Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Welcome to the third edition of Nuggies, an email newsletter that aggregates articles and commentary on business, economics, startups, and more, in bite-sized nuggets sent right to your email twice a week. Created by and for college students.
Our quote of the week comes from Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”
This Week’s Articles:
How Hong Kong is beating the Coronavirus, Zeynep Tufekci
If you don’t read anything else this week, read this article. Hong Kong has been known for its protesting over the last year, but the story of how this protesting resulted in Hong Kong beating Corona so successfully is nothing short of inspiring. This article explores how the China-backed government of Hong Kong completely fumbled their Coronavirus response (similar to our executive branch), but how regular Hong Kong citizens stepped up to fill the leadership void. Networks, resources, and mobilization techniques mastered during Hong Kong’s protests were quickly repurposed to address the spread of the Coronavirus. It worked, as Hong Kong, a nation of 7.4 million people, have had only four total Coronavirus deaths.
Read it here
Hostess Twinkies to Get a Boost With More Americans Taking Road Trips, Max Reyes
This quick article covers what feels like the mea culpa of the bored financial analyst. Bill Chappell, analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc. takes an optimistic tone on Hostess ($TWNK), because he believes that more people will travel by car instead of air, and in turn will be buying Twinkies for the road. While this may feel like a stretch, it does seem like a fitting analyst call for a market that won’t stop for a pandemic, sky high unemployment, or riots across America.
Read about it here
SoftBank $100 Million Fund to Back Firms Led by People of Color, Amy Thompson
SoftBank, the giant Japanese conglomerate known for is known for telecoms, robotics, and its “Vision Fund” venture capital fund. The Vision Fund is well known for splashy investments at HUGE private valuations, such as their investments in WeWork and Uber. This article, however, brings attention to a new SoftBank fund, one that will fund minority founders who face “systemic disadvantages in building and scaling their businesses.” Venture capital (VC) is a notoriously white space, with only 1.9% of VC-backed founders in 2017 being Latinx and 1% being black. In a time where racial injustice is on the forefront of the national dialogue, it is nice to see a huge corporation set an example by doing more than just posting a statement on Twitter.
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:
Some more of Nuggies favorite Twitter accounts:
@hipster_trader @dougboneparth @ianbremmer @naval
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
Here is a graph that charts the Rise of the Dow Jones from mid-March to June against significant socio-economic events. While this just only shows one side, and is a bit satirical, it’s a good visualization of the market which just cannot seem to stop going up.
This Week’s Question:
What could be the source of the problem (and beginning of the solution) to economic inequality in the United States?
What are we listening to this week?:
Kendrick Lamar’s third album, To Pimp a Butterfly, is simply a masterpiece. No comment needed.
Thank you for reading! Nuggies is created by Thomas Pero and Spencer Koehl, two undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame.
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