What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collaborative team came across this week …
According to the survey, three in five Americans pay more attention to how their friends spend compared to how they save, with an equal number saying they’re at a loss to understand how their friends are able to afford the expensive vacations and trendy restaurant meals they portray on social media.
Seeking to create several hundred more [delivery companies], Amazon said it would give its existing employees as much as $10,000 each for startup costs as well as the equivalent of three months of gross salary if they start their own delivery businesses.
Thirty-nine percent of the 89 forced CEO departures in 2018 were due to ethical misconduct, which the study defines as the removal of a CEO following a scandal or improper conduct … Meanwhile, 35 percent of ousters in 2018 were a result of poor financial performance and just 13 percent were because of conflicts at the board level or with activist investors that weren’t about financial performance but led to the CEO’s ouster.
Overall, we find that debt literacy is low: only about one-third of the population seems to comprehend interest compounding or the workings of credit cards. Even after controlling for demographics, we find a strong relationship between debt literacy and both financial experiences and debt loads. Specifically, individuals with lower levels of debt literacy tend to transact in high-cost manners, incurring higher fees and using high-cost borrowing.
Microsoft announced Monday that it is releasing an open-source software development kit called ElectionGuard that will use encryption techniques to let voters know when their vote is counted. It will also allow election officials and third parties to verify election results to make sure there was no interference with the results.
Have a good weekend.