Recommended Weekend Reading

May 12 - 14, 2023

Here are our recommended reads from reports we read in the last week. We hope you find these useful and have a great weekend.   And let us know if you or someone you know wants to be added to our distribution list.

·       “Insulate, Curtail, Compete: Sketching a U.S. Grand Strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean”   Ryan Berg/Center for Strategic and International Studies

This comprehensive report looks at US strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in the face of massive investment and political engagement by China in the region. In sketching the outline of a U.S. grand strategy in Latin America and the Caribbean, this report provides a framework within which to answer critical questions that remain unanswered in U.S. policymaking circles: which level of Chinese engagement the United States should permit versus what it should seek to curtail, as well as the necessarily circumscribed areas where U.S. competition should be resource-backed, well thought out, and creatively messaged. The report offers three categories for thinking through the terms of engagement with China in Latin America and the Caribbean: insulation, curtailment, and competition.

·       “Rinse and Repeat: Iran accelerates its cyber influence operation worldwide” Microsoft on the Issues (Microsoft Blog)

In a recent posting by Microsoft looking at adversarial nation-state cyber activity, the company looks at Iran.  Microsoft has detected these efforts rapidly accelerating since June 2022.  They attributed 24 unique cyber-enabled influence operations to the Iranian government last year – including 17 from June to December – compared to just seven in 2021. Though Iran’s techniques may have changed, its targets have not. These operations remain focused on Israel, prominent Iranian opposition figures and groups, and Tehran’s Gulf state adversaries. More broadly speaking, Iran directed nearly a quarter (23%) of its cyber operations against Israel between October 2022 and March 2023, with the United States, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia also bearing the brunt of these efforts. You can access the full Microsoft Threat Intelligence Report HERE.

·       “The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chian Hack Ever”  Wired

The attackers were in thousands of corporate and government networks. They might still be there now. When investigators finally cracked it, they were blown away by the hack’s complexity and extreme premeditation. Two years on, however, the picture they’ve assembled—or at least what they’ve shared publicly—is still incomplete. A full accounting of the campaign’s impact on federal systems and what was stolen has never been provided to the public or lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Here is a behind the scenes  look at the SolarWinds investigation.

·       “Pandemic labor force participation and net worth fluctuations” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

In this working paper by the Economic Research team at the St. Louis Fed, they note U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) experienced a record drop during the early pandemic. While it has since recovered to 62.2% as of December 2022, it was still 1.41 percent below its pre-pandemic peak. This gap is explained mostly by a permanent decline in the LFPR for workers older than 55. This paper argues that wealth effects driven by the historically high returns in major asset classes such as stocks and housing may have influenced these trends. Combining an estimated model of wealth effects on labor supply with micro data on balance sheet composition, we show that changes in net worth caused by realized returns explain half of the drop in LFPR in the 2020-21 period and over 80% of "excess retirements'' during the same period.

Chart of the Week 

Young adults in the US are less likely than those in most of Europe to live in their parents’ home 

In a Pew Research Center survey released on May 3rd, only one-in-three US adults aged 18 to 34 live in their parent’s home (per U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021). 

In Europe, the numbers are quite different.  According to the survey, more than seven-in-ten adults in that age group live with their parents in the countries of Croatia (77%), Greece (73%), Portugal (72%), Serbia (71%), and Italy (71%).

On the other end of the spectrum, fewer than one-in-five young adults in the Scandinavian countries of Finland (18%), Sweden (17%), and Denmark (16%) live with their parents.

Overall, countries in southern and eastern Europe tend to have higher rates of young adults living in their parents’ homes than countries in northern and western Europe, a difference that may reflect both cultural factors, such as social norms and family ties, and structural factors, such as housing markets and welfare systems.