The Sunday Drive - 04/16/2023 Edition

Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur

Apr 16, 2023

👋🏻 Hello friends,

Welcome to the 53rd edition of the Sunday Drive. Happy Anniversary! I can’t believe a whole year has passed since we began… and boy, what a year it’s been.

Let's take it easy and enjoy a leisurely Sunday Drive around the internet.

Vibin'

New Wave music was never really my thing as a teenager, being more the guitar band sort of fan. But… I was always impressed with the creative minimalism that The Cars brought to their songs. This week I’m vibin’ to Moving in Stereo from their 1978 self-titled debut album… and it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the swimming pool scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 😉

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💭 Quote of the Week‌

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty." - Winston Churchill

💭 Bonus Quote of the Week‌

“Never bet against optimism. It always wins.” - The Dragon Slayer

📈 Charts of the Week

Note the growth in Non-Bank Financial Intermediary (NBFI) assets. If there’s a place where the Federal Reserve Bank’s epic interest tightening cycle could break things, it might very well be the “Shadow Banking System”.

🚙 Interesting Drive-By's

🤔 Steve Jobs’ Legacy for Builders - Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

😁 What Makes You Happy - The richest you’ll probably ever feel is when you get your first paycheck, and your bank account goes from $5 to, perhaps, $500. The contrast that generates might be greater than going from $10 million to $20 million. Going from nothing to something is so much more powerful than going from a lot to super a lot.

🙏🏻 Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk - Focusing wasn’t much easier in the time before electricity or on-demand TV. In fact, you probably have a lot in common with these super-distracted monks.

📈 OpenAI: the Next Tech Giant? - It’s pretty rare for a company to transition from a research lab to a developer infrastructure provider to a behemoth consumer app in just a few years. But given the launch of ChatGPT plugins last week, there’s a fair chance this could end up being the story of OpenAI.

🧐 Life Expectancy and Inequality - America is seeing the greatest gap in life expectancy across regions in the last 40 years.

📞 Weekly Call 2 Action

Given how the calendar works out this tax year, TAX DAY is Tuesday, April 18th - not April 15th (aka “Yesterday”). So if you haven’t finished your taxes yet, you can think of this year’s deadline as a sort of “Daylight Savings Time for Taxes”.

👋🏼 Parting Thought

If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em at me.

‌I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...

Your faithful financial provocateur,

-Mike‌

If you enjoy the Sunday Drive, I'd be honored if you'd share it with others.‌‌

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