It’s the end-of-year edition of Unrequired Reading, my unrequired readers! We’ve got more long-ass articles and otherwise interesting pieces that I haven’t had time to write about than you can shake a stick at!
We’ll start with a lengthy take on why hedge funds are good for the economy. I always had a knee-jerk assumption that they were too secretive or opaque for instruments controlling so much money, but Sebastian Mallaby disagrees and comes up with all sorts of facts on the matter.
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Mark Cuban likes Happy Gilmore.
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But St. Petersburgers don’t like the new Gazprom tower.
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Slate offers up the worst TV commercials of 2006. Of course, the Visa check-card one where the world is shown to consist only of consumer and service automatons rocks the list.
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There’s quite a story behind the Africans who sell knockoff handbags on the streets in Milan. I saw them in 2000, and had the standard reaction:
If they think about it at all, tourists and locals alike probably assume these traders are just a disorganised, random sample of Europe’s vast army of human flotsam and jetsam, desperate migrants from poor places who arrive in leaky boats. In reality, the traders on the streets leading to the Vatican are anything but disorganised. They are members of a highly disciplined international community, at once religious and economic, with headquarters in another holy city — Touba, in the heart of Senegal, three hours’ drive from Dakar, the capital.
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Gary Pisano explains why there ain’t gonna be another Amgen.
(Okay, it’s interesting to me, because I care about the pharma & biopharma industries, and how market conditions have changed in the decades since the first major biopharmas — Genentech and Amgen — grew up. I think the biggest reason is that the venture capital funding for emerging biopharmas requires such a level of return that there’s too much pressure on the companies to out-license their products to a major drug company or, more likely, sell outright. In my opinion, there simply isn’t enough time for an emerging biopharma to get a billion-dollar drug through development and onto the market, and then build it up to that sales level.)