The Sunday Drive - 04/16/2023 Edition
Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur
👋🏻 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. 😉
💭 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.
If this was forwarded to you, please subscribe and join the other geniuses who are reading this newsletter.