Crypto News: The Taylor Swift economy is a post-Covid myth

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Taylor Swift hype is not helping.
Summer vacation is slowly melting.
Jason Belmonte keeps on excelling.
Back-to-school sales are not compelling.

You've been hearing it for months now: It's Taylor Swift's economy, and we're all just living in it. But what if I told you that's a myth? Our columnist Jonathan Levin embarked on what is perhaps the bravest mission of our era: The demystification of "Swiftonomics." He found that the fans — and the Philadelphia Fed — were wrong.

After analyzing the numbers, he found that the post-Covid experience has not "unleashed a torrent of reckless spending on discretionary services" as was initially thought:

Despite all the friendship bracelets and chant rituals, live-event spending actually looks pretty tame compared to pre-pandemic levels. "On an inflation-adjusted basis, only live sporting events have experienced an increase," Jonathan writes. Taylor's fans might be selling out football stadiums, but the sport normally played on the field underneath her stage is buoying the economy just as much, if not more, than her concerts:

While these charts may come as a surprise to stans, they still don't fully explain the vibes. For the past year, Taylor has been everywhere, and that's no myth: In October, she released Midnights. In March, she embarked on the Eras Tour. This month, she released Speak Now, Taylor's Version. And the demand to see her perform live is unrelenting: "14 million people flocked to Ticketmaster in hopes of scoring seats; the majority were unsuccessful," Bloomberg News's Augusta Saraiva explains.

The imbalance, between fans who were able to get tickets and fans who weren't, exposes the true fulcrum of the Taylor Swift Economy: inflation. Pricing pressure has "made it seem as if we're being more profligate than we used to be, but really we're gobbling up about the same quantities of tickets," Jonathan writes. While that might be the case, I'm not sure the data will protect Jonathan from receiving some hate mail from the Swifties. In honor of that, I penned some new lyrics to "Dear John," written from the perspective of the Post-Covid Economy. Please enjoy:

Oh, what a difference a year makes:

The trouble of overusing a word like "hell" is that it becomes tough to delineate certain scenarios. In 2022, there were headlines such as "Are You Excited for Your Summer Vacation in Hell?" and "Summer Travel Is Hell This Year," both of which described the Sisyphean task of locating your luggage in the Post-Covid travel deluge. But this year, the "travel hell" is much more literal, and it's hitting closer to home — or maybe even your vacation home. Tourists are quickly waking up to the fact that the rest and relaxation they seek has been sabotaged by mother nature's unending desire to slowly roast civilization until it is burnt to a crisp. "This is the kind of postcard I send now," Antoaneta Roussi tweeted:

"Back at the hotel, fires are erupting all around, darkening the sky as holidaymakers bathe nervously in the pool. The light is an eerie yellow. At one point, my husband helps the lifeguard extinguish a fire that has auto-combusted in the parking lot."

"Most of us have an idea of summer in our heads," Niall Ferguson explains, pointing to visions of white sandy beaches, where vacationers "strip down to near nakedness" and frolic around in the salt air. But rising temperatures are killing the very notion of summer being a season where any reasonable human wants to take a vacation. "If the mercury is above 30 degrees C (86 F)," forget about enjoying yourself, he writes.

The focus of Europe's heat wave is now switching to Spain, about one-fifth of which the FT's Simon Kuper says has "desertified." "If Spain were a company, the consultants would say: 'Your business model no longer works. Either pivot or close the thing down,'" he writes. And in the US, Niall writes, people have demonstrated that they are still willing to "live and work where the jobs are plentiful and/or the taxes are low, even if that means unpleasantly high outside temperatures." As Jonathan Levin charts, home prices in Miami are up about 64% since 2019. "Logically, buyers must either lack information about the climate threat or they're intentionally choosing to disregard it," he writes:

The desire to stay in places that regularly experience ultra-hot temperatures and overflowing septic tanks may help explain why "there's no shortage of alarm about the rising climate impact from the energy we'll use to cool our homes," David Fickling says. But that alarm is misdirected, he argues. Although people in developing economies will buy a billion air conditioners by the end of this decade, the climate in 2050 will still be suffering more from heating homes than cooling them. Turns out, killing Dante's Inferno with your AC unit is not the worst thing in the world.

There's no science behind the theory; it's just a fact.

You know how some people just have famous names? Like, whoever named them must have had a premonition about their child having a Wikipedia page or winning a Oscar or something?

Let me provide an example: Jason Belmonte. Say it out loud, and hear how it rolls off the tongue: Jason Belmonte. There's no arguing here. Jason Belmonte is 100% a famous name, even if you have no idea who the dude is. So let me clue you in: Jason is incredibly well-known … in the world of professional bowling.

The native Australian's accomplishments in the sport of 10-pin bowling put him on a par with other famous-sounding athletic legends like Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt and Michael Jordan, Bobby Ghosh writes. Not only has Belmonte managed to score three perfect 300-point games (12 consecutive strikes) on television, but he has also revolutionized the act of bowling itself with his two-handed technique:

Look ma, two hands Photographer: Portland Press Herald

Belmonte's unique spin on the game has greatly influenced the best players of the next generation. Last year, 9 out of 10 boys who qualified for the final in the Professional Bowling Association's juniors competition bowled like "Belmo." While his mental strength is evident as he scores strike after strike on live TV, his charisma shines through when he promotes the game outside the lanes "by dreaming up stunts like bowling out of a NASCAR car traveling at 140 mph and performing trick shots," Bobby writes. Jason Belmonte's influence has no bounds — or bumpers, more aptly. The famous name theory strikes again! Read the whole thing.

Bonus Sports Reading: Please don't disqualify Ukrainian athletes to for not shaking hands with Russian opponents. — Andreas Kluth

As a kid, back-to-school shopping used to be the highlight of my year. I would salivate in the binder aisle, testing out the snap of the three D-rings. I would proudly push my cart around, throwing in pencil grips and flower-shaped Post-It notes that my mom would inevitably determine were "unnecessary." When time came to check out, the bill would be a mile long, but the discounts were *flowing* and my third-grade heart was fluttering. Nowadays? There's not a deal in sight, Leticia Miranda warns. "The costs for school supplies have gone up about 24% the last couple years," she explains, and the "doorbuster" deals you see commercials about are more myth than reality:

I was never the best at math, but even I can understand that numbers like these do NOT add up:

20 million Quest virtual reality headsets have sold since 2019
200,000 users are reportedly active on Horizon Worlds
$21 billion has been lost on creating the Metaverse since 2022

"When bad times come around again, and advertising sees a slump, Zuckerberg's metaverse vision needs to be in much stronger shape than it is today. Otherwise, he'll find investors might be far less forgiving," Dave Lee writes. Although VR has proven mildly useful in the gaming universe, Dave says he has a hard time seeing "it as a serious platform for work, networking and productivity."