10 Friday AM Reads

March 27, 2015 7:45am by

Where does the time go? Its already Friday, and we present the finest morning train reads in the land:

• In US Small-Caps, Quality Is on Sale (AB Global) see also This is nothing like the 2000 dot-com bubble (MarketWatch)
• Hedge Funds: Don’t Call Us a Hedge Fund (WSJ)
• Silicon Valley is seizing the customers: Instead of building for others, companies are doing more for themselves (FT)
• Fed Shouldn’t Raise Rates Yet Because Job Market Still Ailing (Real Time Economics) see also As Dollar Heats Up Overseas, U.S. Manufacturers Feel a Chill (NYT)
• Meet Periscope, Twitter’s New Live Video App (Buzzfeed)

Continues here

 

 

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  1. RW commented on Mar 27

    The NYT’s piece on an expensive dollar “chilling” American manufacturing is rather misleading in that it implies US manufacturing was okay before: It wasn’t; exports were not a driver of recovery before and things are just getting colder now.

    Contrary to What You Read in the NYT, Net Exports Have Been a Drag on Growth in the Recovery.

    …it is net exports that contribute to GDP, not exports. Apparently this distinction is difficult for people involved in economic policy to understand since they keep making the same mistake.

    The point is straightforward. If the United States increases its exports because GM is exporting car parts to be assembled in Mexico and then imported back as a finished car to the United States, it will not be a net job creator.

  2. rd commented on Mar 27

    Re: An epidemic of behaving well

    Most of US history didn’t collect statistics, so it is hard to compare periods accurately. However, a few major things to note that indicate a golden age of good behavior is a figment of the imagination:

    1. Alcoholism was a significant enough problem in the late 1800s and early 1900s to result in a temperance movement that resulted in a constitutional ban on alcohol. That implies there were serious societal issues related to this.
    2. The wave of crime associated with bootleg liquor helped drive the repeal of Prohibition. There was no national organized crime before Prohibition, but we are still dealing with national and international crime syndicates that arose during Prohibition.
    3. Black Americans were held in slavery until the end of the Civil War. This destroyed family and tribal bonds as families were separated in Africa, upon initial sale in the US, and then again when individuals were sold by slave holders. The Jim Crow laws also forced disruption of family units. Most black Americans today would struggle to trace their families back more than a century or so.

    The US appears to believe that the “Leave it to Beaver” and “Waltons” era is the baseline for judging everything when, in reality, it was just a couple of decades after WW II that is actually an anomaly in US history.

  4. rd commented on Mar 27

    Areas that used to be glaciated are still rising:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-27/earth-s-surface-rising-as-ice-age-still-felt-from-u-s-to-europe

    Despite sea level rise, some areas still have land rising relative to water. Periodically over the past few centuries some northern areas have had new islands and portions of coastline emerge from the water. There is a whole body of law about what happens with new land (also applies to volcanic and tectonic movements).

    So the Canadian coastline, Maine, Scandinavia etc. are much less likely to be impacted by sea level rise over the next couple of centuries than un-glaciated areas like Florida etc.

    • VennData commented on Mar 27

      Boycott Notre Dame Athletics. Indianapolis Colts. Anything Andrew Luck advertises.

      Make the Republicans go elsewhere to find voters elsewhere than the snake handlers to manage their tax cuts for the rich.

    • rd commented on Mar 27

      Perception is reality. The medium is the message.

    • rd commented on Mar 27

      BTW – there is a decent chance that the “concerned citizens” calling the police on these unattended children have elected not to vaccinate their own children in order to “protect” them.

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