ITK Daily | September 28

Happy Wednesday.

To be ITK, know this:

Happy Happy Birthday, William Ross

Russia prepares to annex parts of Ukraine as staged votes end: WSJ reports Blinken said the US would never recognize the annexation, which could enable Moscow to say Russia is being attacked if Kyiv’s offensive continues.

+ Derided as a sham by Ukrainian and Western officials, the votes on whether to join Russia are designed to confer a veneer of legitimacy on Moscow’s land grab, despite reports of coercion in the process.

+ As Russia announces that 96% of voters are in favor of annexation, with 15% of ballots counted, those who fled the Russian-occupied territories view the 'referendums' with fatalism.

Sweden and Denmark say Nord Stream pipeline blasts were deliberate attacks: Although suspicion is falling on Russia, neither Copenhagen or Stockholm identified a culprit. Politico

+ The Nord Stream pipelines, built to carry Russian natural gas to Europe, suffered three mysterious leaks.

+ "It is the authorities' assessment that these are deliberate actions. It is not an accident," Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said on Tuesday, hardening an assessment from earlier in the day. "The situation is as serious as it gets," she added in remarks carried on Danish media.

+ Sweden's national seismic network detected two distinct blasts in the area on Monday, one at 2.03 a.m. and the second at 7:04 pm, reported national broadcaster SVT.

+ “It seems extremely improbable that the leaks on two different pipelines happen at the same time. Therefore I think we should assume that it was intentional to create these leaks,” said Mateusz Kubiak, managing partner at the Warsaw-based Esperis consultancy.

Giorgia Meloni’s moment: The Italian right’s decisive election victory puts its leader in line to be the country’s first female prime minister and the first to claim an unambiguous post-Fascist lineage. But there is little reason to believe it will change Italy’s course in ways that matter either to markets or to the country’s international partners. Bill Emmott

+ "There is little reason to believe it will change Italy’s course in ways that matter either to markets or to the country’s international partners."

+ "This election was that rare modern case in which opinion polls got the outcome largely right. It has been clear for at least two years that if the three main right-wing parties held together, they would win an absolute majority."

+ The Elysée Palace said it 'respects the democratic choice' of Italians, who voted Sunday for the right-wing and far-right coalition, putting a post-fascist leader in the lead in the legislative elections.

God save the pound? The problem with the United Kingdom’s growing budget deficit and public debt is not that they condemn the currency to being weak or strong. It is that they can constrain monetary policy, create uncertainty that spills into financial markets, complicate the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, and hinder long-term growth. Andrés Velasco

+ "The United Kingdom used to be among the countries – mostly rich and highly developed – where the predictions of Marcus Fleming (a Briton) and Robert Mundell (a Canadian who won the Nobel Prize) held true. No more."

SCMP: With eye on Beijing, India and US make a show of unity amid fissures

+ US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar affirm cooperation in the Indo-Pacific

+ The joint appearance comes a day after Jaishankar criticized the US for its package to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16 fighter jet fleet

World Bank cuts China growth forecast: WSJ reports the emerging East Asian economies are expected to outpace China for the first time since 1990, as the world’s second-largest economy struggles with a real-estate crunch and the government’s zero-tolerance approach to COVID.

Social media and news fact sheet: Digital news has become an important part of Americans’ news media diets, with social media playing a crucial role in news consumption. Today, half of US adults get news at least sometimes from social media. Pew

+ Roughly a third of US adults (31%) say they regularly get news from Facebook.

+ A quarter of U.S. adults regularly get news from YouTube, while smaller shares get news from Twitter (14%), Instagram (13%), TikTok (10%) or Reddit (8%).

+ Fewer Americans regularly get news from LinkedIn (4%), Snapchat (4%), Nextdoor (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1%).

+ Half or more of regular news consumers on Snapchat (67%), TikTok (52%), and Reddit (50%) are ages 18 to 29.

+ Additionally, women make up a greater portion of regular news consumers on Facebook, while the opposite is true for sites like Twitter and Reddit.

Mental health crisis leads hospitals to create a new type of ER: Recliners and games in “Empath units” are helping move patients with psychiatric ailments out of emergency rooms. Bloomberg

+ Mental health crisis units designed to treat people quickly in a more serene setting, so they can stabilize patients and send them home.

+ The idea is an open room with recliners, soft lighting, TVs, and card tables. At the two dozen or so Empath centers in the US today—with dozens more on the way.

+ The number of public psychiatric beds per 100,000 people dropped from 340 in 1955 to 12 in 2016, according to the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.

+ After the University of Iowa Health Care opened an Empath unit in its main hospital building in Iowa City, the number of suicidal patients admitted and the length of time they waited in the ER dropped dramatically, researchers found.

+ A separate Iowa study looked at the economics of the approach and found that revenue in the emergency department increased as fewer patients left before being treated.

Is the Hyperloop doomed? Though some efforts continue, the once-promising technology has run up against significant challenges — most notably creating an entirely new transit infrastructure. NYT

+ It has been a transportation dream for over 150 years: In the 1870s, a test system used a pneumatic vacuum tube to propel people under Manhattan from Warren Street to Murray Street.

+ “Time and again, you see technological innovations attracting a lot of investment, and you can make a lot of money during the hype cycle,” said Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. However, the technology doesn’t anticipate the significant technical challenges associated with creating an entirely new infrastructure.

Hertz, BP join to bring EV charging stations across North America: WSJ reports the deal to develop a network of charging stations comes as the car-rental company says it has tens of thousands of electric vehicles in its fleet.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The self-styled scourge of ‘woke’ boardrooms: Fund manager with a history of bold claims says energy stocks could triple if ESG aims scrapped. FT

+ Since August, the serial entrepreneur has launched two new exchange traded funds that explicitly seek to pressure companies to drop efforts to diversify their workforces and cancel their pledges to address climate change.

+ Ramaswamy last week wrote public letters to Apple telling it to halt plans for a racial equity audit and to Disney, insisting that the company stop “speaking out on political issues that do not affect its business,” such as gay rights.

+ Strive’s marketing literature says that if oil and gas companies were freed from climate and other ESG concerns, “US energy stocks have room to appreciate 2-3x in value over the next 12-24 months.”

+ Ramaswamy argues that stakeholder capitalism has become a means for top level corporations to increase their profit while dictating moral and social values that should rather be voted on by the electorate.

GM revises return-to-office plan amid employee concerns: WSJ reports the in-office policy has been pushed to next year as the company seeks worker feedback.

+ The automaker had required three days a week starting late 2022.

Bloomberg: US consumer confidence rises a second month to most since April

+ The Conference Board’s index climbed to 108 in September

+ Job market and lower gas prices are feeding higher sentiment

NFL nixes tackle game from Pro Bowl: NYT reports pro football’s annual all-star event will instead feature a flag football game and skills competition in an attempt to restore interest and increase player participation.

+ The NFL is pushing for flag football to be included in the Olympics — part of its effort to attract more international fans.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc