On a recent visit to Salt Lake City, Alexander Dyck ordered Chinese takeout and received a branded fortune cookie wishing him wealth and promoting FTX, presumably packaged before the crypto empire’s epic collapse. “I should have saved it,” he said regretfully.

Mr. Dyck is a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, who just published a provocative new study on the pervasiveness of corporate fraud. The study has been passed around in the world of academia in recent weeks, and has become a fascination among general counsels, corporate leaders and investors.

It suggests that only about a third of frauds in public companies actually come to light, and that fraud is disturbingly common. Mr. Dyck and his co-authors estimate that about 40 percent of companies are committing accounting violations and that 10 percent are committing what is considered securities fraud, destroying 1.6 percent of equity value each year — about $830 billion in 2021.

“What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is,” Dyck said about his study, which was published in the Review of Accounting Studies this month.

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Just How Common Is Corporate Fraud? New research by Prof. Alexander Dyck and colleagues via @el72champs @dealbook “What people don’t get is how widespread the problem of corporate fraud is.” https://t.co/pKIrdc3D9r

— Rotman School (@rotmanschool) January 14, 2023

The farm labor history of California has often been told through the plight of agricultural laborers during the Depression era and the efforts, beginning in the early 1960s, of the United Farm Workers to improve working conditions of Mexicans in the fields.

But to Lloyd Barba, a professor of religion at Amherst College, this history isn’t complete without factoring in religion, particularly the stories of California’s Mexican farmworkers who embraced Pentecostalism, a Christian movement generally seen at the time as a “distasteful new sect” with “cultish and fanatical tendencies.”

“I think about how often Latino history is told as labor history, and that makes sense … but where are the laborers going?” Barba said. “If we’re going to get a more balanced and accurate Latino history, we have to look at Latino religious life.”

In his recently released book, Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California, Barba writes about the Mexican and Mexican American Pentecostal agricultural workers who built houses of worship in the state’s agricultural towns, who turned to “divine healing” for injuries they sustained working in the fields and whose worship style inspired civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to incorporate music and singing in his union organizing.

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Pentecostal laborers built houses of worship, turned to “divine healing” for injuries, and inspired Cesar Chavez to incorporate music into his organizing.https://t.co/ZkaDRVxOPB

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) January 23, 2023

In 1904, 180 Americans were trapped by fire in a Pennsylvania coal mine. Two heroes went in to save them, but the rescuers and all but one of the miners perished. Still, that act of heroism touched one of the richest Americans, a man whose steel mills were fired by coal. Andrew Carnegie donated more than $100 million, in today’s money, to recognize heroes in the U.S. and Canada. As we first reported in 2021 — a good deal has changed in 118 years; thousands have been awarded the Carnegie Hero Medal and advances in neuroscience are revealing why some of us may be heroic. We’ll get to the science, but first, meet some of the Carnegie Heroes, including Terryann Thomas.

Terryann Thomas: I remember thinking just almost instantly, “I am not gonna let somebody die.”

Terryann Thomas was a civilian overseeing confiscated property at the headquarters of the Topeka Police Department. In 2015, an agitated man came into the basement property room to demand his bicycle. Thomas turned to find it.

Terryann Thomas: As soon as I turned around and started to walk off, I heard a scream.

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Republicans, who have newly taken control of the House of Representatives, say that they cannot abide runaway spending and must rein it in. This deep concern appears episodic. When Donald Trump was president, the debt ceiling was increased three times with Republican support, and the national debt rose by $8trn over his term ($3.2trn of which came before covid-induced spending began in 2020). Those increases were not particularly contentious, and the White House wishes the same for this one. “Raising the debt ceiling is not a negotiation; it is an obligation of this country and its leaders to avoid economic chaos,” Mr Biden’s press secretary said in a statement released on January 20th.

But it may not be so simple. Republicans are unlikely to let their leverage over Mr Biden lapse. Kevin McCarthy squeaked into his position of Republican speaker of the House by promising many concessions to hardliners, including pledging extreme brinkmanship over the debt ceiling. Mr McCarthy has vowed to secure spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit, and pledged to put the country on the path to a balanced budget in a decade. As part of his bargain to attain power, the beleaguered speaker also had to allow a parliamentary manoeuvre that would make his own removal easier. Mr McCarthy may not be able to keep his promises, in which case his own party could end his speakership in its first year.

This is forcing financiers, lawyers and officials to focus on the unthinkable. The starting point of such contingency planning is that a sovereign default would be cataclysmic: in all likelihood stocks would plunge, borrowing costs would soar, growth would suffer and the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency would be shaken. Any way to avoid this series of disasters merits attention. The problem, unfortunately, is that each proposed workaround has severe—and quite possibly unworkable—drawbacks.

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Most games of chicken do not have trillion-dollar stakes. But such a spectacle is common in America https://t.co/18TkzGkAnt

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 23, 2023

O everlasting God, who didst reveal truth to thy servant Phillips Brooks, and didst so form and mold his mind and heart that he was able to mediate that truth with grace and power: Grant, we pray, that all whom thou dost call to preach the Gospel may steep themselves in thy word, and conform their lives to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O Lord God, suffer us not to lean to our own wisdom, nor to believe as blind flesh fancieth, nor to seek salvation where superstition dreameth; but let our faith only be grounded on Thy Word, and give us grace truly to believe in Thee, with all our heart to put our trust in Thee, to look for all good things of Thee, to call upon Thy blessed Name in adversity, and with joyful voices and more merry hearts to praise and magnify it in prosperity.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

Paul an apostle–not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead–and all the brethren who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father; to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel–not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.

–Galatians 1:1-7