What We’re Reading

Growing too fast:

By chasing rapid expansion without paying enough attention to how much they were actually spending, the co-founders ended up making big bets that cost the company millions — and mistakes that left thousands of gallons of ice cream literally swirling down the drain. “It was a fairy tale,” says Greg O’Connell, one of Ample Hills’ biggest investors. “They were kind of living in a dream world because their marketing was so great.”

Equity:

By the end of last year, more than 30% of U.S. homeowners were considered equity-rich – meaning their property was worth twice as much as the underlying mortgage, a report showed.

Helped by low interest rates, the count of equity-rich properties in the fourth quarter of last year rose to 17.8 million of the 59 million mortgaged homes in the U.S., according to the ATTOM Data Solutions fourth-quarter 2020 U.S. Home Equity & Underwater Report released Thursday. That’s up from 26.7% in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Investment:

China overtook the U.S. as the world’s top destination for new foreign direct investment last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic amplifies an eastward shift in the center of gravity of the global economy.

New investments by overseas businesses into the U.S., which for decades held the No. 1 spot, fell 49% in 2020, according to U.N. figures released Sunday, as the country struggled to curb the spread of the new coronavirus and economic output slumped.

China, long ranked No. 2, saw direct investments by foreign companies climb 4%, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said.

Resilience:

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

New economy:

Andrea Romo, 27, earns $12.50 an hour as a merchandise associate at Lowe’s in Albuquerque. She doesn’t consider herself a social media influencer, but has enjoyed sending messages to friends on Snapchat for years. When she noticed the new Spotlight feature on Thanksgiving, she decided to upload a video of her sister deep frying a turkey.

Two weeks later, Ms. Romo learned that her video was so popular that it had earned her about half a million dollars. “It was a big surprise that you can get money posting a video of something totally random,” she said. (The company said it determines payment amounts based on unique video views and proprietary internal metrics.)

Have a good weekend.