Zerohedge Blog Total federal interest expenses should rise by approximately $226 billion over the next twelve months to over $1.15 trillion. For context, from the second quarter of 2010 to the end of 2021, when interest rates were near zero, the interest expense rose by $240 billion in aggregate. More stunningly, the interest expense has increased more in the last three years than in the fifty years prior.
10. Forget college admissions — some parents are shelling out up to $4,000 just to get their daughters into sororities
Meanwhile here is the Ukraine Sorority
There’s an admissions coach for everything these days.Kwan Wei Kevin Tan
Jul 25, 2023, 5:17 AM EDT
Some parents are shelling out up to $4,000 to get their daughters into sororities, per The WSJ.
A sorority consultant said admissions are just as competitive as those for top colleges.
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If you thought getting your kid into a top college was going to be your last big admissions challenge, think again.
Some parents are shelling out up to $4,000 just to get their daughters into their dream sororities, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal published Monday.
The Journal spoke to several sorority consultants who offer admissions advice and coaching services to aspiring members. These consultants coach aspiring sorority members on what to wear, how to behave, and how to manage their social media presence.
Stacia Damron, the founder of the sorority-consulting company Hiking in Heels, told The Journal that sorority admissions are just as competitive as those for top colleges.
“My boyfriend went to Stanford, and he said this is more complicated than getting a Stanford M.B.A.,” Damron said.
Damron told The Journal that her fees go up to $4,000 for an on-call service during peak recruitment periods. According to the Hiking in Heels website, as of 2022, a premium package cost $1,495 while an elite membership cost $2,975. Her 2023 rates are not currently available on the site.
Sorority recruitment, also known as a sorority rush, typically starts in the fallsemester, though some college sororities recruit in the springsemester as well. And sorority consultants like Damron have been seeing increased demand from aspiring members.
“The demand for help preparing for sorority recruitment has dramatically increased since 2019,” Damron told Insider.
Damron said there were two key reasons for the increase in demand.
Firstly, sororities have beefed up the selection process during the COVID pandemic, throwing in extra tasks such as recorded video assignments and essay questions to make up for the lack of in-person interaction. This was on top of traditional requirements such as recommendation letters and registration forms, Damron said.
Secondly, parents and their daughters are learning more about the recruitment process and just how competitive it is from TikTok videos.
“The information is more accessible, and potential new members and parents are learning that there’s more to the process and that preparation begins months earlier,” Damron said.
But hiring a consultant isn’t a guarantee that clients will get into their dream sororities. Dani Weatherford, the chief executive of the National Panhellenic Conference, told The Journal that out of the 125,000 sorority applicants last year, 20% to 25% got rejected or withdrew their applications.
“Much like an SAT prep class can’t guarantee a perfect score, there’s no recruitment coach that’s truthfully able to guarantee or promise a bid. The decision ultimately remains with the sororities,” Damron told Insider.
5. Nasdaq 100 Free Cash Flow Yield is the Lowest in 20 Years
Bloomberg by Ryan VlastelicaThe Nasdaq 100 Index closed with a free cash flow yield of 2.41% on Monday, near its lowest level in more than 20 years, and down from a 2022 peak of nearly 4.2%. The drop in this metric comes amid a gain of more than 40% in the tech-heavy benchmark this year.
About a decade ago, Google launched an initiative to determine what makes the perfect team.
“Code-named Project Aristotle—a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,’” according to re:Work, the initiative studied 180 teams company-wide to determine why some succeeded and others floundered.
It wasn’t easy. A data-driven company to its core, Google researchers initially struggled to find connections between the teams that were thriving. Some of the best teams were full of friends who saw one another outside of work; others, The New York Times reported, “were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room.”
Over the course of several years, unexpected findings emerged from Project Aristotle. The best teams didn’t have the smartest people or even the hardest workers—among other characteristics, such as dependability and clear goals, they were teams where members listened to one another, respected each other and felt safe to take risks. They were teams where everyone felt “psychologically safe.” In other words? They were teams where members had a high emotional intelligence.
The importance of emotional intelligence at work
Emotional intelligence, also known as EQ or emotional quotient, is just what it sounds like: the ability to understand and manage your emotions, and the emotions of people around you.
“The simple way to think about emotional intelligence is being smarter with feelings,” Joshua Freedman, co-founder and CEO of the EQ network Six Seconds, explains. Everyone has feelings, of course—emotional intelligence is about accessing and interpreting those feelings. “We can be smarter and say, ‘Alright, let me assess and understand this,’” Freedman says. “‘Let me accurately get this data. And use this data to help me solve problems.’”
In the workplace, a high EQ is more important in some roles than others. Victoria Neal, an HR knowledge adviser with the Society for Human Resource Management, says it’s especially necessary in management and leadership roles. “Who do you want to work for? Do you want to work for a manager that treats you compassionately, who listens to your ideas, values you as a coworker and colleague?” she asks, rhetorically. It’s a no-brainer—of course people prefer to work with someone who cares about them, takes their feelings into account and manages their own emotions rather than resorting to yelling or finger-pointing.
But it’s also important in other interpersonal roles where teamwork, communication and group problem-solving are key. “Essentially, the more relational and emotional complexity a role has, the more you need emotional intelligence,” Freedman says. Positions in sales, for example, require a high level of self-motivation and resilience, and there’s an important relational aspect to the work, since those in sales need to interact and connect with people. Similarly, Freedman says that if you’re managing people remotely, or trying to instigate or support change, those roles require more emotional work and therefore higher EQ.
Many of the issues we may run into in the workplace, both day-to-day and long-term, are, at their core, emotional: motivating ourselves and others, collaborating across boundaries, approaching and solving problems we haven’t solved before, fostering innovation, connecting with customers, etc. “And what we know from research is that… the more of these skills people bring to the workplace, the more effective they are individually, the better teams perform and, particularly for managers, the greater engagement and performance they create in their teams,” Freedman says.
How to determine emotional intelligence during the hiring interview
While these skills can be taught—“we have a lot of evidence that shows that,” Freedman notes—not all organizations may have the resources to take that on. That makes it important to hire employees who already have strong emotional intelligence.
So how do you make finding these workers a key part of your hiring process?
Freedman says it starts with the job description, where you should be thinking about how emotional intelligence fits into your organization, your culture and the specific role. “I think that’s really important in terms of who you’re attracting to begin with,” he says.
Ask behavioral questions
During the interviewing process, Neal recommends asking behavioral interview questions such as, “What do you think makes an ideal coworker?” or “Tell me about a time you were challenged at work, and how you overcame it.” She encourages interviewers to ask tough questions about failure, rejection and conflict—ask about a time a project failed, for example, or when a team member wasn’t doing their part. How did they handle it? Do they own their weaknesses?
“If something bad happens—that’s not really what they’re evaluating somebody on,” Neal says. Instead, you want them to talk about the next step after that: Okay, this went badly, so how did they fix it? “Make it behavioral, make it open-ended and then really delve in there and ask follow-up questions,” she continues.
Assign an EQ assessment
In addition to the interview, Freedman recommends having prospective employees take an EQ assessment. “You absolutely can ask questions about the kind of emotional domain—things like resilience and optimism, and situations you may have found emotionally challenging or stressful, and listen for how candidates respond to that,” Freedman says. “And you’re not going to be as accurate as an assessment.”
Incorporate EQ in your talent strategy and company culture
Freedman also encourages companies to think about emotional intelligence in the whole process of their talent pathway, not just at the interview stage. “If you really want the benefits, selection is a great step—and it should be part of the larger talent strategy,” he says. It’s something to consider across the spectrum of talent at your organization, from who you’re recruiting and how you do your selection all the way up to how you build your culture and assess performance.
Neal agrees: Getting the most out of EQ requires a holistic approach. Yes, it’s great to focus on EQ in new candidates. But if you hire someone with a high EQ who’s then being managed by someone with a lower EQ… well, you can start to see how conflicts might emerge, and you might find yourself interviewing new people for the position you just filled.
She encourages hiring managers to not be dazzled by the technical skills and work experience of a potential employee—or at least, not to be so dazzled by those factors that they ignore the importance of EQ. Because, sure, maybe that candidate is incredible at what they do. But if they’re driving your team away, or they can’t maintain a team or deal with colleagues, you’ll have to contend with financial and cultural costs associated with constantly changing team members and dealing with workplace conflict issues.
“Your leadership needs to guide people; your senior leadership needs to establish the culture within the company,” Neal says. “If the culture isn’t collaborative or inclusive, and you get the opposite… you’re not going to get your best out of people, and people aren’t going to want to stay. That’s where you start getting the revolving door, as a hiring manager.”
Make emotional intelligence part of your core strategy
Luckily, you don’t have to do it all at once. The important thing is that you make a concerted, company-wide, continued effort to emphasize emotional intelligence. “A lot of organizations think, ‘Oh, we should do something on emotional intelligence,’ and they kind of treat it like a checked box,” Freedman says. “If you want the value, really look at the business case for your organization and get aligned on: How is this part of your competitive advantage? How is this part of your value creation?”
“We’re not just saying, ‘This is something we should add into the mix,’” he adds. “This is part of the core strategy of how we protect ourselves, stand out in the marketplace and deliver value to our stakeholders.”
Neal notes that there are roles out there for people who may have a lower emotional intelligence. “Culturally, EQ is really important, but I think there [are] jobs where it is not as critical as, say, leadership roles or team roles,” she says. These positions tend to be more individual or independent; roles where there’s less need to interact with others. Engineering, computer science, product testing, data entry—depending on the specific requirements of the job, all of these fields (and plenty more) can work just fine for employees with a lower EQ.
And if you’re reading this as a candidate and wondering if you can work on your EQ, Freedman says the answer is: “Absolutely.”
“I think taking your own emotional intelligence assessment, really looking at where you are in these capabilities and setting your own growth plan in place, is probably a good idea as you’re thinking about your career progression,” he says. “We see that there’s a pretty strong correlation between emotional intelligence and career level, so if you want to become a senior manager, this is going to be really important stuff.”
1. American Resilience ….We are Creating a Record Number of Businesses
Torsten Slok Apollo About 450,000 new businesses have opened every month since the onset of covid-19, which is 50% higher than in 2019, when the number of new businesses opening every month was 300,000, see the first chart below.
The main sectors with significant growth in the number of firms are retail trade, professional services, and construction, see the second chart. Within the retail sector, online shopping accounted for 70 percent of all applications in 2020.
The bottom line is that the US economy was already the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world, and the level of entrepreneurship and innovation has increased further during the pandemic.
2. Private Equity is Buying a Record Amount of Small Founder Owned Businesses
Top Down Charts ‘Tis the Season to be Volly: Indeed, the seasonal tendency is for higher volatility around this time of the year; climaxing around October. With sentiment increasingly frothy, valuations back to expensive levels, and still murky macro, the path higher may not be as smooth or simple as it seems.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that NBA stars are now more likely to take home $30 million+ pay packets than CEOs at S&P 500 companies. A recent YouGov survey, however, found that the American public doesn’t think either party is particularly deserving of the money they’re currently netting.
Indeed, pro athletes actually drew level with politicians — senators and representatives take home at least $174,000 a year in compensation — in the rankings for the most overpaid positions in the US, with a whopping 78% of respondents saying the professions are “very or somewhat overpaid”. CEOs can rest easy knowing only 76% of people think the same about them.
Poll positions
The YouGov poll asked 3,000 Americans to rank 30 professions on 3 criteria: the occupations’ impact, the perceived happiness of those working the job, and how overpaid/underpaid they think the vocation is. Interestingly, four of the top five “overpaid” positions also appeared in another unflattering tier, with lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs, and politicians all top occupations that Americans deem to have a “very or somewhat negative impact”.
On the other hand, the opposite end of the pay scale was a completely different story. Indeed, the “most underpaid” profession, farming, was ranked as the occupation with the most positive impact on society. 68% of Americans think farmers are “very or somewhat underpaid” — a matched proportion said the same of restaurant workers.
Go deeper: Explore how all 30 professions perform on the different metrics here.
As we age, we lose people and bodily functions, but we’re happier.
KEY POINTS
Older people are happier than middle-aged and younger people.
Anxiety, depression, and anger decrease with advancing age.
Old people are a reservoir of wisdom and experience and make a valuable contribution to the workforce.
As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change.
It’s counterintuitive that old people can be happier. As we move closer to death, we become invisible and are considered a drain on the economy.
When I turned 60, all I saw ahead of me was decline. Then I met a man who said, “I’m 82 and this is the best time in my life.” I wondered, What does he know that I needed to learn?
Laura Carstenson studies aging and happiness. She found older people are happier than middle-aged and younger people.1 Many researchers have replicated her findings.
Changing demographics
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, since 2010 the 65-and-older population has increased by 34 percent.2It reported that over the last decade, the growth of the “non-working-age, dependent” population has outpaced the growth of the working-age population.
I object to the characterization of this population as “non-working” and “dependent.” Adults aged 65 and older are twice as likely to be working today compared with 1985. Many of them are making good money.3More than 20 percent of adults over age 65 are either working or looking for work. The Census Bureau paints a picture of a smaller group of young people caring for helpless old people. Politicians have taken note as they threaten to raise the age for Social Security.
Old people are a reservoir ofwisdomand experience. They may work at a slower pace but they are a valuable contribution to the workforce. Old people are a resource that can solve some of the problems of workforce shortage.
An encore job gives life meaning. I’m now 80 years old and I work. Work gives my life meaning. Iwrote two booksafter I turned 65. I amnotdependent! Of course, how mucheducationwe have and what type of work we do shapes our being able to work past the traditionalretirementage.
The paradox of aging
In the 1980s, society considered old age pathological, thatdepression,anxiety, and the loss of cognitive function andmemorywere inevitable consequences of aging.
Americans worship youth and spend billions of dollars annually in the pursuit of youth. We’re told:To avoid a descent into despair, buy this product.
The paradox of aging4is that even though people’s physical health and functions decline in later adulthood, happiness does not. Many studies show that depression, anxietystress, worry, andangeralldecreasewith advancing age.
Recognizing we won’t live forever changes our perspective in positive ways.
Mental health improves with age
Aging is not a disease;dementiais. Unfortunately,dementiaandagingare often used interchangeably. Dementia is not an inevitable consequence of aging. It is ominous to consider 10 percent of the aging population has dementia. But it looks much different when we acknowledge that 90 percent of the elderly are not demented.
Old people process information more slowly. This can frustrate the older person and cause them and their loved ones to worry about dementia. But a longer response time decreases impulsivity; we have more time to think through the problem and give a considered response.
Chronological age is just a number. We have a physical age, a psychological age, and asexualage. They vary from individual to individual and from time to time.
As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and ourgoalschange. Older people direct their cognitive resources to positive information more than to negative.
I learned from that 82-year-old man that we can either measure or experience time. I was always busy, and in America, being busy is a badge of honor. I rushed from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting.
Then, I recognized the oppressive power of ambition. I began to think,“Do I want to spend the rest of my life the way I’ve lived the first part?”My priorities changed as I moved closer to death.
Time still carries a sense of urgency, but the urgency of time has been transformed. I no longer see time as an endless series of appointments moving from one goal to the next. Now the urgency is to experience every moment and not waste the time that remains.
Perceiving the future
Younger people focus more on goals linked to learning,careerplanning, and new social relationships that may pay off in the future. As a young person, I felt no constraints on my time.
Every day, things happen to remind me of my mortality, and they seem to come at me with increasing frequency. As I grew older, I began to focus myattentionon the positive aspects of my world. My goals shifted to ones that have emotional meaning. I live in the moment and let the future take care of itself.
I focus more on current and emotionally important relationships. I work, but only where and when I choose to. I decided never to sit through aboringlecture and never to go to cocktail parties to network. I would neverwear a necktiebecause I refused to do what others expected of me.
I didn’t worry about dying but only how I would die. I wanted to avoid a lingering death, and I discussed that with my family and my doctor.
Mysocial networkshrank, but I pursued the most important relationships. I began to savor life, ignore trivial matters, appreciate others more, and found it easier to forgive. The more I did this, the happier I felt.
I experienced losses, but I became more comfortable with the sadness. Life became more than a series of painful events. I experience more joy, happiness, and satisfaction.
I no longer believethere’s always tomorrow. I have no promise of a tomorrow, so I’m going to make the best I can of today. I will let the future surprise me; it will unfold as it will.
Start thinking like an old person
Do you value being busy more than an adventure or spending time with your family? If you’re still years away from retirement, don’t wait until you’re 65 to experience the urgency of time. Why spend 30 to 40 years in retirement? Borrow time from our retirement years while you’re young.
Get off the treadmill now. Be happy like old people.
3. Top 10 Weighted Stocks Market Cap vs. Earnings Contribution
Callum Thomas This is a very interesting juxtaposition, and similar to a chart I shared recently, it shows the market cap weighting of the 10 largest stocks… vs the earnings contribution of the same group. Seems they’re not really pulling their weight.
7. Commercial real estate is poised to take a $800 billion hit from remote work-Quartz
Offices need to adjust to the new reality of remote and hybrid work—or risk bigger losses for their cities.Clarisa Diazand Gabriela Riccardi
This week, a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute looks at how remote and hybrid work are changing real estate in the world’s biggest urban centers. Their projection: In nine global cities, remote work is poised to wipe out up to $800 billion of office value by 2030. And that’s just the moderate projection.
Chartr.com Scaling up Prescriptions for Ozempic, which is still technically only approved as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, have soared in recent years as word continues to spread about the drug and its reported pound-shifting properties. Indeed, at the start of 2018, US Ozempic prescriptions weren’t even breaking the 100 mark — by 2020, there were over 100,000 a week. That figure has risen even higher since, making it the most prescribed diabetes drug in America by some distance, with doctors increasingly prescribing Ozempic “off-label” — that is for a different purpose from what the medication is explicitly intended for.
And Ozempic isn’t the only diabetes drug that’s seen a surge in demand. Novo-produced Rybelsushas also soared, as has Mounjaro, which is one of the fastest-rising diabetes treatments, and being tipped by some doctors as the most powerful on the market in terms of weight loss credentials. Developers Eli Lillyare looking to get FDA approval of the drug for that purpose by the end of 2023.
It’s been a little over a month since the “Debt Ceiling” was suspended. What has transpired since? A borrowing binge for the ages, with National Debt increasing by over $1 trillion.
To say that the government is spending money like a “drunken sailor” would be an insult to drunken sailors who at least a) were spending their own money and b) quit when they ran out of funds.
Not so for the US government, which continues to borrow from the future to spend more money today. In June, federal budget deficit rose to $2.25 trillion, its highest level since 17 months.
10. Do Hard Things if You Want an Easy Life-Darius Foroux
The other day my mom told me about a family member who had a flat tire on her bike. This relative doesn’t live an easy life.
She had a doctor’s appointment and when she pulled out her bike to go there, she discovered the flat. She doesn’t have a car. So she ended up walking to the doctor’s office. To make it worse, it also started to rain after a few minutes into her walk.
She barely made it. I thought, “Man, I’m lucky. I have an easy life.” But then I also thought, “I did a lot of hard things to get here.”
I remember the days of not having much. When I was 17, I had a full-time job during the entire summer at a call center. One day I was cycling to work and a massive downpour started about halfway through.
If I stopped to get shelter from the rain, I would’ve been late. I also couldn’t return to get the bus. I had to keep cycling.
Man, I still remember how I felt when I showed up at work, completely SOAKED in water, from my socks to my underwear. I sat down, at 9 AM and started making my calls.
During my breaks, I went to the bathroom and tried to dry my clothes piece by piece with the electric hand dryer. That whole day I sat in my chair with wet clothes, cursing at everything in my mind.
I was livid. I didn’t want a hard life like that.
A hard life versus doing hard things
Looking back, I’m grateful for experiences like that when I was in my teens and early twenties. It taught me that a hard life can be like a black hole that you can’t get out from.
My luck was that after the summer, I went to college. My parents, who never went to college, forced me to study. I really wanted to keep working because I thought that having my own money would make my life easy.
They knew better. Having a salary and nothing else is the road to a hard life. The path to an easier life is to get educated.
Getting educated is hard.
Learning new skills is hard.
Exercising regularly is hard.
Eating healthy is hard.
Sleeping at the same time every day is hard.
Seeing your friends having fun and going out is hard.
But the truth is that these things are only hard during the moment. Because what’s the alternative? I bet you have family members or friends who also have hard lives. What makes your life hard?
You might be doing hard things, but you do it because you don’t want to have a hard life.
Having the freedom to do what you want and being comfortable doesn’t come easy. We must work hard for that privilege every single day. And we will never reach an end state where our lives will always be easy.
It’s something we keep working for. Day in and day out. But it’s all worth it.
