10 Friday AM Reads

November 20, 2015 7:30am by

Markets continue to shake off externalities and are powering forward into the expected December rate hike. End your week right with our morning train reads:

• Ben Bernanke on bubbles, bitcoin, and why he’s not a Republican anymore (Quartz)
• Buffett’s Grandson Seeks Own Investment Route: Social Change (NYT)
• My Dangerously Selective Memeory (Bacon Asset)
• Land Rover Defender Ends 70-Year Run Ferrying Farmers and Royals (Bloomberg) see also The Last Land Rover Defenders Are Rolling Off the Production Line (Bloomberg)
• Two Gorgeous Spiral Galaxies Just Because (Slate) see also Local supernova 2 million years ago solves cosmic ray puzzle (New Scientist)

Continues here

 

 

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  1. VennData commented on Nov 20

    Trump says he would ‘absolutely’ implement a database to track Muslims

    http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wants-to-create-a-muslim-database-2015-11

    What about one to track guns?

    Because Muslims could hire Christians to do their mass killings, Or Atheists. And what if a Muslim leaves the faith? How long do we keep tracking her? And what if a child is born to a Muslim family but swears he’s not a Muslim but they make him go to Mosque and Saturday school?

    And while i can’t speak to whether it’s constitutional to track someone based on their religious faith I know guns don’t have a religion.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 20

      Maybe he will make them wear yellow armbands with a star and crescent.

    • rd commented on Nov 20

      Actually, I think many of the thousands of gun deaths in the US each year are caused by Christians. It should be simple to institute a Christian database as well as the Muslim database at the same time. The logical thing would be to add a check box of Muslim/Christian/Jewish/Other right after filing status on income tax returns. It could be marketed as a fund raising tool for political parties and religious institutions with Trump’s Treasury just taking a small percentage cut as a fee.

      Then people can walk around on the streets wearing little crescents, crosses, or stars so people can know which class to be wary of for different potential offences.

      I can’t imagine that any First Amendment rights would be violated by any of these suggestions.

    • VennData commented on Nov 20

      I think the Jews should run the database. I met this Jew who knew computers. At least he looked Jewish.

      The reason American is failing and the World is on Fire is because either your with us, or against us. I support the Christians. Do you? It seemed other people on this site don’t.

      Did I mention I’m angry?

    • VennData commented on Nov 20

      I want phone meta data tracked. I don’t care if the NSA knows I called a pizza place.

      It’s so typical of The Right to blame others, not take responsibility and not want any restrictions on THEIR freedom. Recall those oldsters wearing the USS Ronald Reagan caps furious they were being searched by TSA getting on a plane.

      White people shoot people too, go to a college campus to see.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 20

      Well, I do! And I don’t want them listening to political conversations. Fourth Amendment! Bush recorded every conservation in Northern California for six months. This includes all of Nancy Pelosi’s conversations. The federal government is not supposed to be Big Brother.

  2. VennData commented on Nov 20

    Here are the colors of the Mali flag to put on your FB page.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Mali

    Oh, you only care about France? And white people being murdered?

    Well listen, let’s treat people equally, the way the US Constitution says. Apply our principles globally, what do you say?

    And maybe “Boots on the Ground” radicalize more people. At least that’s what’s happened when Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. And Israel refuses to cut a deal with Palestinians. And the UK and US support of the Shah… Seeing a pattern here?

  4. VennData commented on Nov 20

    How do these CNBC guests and Joe Kernan look themselves in the mirror after claiming “the reason there’s not enough investment is the cost of capital is too low,” how?

    So if it goes up then there will be more investment? Ridiculous.

    Only in Supply Side economic echo chamber can they convince each other then shout; “Reagan!”

    Supply Siders shout “Quadrupled the debt ending in the SL debacle” after you shout “Reagan!” please.

    • mitchn commented on Nov 20

      Kernan is an idiot.

  7. Jojo commented on Nov 20

    How A Monster Year For Amazon, Google And Facebook Is Carrying The Stock Market
    By Steve Schaefer
    November 16, 2015 9:25 AM

    There are 500 companies* in the S&P 500, but 2015 has been a year for the top 1%. Five companies — Amazon.com, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Facebook and General Electric — have collective returns that account for more than the entire return of the index year-to-date, according to a note from Goldman Sachs. The sharp rally in just a few stocks is just as much cause for concern as reason for excitement though.

    Excluding the aforementioned quintet, the S&P 500 would be down 2.2% this year, instead of being virtually flat, up 0.1%. Goldman’s chief U.S. equity strategist and the firm’s portfolio strategy research team note that narrow market breadth, with just a handful of strong performers carrying the load for a slew of weaker performers, tends to favor high-quality stocks with strong balance sheets and lower volatility.

    …

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/monster-amazon-google-facebook-carrying-142500849.html

  8. Jojo commented on Nov 20

    Surveying the Ghost Cities of China
    Nov 19, 2015

    China has been building like crazy. Parallel to rapid, gargantuan urbanization — 300 million Chinese people moved to the city from the country in the past 2 decades — land development and construction has boomed. As Vaclav Smil has noted, from 2011 to 2013, 6.6 billion tons of concrete were used in China — that’s about 2 billion tons more than were used in the United States over the entire 20th century.

    But as it turns out, even in China, 6.6 billion tons of concrete might be too much concrete.

    Much of that concrete has gone into constructing new, large scale urban projects. Now, many of the buildings in these budding metropolises lie empty. They’re called “ghost cities,” but whereas “ghost towns” are usually abandoned boom towns, China’s ghost cities were never alive in the first place. These towns are still waiting for their boom to happen, either organically, or through intervention of the state.

    …

    http://priceonomics.com/surveying-the-ghost-cities-of-china/

  11. ilsm commented on Nov 21

    Department of defending the narrative.

    ISIL gets a lot of money from other than black market oil, and it is related to Persian Gulf energy profits.

    War profits drive a lot of selling of displaced strategy. Every analysis in the military industrial complex is skewed to sell more bombs.

    Analysis defending the narrative the analyses defend.

    US DoD(defendingthe narrative).

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