My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• Perspectives on Market Downturns. The market does not care about your opinions. Stop it. Just stop it. Empirical studies on environments like this remind us that we don’t know. Goldman Sachs doesn’t know. Morgan Stanley doesn’t know. UBS doesn’t know. I don’t know. You don’t know. (Fortunes & Frictions)

• Trump’s Policies Have Shaken a Once-Solid Economic Outlook: Economic forecasts have deteriorated in recent weeks, reflecting the upheaval from federal layoffs, tariff moves and immigration roundups. (New York Times) see also Wall Street Fears Trump Will Wreck the Soft Landing: The economy’s pilot has a new message: Fasten your seat belts. (WSJ)

• Never Root for a Recession. If we assume that the market will eventually recover, then a decline in equity prices today allows young and “asset-light” investors to buy cheaper today and earn higher returns in the future. But the problem with this logic is that all else isn’t equal. Market crashes don’t happen in a vacuum. When asset prices decline, economic consequences typically follow. Workers lose their jobs or don’t get promoted. Hiring freezes up. People stop spending as much money. And this negative cycle feeds on itself. (Of Dollars and Data)

• Are Stocks a Sure Thing Over the Long Term? Not Necessarily: While it doesn’t occur frequently, U.S. stocks, as well as international markets, have produced losses over 10- and 20-year periods, research shows. (Wall Street Journal)

• Beijing embraces DeepSeek to lead AI adoption as it looks for new growth drivers: Goldman Sachs expects China’s economy to start reflecting the positive impact of AI adoption led by DeepSeek from next year. Over the long term — by 2030 — it pegs a 20-basis-point to 30-basis-point boost to China’s GDP. DeepSeek has shaken China’s AI ecosystem as well, with state-owned entities as well as large tech players, including competitors, leveraging its open-sourced architecture. (CNBC)

• How Natural Gas Became America’s Most Important Export: The White House’s LNG-powered diplomacy will only expand in Trump’s second term. (Bloomberg)

• Why Some of America’s Richest People Are Missing From a List of Big Donors: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of the 50 most generous American donors offers something noteworthy: Some of the wealthiest people aren’t on it. (Barron’s)

• How Giant White Houses Took Over America: They’re huge. They’re unsightly. They’re everywhere. When one went up next door, I went on a quest for answers. (Slate)

• Why You Should Sign Up for the I.R.S.’s Identity Theft Prevention Tool: With employees from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency poking around in agency systems, faith in data security isn’t what it once was. The tool, an identity protection PIN, can help. (New York Times)

• The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century: But the wild thing about sports is that it never really does. With such an unparalleled ability to bottle up the human condition—the highs, the lows, the adversity, the intensity, the buildup, the release, the heartbreak, the triumph—sports are capable of delivering moments of true wonder that become memories, that become part of our lives. When the impossible becomes possible, when the definition of absurd is redefined, when men and women turn into superheroes—you don’t easily forget something like that.  (The Ringer)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview  this weekend with Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and a Senior Fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Previously, she was Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and was named by Politico as one of the 50 people most influencing the policy debate in America, and one of Barron’s top 100 Women in Finance. Her book “The Deficit Myth” became an instant New York Times bestseller.

Think differently about global diversification Source: Vanguard

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