The news flow never stops, and neither do we: Our hand curated morning train reads:
• Drinking Through A Diversity Hangover: What if investors don’t want diversity in asset management? (CIO)
• Things People Say During a Bull Market (A Wealth of Common Sense) see also How I learned to stop worrying and love the missing CapEx (Humble Student of the Markets)
• Millennials Are Moving Out of Basements and Into Apartments (Bloomberg) but see also Homeownership Rate Is Now the Lowest Since 1989, But There’s a Silver Lining (Real Time Economics)
• The supervillain’s guide to saving the internet (Fredrik deBoer)
• NFL Gives Up Tax Break to Keep Its Secrets (BV) see also NFL Will End Its Tax-Exempt Status, Goodell Tells Owners (Bloomberg)
What are you reading?
We may be getting closer to the end game of what started in 2000. The financial sector is beginning to whine big time over their pay. When I started looking hard at the economy in the 2008 financial crisis, it became very obvious that the financial sector was grossly bloated in just about every conceivable way. The major bailouts prevented it from simply exploding like a pricked balloon, so instead it has been slowly deflating back to a state where it can resume a productive role in the economy without sucking the rest of the economy dry. I figured in 2008 that the financial sector would need to shrink by half to two-thirds before the rest of the economy could fully recover. That would include head count, total payroll, market cap, and percent of GDP. It looks like we are slowly getting there.
The Wall Streeters are whining about how regulation is crimping their style. It appears that they still really don’t understand that responsible parents don’t let 6-year olds play with matches and gasoline because they will start out-of-control fires, like Wall Street did in 2008. The public has seen no evidence that the financial sector is willingly reforming their game. Instead, we see a constant parade of arrogant psychopathic market fixers getting exposed.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-29/we-thought-our-pay-would-be-higher-wall-streeters-say-in-poll
This is a classic example of income ratcheting and the rationalization of rent seeking behavior to support salaries and bonus’ that were out of line to begin with. Responsible parents don’t let their kids play T ball when they turn 8 years old or let them whine that the game has gotten too hard….
It’s nice that “economists” agree TPP is good for all of us plebs, but how can they agree when they haven’t seen anything that wasn’t pushed out via Wikileaks? I mean, I understand Americans are “worse than ignorant”, but not even allowing honest debate among our elected representatives on this, and keeping it all a big secret just seems like the opposite of democracy.
A simple rule – if they won’t let you read the contract – WALK AWAY!
U.S. Economy Stalls in First Quarter
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-29/economy-in-u-s-stalls-on-slump-in-business-spending-exports
Without a massive inventory build – presumably due to oil – growth would have been negative, and significantly so.
Naturally I expect “markets” to rally further into record territory on this news as perpetual “temporary, emergency” monetary policy is priced in for the umpteenth time. Orwell would be horrified by the world we’re living in.
Did you participate at all in the run-up?
Why is that when discussing the overt manipulation and doublespeak associated with today’s capital markets people always ask this question? It’s totally immaterial, as I have said on this blog many times.
If I participated in the run-up – which is none of your business either way – does that mean I don’t have the right to point out how crooked things are?
Inner city parental involvement is rare, based on my wife’s inner city school teaching experience. Please note that she is a single parent – most of these kids don’t have fathers in their lives. The War on Drugs and Three Strikes laws for minor drug offences have laid waste to an entire generation.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/baltimore-mother-toya-graham-on-why-she-smacked-son-i-dont-want-him-to-be-a-freddie-gray/
never mind that being a single parent means that all of the parents must be working.
Actually, the ones that are working are often the ones most engaged with their children.
Nobody Knows: Which industry will you change forever? (buzzfeed http://bzfd.it/1JAEGtp)
A solar future isn’t just likely — it’s inevitable (vox http://bit.ly/1DBieb7) Moore’s law for solar, did i read that here? anyhoo 10 years ago people were saying you need to cover entire states in panels to be the equilvalent of …
Uber Is Quietly Testing A Massive Merchant Delivery Program (techcrunch http://tcrn.ch/1ODSPJv)
did anyone watch The Wire? baldimer, charm city lol
Cullen Roche attacks the underlying philosophy of the Austrian school of economics; namely that greed is inherently good and beneficial.
http://www.pragcap.com/free-markets-over-morals
Republican clowns worried about Obama military takeover in where else, Texas!
http://news.yahoo.com/texas-governor-tells-state-guard-monitor-army-training-210305780.html
Remember the Clinton “Black helicopter” talk? Same nonsense.
These are your base GOPers.
Your name is inscribed on this bullet, truly!
————–
New Homing Bullets Can Hit Moving Targets
By Carl Engelking | April 28, 2015
If there’s an overarching theme for weapons research at the U.S. Department of Defense research agency DARPA it’s this: You can run, but you can’t hide.
DARPA researchers have recently tested homing bullets that maneuver themselves in-flight to hit moving targets from long distance. Researchers first tested the Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) earlier this year, and expert, as well as novice, marksmen consistently hit a target from hundreds of yards away.
…
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/04/28/homing-bullets-moving-targets/
If You Think the Water Crisis Can’t Get Worse, Wait Until the Aquifers Are Drained
We’re pumping irreplaceable groundwater to counter the drought. When it’s gone, the real crisis begins.
By Dennis Dimick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED August 21, 2014
Aquifers provide us freshwater that makes up for surface water lost from drought-depleted lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. We are drawing down these hidden, mostly nonrenewable groundwater supplies at unsustainable rates in the western United States and in several dry regions globally, threatening our future.
We are at our best when we can see a threat or challenge ahead. If flood waters are rising, an enemy is rushing at us, or a highway exit appears just ahead of a traffic jam, we see the looming crisis and respond.
We are not as adept when threats—or threatened resources—are invisible. Some of us have trouble realizing why invisible carbon emissions are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and warming the planet. Because the surface of the sea is all we see, it’s difficult to understand that we already have taken most of the large fish from the ocean, diminishing a major source of food. Neither of these crises are visible—they are largely out of sight, out of mind—so it’s difficult to get excited and respond. Disappearing groundwater is another out-of-sight crisis.
Groundwater comes from aquifers—spongelike gravel and sand-filled underground reservoirs—and we see this water only when it flows from springs and wells. In the United States we rely on this hidden—and shrinking—water supply to meet half our needs, and as drought shrinks surface water in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, we rely on groundwater from aquifers even more. Some shallow aquifers recharge from surface water, but deeper aquifers contain ancient water locked in the earth by changes in geology thousands or millions of years ago. These aquifers typically cannot recharge, and once this “fossil” water is gone, it is gone forever—potentially changing how and where we can live and grow food, among other things.
…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140819-groundwater-california-drought-aquifers-hidden-crisis/
The Oglalla and similar aquifers in the mid-West and the California aquifers were replenished during the last continental glaciation period when the south and southwest had temperate climates similar to today’s northeast US. That water isn’t coming back until the next ice sheet covers Chicago.
and those aquifers are one of the arguments against the XL pipeline. cause its going through some of them. and if a pipeline were to break (like they tend to do) that will make that water useless. never to return. leading to major loss of farm land, and loss in food.
Here’s where the existing oil and refined products pipelines are. The Oglalla Aquifer has lots of them running over it now. Petroleum products are typically lighter than water, fairly viscous, and bio-degrade, so they are not a major hazard to groundwater although the same properties make them disastrous in surface water. Chemical and industrial plants that make and use solvents, especially chlorinated solvents, are generally far more devastating to water supplies.
http://www.api.org/~/media/files/oil-and-natural-gas/pipeline/us-pipeline-map-api-website3.pdf
The only reason pipelines ‘break’ is because they are not maintained properly.
If commercial aircraft were ‘maintained’ like oil pipelines, it would be back to the 1980’s! *
http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/oil-leak-is-latest-mishap-for-troubled-alaska-pipeline-system
* airline crash every 4-6 weeks; including two of the ten worst disasters
New lows from congress:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/29/predatory-lending-military_n_7171748.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/28/cia-torture-report_n_7154964.html
Bill Gates as a predicted of the future.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-15-predictions-in-1999-2015-4?op=1
I wonder how many of these things he knew were being developed at the time he made the predictions.
If you help shape the future of technology it would be a lot easier to predict the future of technology, never the less an impressive feat that .
It wasn’t that Gates was necessarily building the future, but he was definitely paying attention to the people who were. Hhis predictions date from 1999. The internet had been around for over 25 years. Compuserve had been out forever. Usenet had been running for over ten. People had been talking about and working towards these ideas since the late 1940s. One of the reasons Al Gore pushed to open the internet to commerce and the general public was that he was following the same scene as Gates. Everyone understood the potential.