Gita Gopinath: “If you look at just what goes into a trade balance equation, it depends upon the relative price of your goods in international markets, but it also depends upon the relative level of demand in the two different countries for just overall consumption. For example, if in the US consumption is strong, while in China consumption is weak, even if relative prices were to favor, for example, US goods, just the overall level of demand being lower in China would reduce the overall level of exports from the US to China. Both those variables matters, not just the relative price, but also the relative levels of demand in countries.”
WSJ: “A peptide is simply a short chain of amino acids, often used by the body as a message to do things like quiet inflammation or release insulin. That precision can make peptides useful drugs. Insulin is a peptide. So is Ozempic’s active ingredient, which mimics the gut hormone GLP-1 to control blood sugar and curb appetite. Until recently, peptides had to be injected because the gut treats them like a piece of steak and digests it. That is what makes the recent breakthrough in pharma so important: Companies are figuring out how to put peptides into pills.”
David M. Rubenstein on the difference between owning a business and owning a sports team: “First, in business you’re not usually facing 29 other competitors in every product you sell. Here, we have 29 competitors. Second, people pay much more attention to how the team does every day than how a business does every day, as a general rule. Therefore, you will be subject to more questions, criticisms, commentaries, and objections to what you’re doing. Also, there’s less you can do to change the day-to-day or week-to-week output of a team than you probably can do to change the output of a business. If a business isn’t doing well, we can quickly bring in someone else, change a strategy, or do other things. It’s much harder to change a baseball team midseason. Sometimes, it’s hard to make trades, players sustain injuries, and you can’t just replace the team overnight because it’s not doing very well. So, owning a sports team is much more difficult, much more challenging, and produces much more gray hair.”
WSJ reviews What Could Possibly Go Right?: “In the past 20 years, Danny Meyer has opened 27 restaurants and closed 10. He’s also launched more than 700 Shake Shacks in 24 countries.”
