A state in the US wants to open a new stock exchange
There's an orange shortage and website traffic is declining
Hello,
Whilst the weather isn’t quite playing ball yet, summer ‘24 has all the hallmarks of a classic. There really is something for everyone. Taylor arrived this weekend, kicking off the UK leg of her mammoth tour in Edinburgh. For anyone with a Swifty in their household it sort of feels like our whole lives have been leading up to the evening they go to see her.
You’ve got the Euros starting on 14th which will no doubt get everyone saying “it’s coming home” like some sort of cultish affirmation until it eventually does come home (because it definitely will).
And if none of that’s quite exciting enough for you, you’ve got a whole month left of mainlining The Rest is Politics whilst Sunak and Starmer take chunks out of each other.
What a time to be alive.
The rest is stuff,
Hugo
Chief Flowery Shirt Officer
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Hyper-cars are a good place to put your savings 🚗 - instead of mucking about with premium bonds you are much better off going out and purchasing maybe an Aston Martin Valkyrie or a Bugatti Chiron. Rather than winning the odd fifty quid, your investment could increase thirtyfold over the next twenty years or so.
Traffic to some of the world’s largest websites is shrinking 📉 - unsurprisingly Facebook is leading the decline as it’s now just filled with people’s distant relatives and conspiracy theories. YouTube, Wikipedia and Google were also all down as the big tech enters a midlife crisis, hoping that its new, much younger lover, generative AI gives it a new lease of life.
Another Boeing whistleblower comes forward to raise concerns 🛫 - Roy Irvin has suggested that there are other issues with production that could cause safety incidents. He has described how Boeing is full of “yes men” and “bean-counters” and suggested it needs to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up. Cutting stuff.
Inevitable lawsuit arrives from woman based on Martha in Baby Reindeer 😶🌫️ - Netflix must have been expecting this. The offers to take this case will have been flying into ‘Martha’ from the moment the program launched. The woman who claims to be Martha in real life is suing the television for $170m for defamation, negligence and emotional distress.
Boohoo investors want damages due to low paid staff 🧐 - you know you’ve reached peak capitalism when investors are suing a company for £100m because of the drop in share price after it had been discovered that the company was mistreating workers. My guess is they won’t be handing over that £100m to the employees that were being paid £3.50 an hour. I’m not quite sure shareholders were intended to be the beneficiaries of ESG standards.
Orange production in Brazil is set to decline over the coming years 🍊 - the South American country is the largest producer of everyone’s favourite fruit named after a colour, contributing 34% globally. Production is forecast to fall 24% over the next year, forcing juice makers to look at other options.
Nvidia valuation takes over Apple to become the second most valuable company 💸 - the chip company’s share price has been going bonkers as they keep flogging huge amounts of computing power to big tech. The technology companies really need to start demonstrating some serious value from generative AI as they’ve invested hundreds of billions and so far don’t have a tonne to show for it. They require several tonnes.
Texas Stock Exchange set to challenge NYSE and NASDAQ 🧦 - they really like to just do their own thing in the Lone Star State and with the support of Blackrock and Citadel Securities they are hoping to launch their own bourse in Austin. There will of course be less rules and more free wheelin’ capitalism which is how they will look to lure companies.
Shocking, good office design keeps workers happy 🏢 - there’s something tragically sad about The Office and this is at least in part due to the set, the epitome of corporate drudgery. A couple of decades later lots of companies have realised it doesn’t have to be like this and workers are much happier if they don’t feel like they’re in a depressing sitcom.
Deadline is set to save The Body Shop UK operations 🧼 - if you fancy buying a slightly 90s purveyor of soapy stuff you need to get your bid in by Tuesday. There have already been 75 expressions of interest but Aurelius the most recent owner is not among them.
Quote of the week
“Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess” - Taylor Swift