Friday's Fast Five: Week of 5.26

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Sam Zell about Investing and Business (25iq): Sam Zell was the founder and chairman of Equity Group Investments, which started in the real estate business that went on to own a range of businesses.  Sam Zell’s nickname is “the Grave Dancer” since he is often a distressed asset investor. This is a blog post about Sam Zell the investor.

The man in charge of knowing when the U.S. runs out of money (The Washington Post): More than $6 trillion flows out of the Treasury every year in payments, salaries and purchase orders, and more than $5 trillion flows in, mostly through tax collections and fees. Lebryk’s job is to make sure that these billions of transactions go smoothly.

Debt ceiling negotiators close to a deal, with IRS funding in the spotlight (CNBC): The White House and congressional negotiators were closing in on a compromise agreement on Friday to raise the debt ceiling for two years, with just six days to go before the nation faces a grave threat of debt default.

Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too. (The New York Times): The college graduates who fill white-collar jobs in the San Francisco area began to leave in growing numbers about a decade ago. In the New York area, long a net exporter of graduates, swelling losses have reinforced the trend: Educated workers, dating to even before the pandemic, have been migrating away from the most prosperous parts of the country.

Investing Book That Flopped 32 Years Ago Now Sells for Thousands (The Wall Street Journal): Fund manager Seth Klarman, now 65 years old, didn’t have especially high expectations when “Margin of Safety” was published back in 1991. Then his hedge fund, Baupost Group, racked up one of the greatest investment performances in the industry. Despite huge demand for pearls of wisdom from the publicity-shy investor, he has never reissued it. That has made the book both a cult classic and a collectors’ item.