Today is pub day for my new book, HOW THE WORLD RAN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Inside the Global Supply Chain. It traces a shipping container from a Chinese factory to a US warehouse, exploring every industry that touches it. I hope you’ll check it out. 1/bookshop.org/p/books/how-th… 2/ How did the world’s wealthiest country run out of basic medical gear in midst of public health catastrophe? How did we exhaust supplies of computer chips, infant formula and toilet paper? And how do we protect ourselves? My book is pointed at these questions.

Been reading @semaforben new book, which is smart and terrific. Highly recommended. But as someone who was in high-flying digital newsrooms in the boom days, there is one element that seems to be getting confused in the discussion of the supposed end of social media journalism @semaforben 2/ The social media era was premised on idea that you could support journalism through various forms of digital advertising. The tech people who led the charge -- people like AOL's Tim Armstrong -- were advertising people, and journalism to them was just content.

A marker of the refashioning of global trade: even Chinese companies are nearshoring, setting up factories in Mexico to sell into the US free of tariffs and shipping troubles. My story from Nuevo León, Mexico nytimes.com/2023/02/03/bus… 2/ I was struck by this trend the second I heard about it because it was clear Chinese companies had been preparing for this for years. 18 years earlier I visited factory in Hungary set up by HiSense, Chinese TV maker, to sell TVs duty free into EU washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…

How a global shipping industry that many describe as a cartel has exploited the Great Supply Chain Disruption for record profits while sowing inflation worldwide. Our story nytimes.com/2022/05/04/bus… 2/ conflict gets framed as importers vs. shipping companies, but it’s really giant retailers versus small and medium sized businesses. carriers prioritizing containers for their largest most lucrative customers like Amazon, Walmart, while failing to move cargo for smaller players

It’s incredible that ⁦@RayDalio⁩ warns of civil war, breakdown in faith in institutions while totally exempting his own role and other Davos Men in perpetuating the lie that tax cuts for the wealthy are solution when they are in fact key problem bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Five years ago at Davos — amid Brexit, as Trump inaugurated — billionaires waxed about need to address inequality. @RayDalio solution? Create more conducive opportunities to make money. Typical of “win-win solutions” obviating that wealthy sacrifice

My book, DAVOS MAN: How the Billionaires Devoured the World, is out today. It unspools story of a cosmic heist — the bottom up transfer of wealth engineered by the billionaire class, stripping governments of capacity to respond to crises like the pandemic, undermining democracy. 2/ You can order here: bookshop.org/books/davos-ma…

Beef prices are soaring, but ranchers are going broke. Behind this apparent manifestation of the Great Supply Chain Disruption, a story of monopoly power. Our story from Montana and Missouri with amazing photos by ⁦@erinschaff⁩ nytimes.com/2021/12/27/bus… Like so many American stories, this one goes back to Reagan, and the decision to ditch antitrust enforcement as an impediment to efficiency. Four decades later, four largest meatpackers control 85 percent of the beef market.

This is how the world ran out of everything. Our story on the global shortages and how business overdid it with Just In Time, enriching shareholders at the expense of the real economy. with @NirajC nytimes.com/2021/06/01/bus… @NirajC 2/ How lumber, sporting goods, tapioca and chemicals all got scarce at same time is complex, featuring pandemic-related chaos in shipping, production disruption and wildly fluctuating demand. But one key factor cannot be ignored: the corporate world overdid it with staying lean.

Last summer, the Business Roundtable, an association major US CEOs, produced a statement of purpose under which the interest of workers and environment would gain importance alongside shareholders. The pandemic has revealed the hollowness of those words nytimes.com/2020/04/13/bus… 2/ Pundits construed the statement of purpose as a milestone, the end of the slavish devotion to quarterly bottom line. But many major corps used their cash to buy back stock and pay dividends (check it out @TheStalwart ), leaving them with less to aid workers when disaster came

The global recession is shaping up as deeper, longer and more dangerous than initially feared, with recovery likely to take years. My analysis. nytimes.com/2020/04/01/bus… 2/Among investors, conventional wisdom still has it that recovery will be V shaped: We freeze the economy until we contain the pandemic, then we restart everything. Everyone goes back to the mall, planes fill, life snaps back to normal. That vision looks increasingly ridiculous.

Could this be a worse economic shock than the global financial crisis? “In many ways it’s far worse than 2008,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist. My analysis nytimes.com/2020/03/13/bus… 2/ the point @JosephEStiglitz is making: Last crisis, toolkit was proven. "2008 was a show that we had seen before. We know about financial crises. We knew that it was just money, and that one way or the other the government would step in and save the bankers from their folly.”

How did Italy’s communist strongholds come to embrace the extreme right? It started with the China Shock. My story from Tuscany and Marche nytimes.com/2019/12/05/bus… via @nytimes It is a story with parallels to the China Shock in the American industrial Midwest, which eliminated millions of jobs in the space of a few years, a story that helps explain the embrace of Trump.

What happens when a predominantly white, Christian country with generous social welfare benefits open the doors to dark-skinned, Muslim refugees? Sweden is learning about the limits of its collectivist spirit. My story nytimes.com/2019/07/11/bus… Not for nothing, economists have long admired Sweden for its ability to spur innovation and growth while also maintaining social harmony. People high taxes and they get generous benefits — health care, education, child care, housing