” Michael Stevens, a 24-year-old TikTok creator based in New England, told me

Those “silly little nuances” include starting videos with a sigh, doing dramatic zooms into their own faces for emphasis, and using phrases popularized on Twitter and Tumblr—like “doggo” and “I can’t even”—in real life. “My husband just went to the new Trader Joe’s next to our house and I think it wins the internet for the day,” Stevens says in a Millennial parody from July. “If this is adulting, sign me up.”

Now that Gen Z has all the attention, the internet quirks that Millennials have called their own for years can feel a bit stale, if not downright cringey.

Millennials take Instagram way too seriously, using portrait mode and filling their captions with forced puns.

They love to turn their social-media bios into lists—for instance, mine would read: “Kate. Ravenclaw. Cat mom. Knitting enthusiast. PA > OH > NYC.”

Although Boomers fell out of the internet zeitgeist, they never had as far to fall as Millennials—the first cohort to watch their youth fade in real time, with evidence of their growing irrelevance meticulously documented in memes, trends, and headlines published on the very internet they once reigned over.

They’re no longer the hot new item brands are scrambling to attract, nor the ones the world is turning to for the next fashion trend. The internet has moved on, and Millennials can either adapt or, like a Gen Xer still listening to Pearl Jam, not care if their choices make them seem old.

Melissa Carrion, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the rhetoric of health and medicine, spoke to 50 mothers who had refused one or more vaccines for their children for a study published in 2017.“Across the board, every single one of them gave some variation of the advice that a mother ‘should do her own research,’” she said in a phone interview. “It was this kind of worldview that was less about the result of the research than the individual process of doing it themselves.”

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies. There is some recent institutional interest. But nobody’s been around very long, which makes the idea of “researching” your way to prosperity feel more credible.

Cryptocurrency trading, in contrast to medicine, might represent DYOR in pure no-expert form. Virtually everyone is operating in a beginners’ bubble, whether they’re worried about it or not, betting with and against one another, in hopes of making money.

ere, so-called research materials are often limited to a white paper, marketing materials and testimonials, the “due diligence” posts of others, the reputations of a currency’s creators and the general sentiment of other possible buyers. Will they buy-in, too? Will we take this coin to the moon?In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.

A year ago, Luna boosters (and a few skeptics) in online forums offered the same advice to gathered audiences of potential buyers reading their posts, looking for tips: just DYOR. Thousands invested in both Luna and TerraUSD. The price of Luna climbed from around $5 to over $100. After the crash, at least one Reddit user suggested that the situation highlighted the “limit” of DYOR; the coin’s price had fallen to nearly zero.

All of them are driven by different things, but I break it down into five major crises happening, any one of them on their own would actually be considered large. The five combined are truly unprecedented.

Your second is climate. Wheat growing regions of the world are facing the worst drought they’ve ever faced combined for the last 20 years. And so climate shocks just keep getting in the way of production and productivity. Think of those two things as sort of inputs.

The fourth is record low inventories of grains in general. If you look at government agency estimates, we have about 33% of annual consumption needs sitting in inventory around the world. We just need to move it around. Our data tells us that that number is closer to 20%, which is only 10 weeks of global inventory left. And that’s a really big deal.

If the war ends, that is better than where we’re sitting today. But there’s also a lot of infrastructure that’s been destroyed during the war. So you have to rebuild that and it’s not like you go back to the volumes you are at right away.

Climate disruption leads to a lack of predictability and stability of our food supplies. It just throws my mind off when last year we were writing about how North Dakota was suffering from a record drought and so its corn and soybean yields were going to drop and they did— by like, 24%. This week we’re writing about how it’s too wet there and farmers can’t plant. That’s climate change, this lack of predictability, this lack of stability itself that makes our food systems very, very fragile.

So, we are a private company, but we work with financial institutions, we work with very big and very small companies. We also work with governments to help them think about food security. I started Gro to avoid something like this. I wish people would have paid attention to us when we were ringing alarm bells in 2017. Because it’s always about preventative medicine versus ending up in the ER.

Re-examining what trading in agriculture looks like is a very big part of it. There’s no version of a country that actually has any and all natural resources it needs in one place. You can’t grow everything you need in a country. You actually need the world to function in a particular way, but the world became more isolationist in the last five years—not more connected—as politics and policy came into play. And so that itself has damaged diversification of trading partnerships.

And if you looked at domestic prices in that country, and you look at it in all the different cities, prices weren’t going up, they were going down, which is not a signal for when you’re short of anything. So we put that together and the ban was removed.

You’ll see it manifests itself in many, many different ways. I keep seeing headlines of Netflix losing subscribers. Netflix is losing subscribers because the average price of a grocery basket in America is two times the price it was in April 2020. Something’s gonna give—you’re going to buy fewer shoes—and that’s why I said it will manifest itself in completely unrelated industries as well.

Nobody. There are countries who are net exporters who are obviously making more money. American farmers are certainly making more money as a result of it. Is America as a country benefiting? Absolutely not, because the economic shocks are global. We live in a very globally intertwined financial system, period.

Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.

Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.

The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature

The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.

Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.

By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.

In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.

Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.

owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.

Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.

When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.

At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl

In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.

Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.

In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.

In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.

​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.

Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.

An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”

Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”

SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.

One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed

To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.

A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019

More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.

Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections

investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.

Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.

No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals

In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic

Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.