10 Sunday AM Reads

November 22, 2015 7:30am by

My easy like Sunday morning reads:

• The Generation That Doesn’t Remember Life Before Smartphones (Popular Mechanics)
• Rate-Hike Certainty Sends Stocks Soaring (Barron’s)
• Is the Surge in Stock Buybacks Good or Evil? Companies are on track to purchase the highest number of their own shares since the crisis (WSJ)
• Housing Analogies, Nerd Style (Miller Samuel)
• Intel Lawsuit Questions Place of Hedge Funds in Retirement Plans (NYT) see also Why Pensions and Hedge Funds Don’t Mix (NYT)
• Faulty Assumptions (Wealth of Common Sense)
• GOP Candidates Have It All Wrong on Community Banks’ Demise (American Banker)
• Crowdfunding or Crowdphishing? (Project Syndicate)
• Surveying the Ghost Cities of China (Priceonomics)
• The media hyped up a nationwide crime wave. A new report proves it’s bunk. (Vox)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with NYU Prof Scott Galloway

 

 

It’s Spanish for “The Niño”

Source: Bloomberg

 

 

 

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What's been said:

Discussions found on the web:
  1. DeDude commented on Nov 22

    “Projections from pension plan managers that high-octane hedge funds can make up for any gaps relieves the pressure on delinquent politicians to make the required deposits”

    Exactly. A scam like hedge funds does not grow to 3 trillions simply from greed and an inability to do simple math. Short term thinking politicians are more than willing to ignore all the evidence and just let the crazy hedge fund promises guide projections of future investment incomes. They worry about the next election, not about the long-term stability of the public pension fund. The biggest failure here is with the regulators who allow pension funds to use the hugely overblown projections given by the hedge funds to be used in calculations of needed contributions. Given the lack of information from hedge funds all projections should be base on the average returns over the past decade. But I guess that the regulators who instituted such common sense approach would not get a fat retirement job with a hedge fund.

    • DeDude commented on Nov 22

      that is “average returns for the industry”

  3. Molesworth commented on Nov 22

    Ought not that read Spanish for The Baby Boys?

    • just-sayin commented on Nov 22

      El Nino is a word for boy as opposed to La Nina which is a girl. The years where the Pacific is colder than normal are called La Nina years.

  4. CD4P commented on Nov 22

    Hmmmmm: Unless the readings are skewed by the 2015 measurements being taken in the vicinity of an ocean floor lava vent, the January data shows a difference of approximately 2 degrees F. Given how vast the oceans are that’s quite an amount of energy the oceans have absorbed in 18 years.

    If a climate change advocate wants advance their cause, determine the amount of energy gained by the oceans in the last 18 years and then put that in terms of more everyday things!

  5. Jojo commented on Nov 22

    For Auto Enthusiasts, the Right to Tinker With Cars’ Software
    By BARRY MEIER and JAD MOUAWAD
    NOV. 22, 2015

    Car owners in the United States can soon play Volkswagen engineer, courtesy of the federal government.

    Last month, officials gave auto enthusiasts who want to beef up their car’s performance the right to tinker with vehicle software without incurring the legal wrath of carmakers. The decision was one of many changes to a federal copyright law, including allowing people to “jailbreak” their mobile phones and reprogram older video games.

    Digital-rights activists have applauded the changes, which are scheduled to take effect next year. But environmental regulators and carmakers have warned that the decision opens a new front in a cat-and-mouse game with car lovers who soup up their engines — perhaps violating emissions standards.

    …

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/23/business/for-auto-enthusiasts-the-right-to-tinker-with-cars-software.html

  6. Jojo commented on Nov 22

    San Francisco real estate looking like it did before dot-com crash in 2000
    By Daniel Goldstein
    Published: Nov 21, 2015 8:37 a.m. ET

    Surging rents, skyrocketing real-estate prices and booming tech companies. Sounds like San Francisco in 2015, right? It also describes the city just before the tech bust of 2000, according to a recent report.

    John Burns Real Estate Consulting of Irvine, Calif., and Pacific Union, a San Francisco real-estate brokerage, say that based on the appreciation (and apparent correlation) of venture capital deals and rent prices, the rise in the Bay Area’s rapid real estate and rent price appreciation today is looking more like a repeat of the dot-com bust of 2000.

    “The San Francisco Bay Area is on our watch list for a correction,” said John Burns, his company’s chief executive, in an interview. He said that while San Francisco has become a permanently more expensive place to live and should be one of the most expensive places to live in the world because of its status as the center of the high-tech and Internet economy, the recent increases in home prices and rents have been fueled mainly by speculation.

    ….

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/san-francisco-real-estate-looking-like-it-did-before-dotcom-crash-in-2000-2015-11-20

  7. Bill commented on Nov 22

    I love the Chris Farley reference. Well done…

  9. rd commented on Nov 23

    Political correctness gone wild on campus – free yoga class cancelled because it culturally oppresses India: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/university-ottawa-yoga-cultural-sensitivity-1.3330441

    The same students are going to be stunned they learn that can’t go out to drink beer on a Friday night anymore as they will be culturally oppressing ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians by culturally appropriating this beverage. In addition, beer was also a common breakfast food for centuries in Britain as it was less likely to make you sick than water (the opposite of a typical Friday night on campus) as well as delivering carbs for energy for ploughing the fields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer

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