Weekend Reading #81

Photo by Aleksei Ieshkin on Unsplash

This is the eighty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 22nd August 2020. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

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What we're doing.

Now that our compliance migration is complete, our private market deals platform, 3BC, is all set to scale. The way we are doing this is via our network of partners who are helping us to beef up both sides of our marketplace as they invite issuers and investors to 3BC.  

We’ve never seen 3BC’s growth or success as zero-sum, and the model that we’ve been rolling out in recent weeks is proving that our partners agree. By collaborating, we are looking to reward those who are plugged into global dealflow and those who have contacts who will be signing up as investors. They are helping us to grow both sides of our marketplace, meaning we can focus on providing a framework where investors gain access to high quality deal flow in a regulated environment. It's heartening to find that the economics we’ve offering our partners is incentivizing them to take some of the work load off our hands. 

If you’re interested in partnering up with us to source deals or investors, we’d love to hear from you. The success of 3BC depends, largely, on the quality of the partner network that we are able to grow, so if you think you can help us out, please get in touch.  

What we're reading.

A very good non-fiction we’ve been enjoying is Richard Davies’ Extreme Economies, an adventure into a selection of global economies that have thrived despite all the odds being stacked firmly against them. Davies’s premise is that, at least with respect to economies, harsh conditions matter a little less than we first thought. That means that the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh, the world’s largest refugee camp, Zaatari, or severely deprived areas of Glasgow still provide adequate conditions where businesses, trade and people can thrive.  

Davies is an advisor to the Bank of England and former economics editor of the Economist, and his writing style is a nice mix between magazine reportage and academia. Take his account of his visit to Zaatari, a camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan, the world’s largest refugee camp. Davies immerses you deep in the camp with his writing but also makes the camp a brilliant illustration of Adam Smith’s observations about the power of the natural human tendency to “truck, barter and exchange.” When Davies travels to “Angola” or, as it’s actually called, Louisiana State Penitentiary, the US’ largest prison, despite the inmates having zero freedom, many of whom are serving life sentences or on Death Row, barter and trade thrives.  

Davies’ 9 chapters each depict and unpick a different economic environment somewhere on earth. They are all entertaining and educational, like good non-fiction should be. But the lesson at the heart of it – that life, or, rather, economies find a way – is heartening, especially in times of chaos like those we’ve experienced as a global population this year. 

On a more fun note, we realised that amongst all the excitement of the past year, we completely missed last year’s Daniel Silva book, The New Girl. Silva’s books feature Israeli super-spy, Gabriel Allon, one of our favourite fictional characters out there (or is he fictional?).  

In this instalment, Silva pulls it out the bag yet again with a blockbuster thriller about a Saudi prince supposedly keen on reforming the House of Saud and responsible for the violent death of a journalist who dared to criticize him. Sound familiar? Interestingly, there is a foreword in this book in which Silva explains that he had been writing this book for 2 months at which point the murder of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, occurred. He stopped for a while only to continue at a later stage. Extraordinary stuff.   

In another weird coincidence, we read this book in the week of the historic Israeli peace deal with the United Arab Emirates (followed by one with Sudan). It included a deal with Saudi Arabia to allow El Al, the Israeli national airline, to fly to Dubai over its airspace. This is unprecedented, yet in a world where all of these nations fear the rise of Iran, it makes perfect sense. The economic opportunity for partnership is also immense and in a time of great global uncertainty, a historic peace is something to be celebrated. 

Fancy a late summer getaway? Then good news for all of you cruise fans out there, according to WIRED, cruise ships are back! And even if a holiday aboard a floating hotel with 3,000 other people isn’t your thing, this is a fascinating article about how the some business are adapting to a post-COVID world.  

On the verge of bankruptcy and faced with a PR nightmare, cruise companies have found what they think is the perfect solution: voyages that go absolutely nowhere. These static voyages, that just cruise around open seas for a few days before returning to port, offer a glimpse into the future of cruises. TUI Cruises was the first company to run an all-inclusive cruise to nowhere out of Germany, with stringent health and safety measures that included no port calls or shore excursions. These are the last-ditch attempts to salvage an industry devastated by COVID-19.  

The cruise industry is worth around £115 billion per year – £10bn in the UK and Ireland alone – and supports some 1.2 million jobs worldwide. Customer loyalty, however, will not long sustain an industry that has rapidly expanded in recent years. So something innovative needed to be done... and cruises that don’t cruise seems like an interesting experiment and a level of creative thinking that other COVID-embattled sectors should pay close attention to.
 
What we're watching.

An off-the-beaten-track BBC drama we’ve been enjoying during our evenings is Giri/Hajj, a fast-paced intercontinental thriller and co-production between the BBC and Netflix. The action switches between Tokyo and London, providing a nice juxtaposition between the two environments, cultures and languages (yes, there are subtitles to be read) and gives anyone who hasn’t travelled to Japan a cool opportunity to spend some time there, as we saddle up with Detective Kenzo as he goes on the hunt for his long lost brother.  

The show revolves around two brothers — Kenzo and Yuto, an enforcer for a notorious Tokyo gang family — and uses a familiar Cain-and-Abel storyline as its starting point. You’ve likely seen that story unfold a few times before, but the Japanese elements make this thriller seem fresh and exciting. The switch in language between Japanese and English is also engrossing and you get the feeling that the show hasn’t got the praise or popularity it deserves because most people nowadays don’t want to read subtitles because they’ve half an eye on their phones!  

But do make the effort with this one. As an early line in the show goes: “Someone threw a stone in a pond a long ways away, and we’re only just feeling the ripples.” And that’s a neat way of describing how it feels to watch the first few episodes of this show and see those ripples begin to break into waves.  

Missing office life? Want to return to your high rise sometime soon? Well, after watching this haunting timelapse of New Yorker, Nicholas White, and his ordeal being trapped in a lift for 40 hours you won’t want to go anywhere near a skyscraper anytime soon.  

This viral hit popped back onto our radar this week and it shows how White, a production manager for Business Week, was working late on a Friday night when he went out for a quick cigarette at 11pm. Next thing he knew he was trapped in the lift for the rest of the weekend. Here is also a fascinating New Yorker piece about White’s ordeal, which has been described as the “longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life”.  
 
What we're listening to.

Billionaire investor Michael Novogratz is well known for making some pretty punchy predictions, notably on cryptocurrencies. A bitcoin-bull, Novogratz was a hedge fund manager at Fortress Investment Group having been a Goldman Sachs partner. He now runs Galaxy Digital, which he describes as a “bridge between the crypto and institutional worlds.” 

Novogratz’s opinions are always worth listening to (even if you don’t necessarily agree with them) and his recent outing on the Tim Ferriss podcast was a good listen and covers a broad range of topics, including investing, bitcoin, hallucinogens and why he loves going running in the Sahara Desert.