Le Studio Monthly - July

💻 News of the Month

After seeing the temperatures rise in Europe and the US…

🙈 Monkeypox (From weekly’s newsletter)

The World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global health emergency. More than 16,000 cases of the viral illness have been reported this year. The alert, the WHO’s highest, was last used in January 2020 with SARS-CoV-2. It is meant to spur countries to mount a co-ordinated, international response. Although monkeypox rarely kills healthy adults, it can be dangerous for children, pregnant women and immunocompromised people.

🤡 The US learnt nothing from COVID

Scientists told the NYT that the country is faltering in its quest to defeat the monkeypox outbreak, which has ballooned to at least 700 cases. Testing has been slow to ramp up, vaccines are in short supply, and a tangled web of bureaucracy is stymying a unified public health response.

🏯 Japan loses its most influential Prime Minister

Shinzo Abe has died after being shot while giving a campaign speech. It’s a shocking event in a country where gun violence is extremely rare. As Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Abe was a hugely consequential figure in the country, having led Japan from 2006–7 and 2012–2020. He’s known for his economic reforms intended to kickstart Japan’s deflationary economy, dubbed “Abenomics,” and his attempts to reassert Japan’s security capabilities after decades of pacifism.

🤴 Boris Johnson resigned

The British prime minister announced he’ll step down following the mass resignation of about half of his government. Johnson, who’s been plagued by scandals and his misleading responses to them, will remain “caretaker” prime minister until the party (not the voters) selects a new boss. Potential contenders to replace Johnson include former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, and—NBA fans are going to love this—Defense Secretary Ben Wallace.

😥 Another shooting that could have been avoided

A 21-year-old man has been charged in Highland Park shooting**.** Authorities charged Robert E. Crimo III with seven counts of first-degree murder in the killing of seven people at a July Fourth parade in a Chicago suburb on Monday. Police said that he planned the attack for weeks and dressed up as a woman in order to evade authorities as he fled the area. Both rifles recovered at the scene were bought legally by Crimo, one of which he allegedly used to fire off more than 70 rounds. Police also said that authorities were called to Crimo’s house twice in 2019 over threats of violence and suicide—in one of those instances, they confiscated 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword.

🏡 Home Ownership

Home prices rose faster than ever in 2021, with mortgage rates being the highest they’ve been since 2008, and extremely limited supply.

Some buyers find alternative options, like the lease-to-own model that allows customers to make a monthly lease payment, with a portion of it going toward owning the property. Kinda what you do with your car but for a house. A few PropTech companies have emerged in the market. Some critics these companies are predatory and targeting low-income communities who already struggle financially.

👨‍✈️ Cancel your vacations, airports are crowded

Airlines have not been handling the new volumes of travelers well. Even after airlines received more than $54 billion in pandemic relief from the federal government to keep staff on payroll, the industry had lost 31,000 workers by 2021. Many of those workers, such as ramp staff or ops agents, haven’t come back.

Airlines argue that the mass delays and cancellations are a result of an air traffic controller shortage.

When air travel was low during the pandemic, airlines incentivized their pilots to retire early. Getting them back has been a challenge made more difficult by the regulations required to become a pilot: They have to log 1,500 hours of flying experience before being able to take the controls of a commercial jet.

Americans can take comfort in the fact that the chaotic air travel situation is even worse in Europe, where flight cancellations were double those of US carriers between April and June (RadarBox.com).

🖼️ The Art Market Thrives

The art market is up 32% in 2022—compared to 20% losses for the S&P—and the WSJ calls art “among the hottest markets on Earth.” Some of the reasons are:

14% annual appreciation (1995–2021)
Lowest correlation to equities of any asset class
Doesn’t drop when you-know-who tweets

🌳 Europe, Crypto and the Climate

The EU reached a new agreement that will force crypto companies to disclose their environmental impact in Europe, including energy consumption and carbon emissions.

💲 Dollar vs Euro

The US dollar and euro hit parity this month for the first time in 20 years.

💪 BYOB (Be Your Own Boss) The self-employed proportion of the US workforce has hit its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis (Bloomberg).

🎾 Novak’s Era

Novak Djokovic won his seventh Wimbledon championship. The Serbian tennis player defeated Nick Kyrgios for his 21st major title. It puts him one ahead of Roger Federer and one behind Rafael Nadal for the most major championship wins in men’s tennis history. On the women’s side, Moscow-born Elena Rybakina became the first player representing Kazakhstan to win a Grand Slam tournament.

🌌 NASA shows us Space

The first full-color image taken by NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was revealed. It captures the highest quality and most detailed pictures of space of any telescope ever built. The telescope snapped the sharpest and deepest picture of our universe to date, showing a mess of galaxies that no human has seen before.

One picture reveals thousands of galaxies despite only covering a spot of sky the size of a grain of sand.

🚒 Hot & Burning

Wildfires blazed across several European countries, including Portugal, Spain, and France, amid a brutal heatwave.

👇 Low Valuation

Stripe, the payments behemoth, cut the value of its internal shares by 28%, lowering its valuation from $95B to $74B. The company didn’t disclose a reason for the move.

💵 Acquisition

Amazon announced plans to acquire One Medical, the membership-based health care provider, for ~$4B. The deal enhances Amazon’s health care aspirations, which already include a digital pharmacy and telehealth service.

ELON’s MONTHLY NEWS (he deserves its own section at this point)

Elon Musk quietly had twins last year with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink (Insider). Musk, who has repeatedly warned of “population collapse,” now has nine known children.

The Musk–Twitter deal in “serious jeopardy.” Elon has announced his intent to back out of his deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. In the SEC filing, Musk’s team wrote that Twitter has “failed or refused to provide” information on fake or spam accounts for two months. If successful, Musk will need to pay $1B for backing out.
Twitter is suing Elon Musk for breach of contract. Twitter said it spent $33 million between April and June 2022 dealing with Elon Musk’s chaotic bid to buy the company.
It has been disclosed by WSJ that Elon had a brief affair last fall with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, causing Brin to file for divorce and the two tech moguls to end their long bromance.

Last minute addendum: Musk denies the affair vehemently. Messy, messy, messy.

On another note but related, Tesla sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings, at a loss.

🔢 Data of the Month

🐳 Whales

Fin whales, almost hunted to the brink of extinction, are now seen in Antarctica again.

💰 VC Q2

VCs spent $120 billion in Q2 2022, per Crunchbase—down 26% from Q1, and 27% YoY. There’s a ton of dry powder left for venture investors to dip into: US VCs alone have raised nearly $122 billion so far in 2022 (Pitchbook), an impressive amount given that they raised a total of ~$139 billion across all of 2021.

🏘️ Rent control

An interesting new report found the cities with the most significant rent decreases in June included Tallahassee, FL (-6.5%), Anchorage, AK (-6.2%), and Honolulu, HI (-6.1%). On the other end, Norfolk, VA (+6.4%) and Fresno, CA (+6.3%) saw the biggest jumps.

The real question is who would want to move to Fresno?

🐮 AgTech investments

In Q1 2022, VCs worldwide invested $3.3 billion in agtech firms across 222 deals—that’s more than double the $1.5 billion invested in the sector in Q1 2021 and just 9% less than the Q3 2021 record of $3.7 billion.

🧑🏼‍🤝‍🧑🏽 Population growth

For the first time since WWII, the global population grew by less than 1% between 2020 and 2021. Europe’s population actually declined during the pandemic, and 61 countries are expected to see population declines of 1%+ between 2022 and 2050.

Maybe Elon is onto something after all.

👛 Under valuation

Klarna, the Swedish “buy now, pay later” giant, raised $800m at a $6.7B valuation, down 85% from its valuation during its previous funding round in 2021.

👷‍♀️ More jobs than workers

New data showed 11.3 million open positions in the US in May, a sharp drop from April but still very high by historical standards—there are now 1.9 job openings for every available worker. These numbers paint a picture of a healthy labor market.

📈 Inflation

US consumer prices climbed 9.1% in June from a year prior, topping expectations of an 8.8% gain. That’s the highest rate of inflation since 1981, and a sign that it still hasn’t peaked. Core prices, not including food and energy, jumped 5.9% YoY. Analysts believe the Federal Reserve may raise the benchmark interest rate by more than 0.75 percentage points later this month.

🔎 Finds of the Month

Microsoft desktop background or NASA picture of the universe?

Nasa for the Win
The James Webb Space Telescope took wonderful new pictures of our universe. It shows elements of space that were unseen before. Because most of these elements seen in pictures for the first time are so old and the universe expands exponentially faster, it also means they are also very small in reality.
It matters because one of the purposes of the James Webb telescope is to help scientists understand how the universe was formed. As it snaps more pics, it’s possible it could capture images of even older galaxies…and the big bang itself.
Mind-blowing!
Auction house vs Tech
The legendary auction house, Christie’s, announced it's branching into tech investing. The company launched an in-house VC arm called Christie’s Ventures, which will focus on art and crypto startups.
Best Foods
A list of the world’s [50 best restaurants](https://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50?). How many have you tried?

🕔 LONG-FORM Article

🎮 A story about a [video game]) heist
🐉 A sad story about the discovery of the 1st T-Rex fossils and Barnum Brown

🔉 Podcast of the Month

Persona, the story of the most prolific scam artist of the past few decades.

💼 Jobs

Some of our companies are hiring! Check out their openings:

Therma

🙌🏼 Thanks for reading! See you next month!

⭐ We'd also love to hear more of your feedback. Tell us what you think and what you want to see in the future in this digest at m.plata@tamar.capital- cheers !