10 Thursday AM Reads

December 17, 2015 8:30am by

My first morning train reads of the post ZIRP era:

• Commodities Bust? Love It! (Bloomberg)
• Elegant Design: How Would Steve Jobs Design Income? (Research Affiliates)
• Momentum Investing Predates the Civil War (Irrelevant Investor) see also The History of the Black-Scholes Formula (Priceonomics)
• Checking Out a Paycheck Mystery: An upward revision last month to government figures on workers’ pay left a mystery: Where did the gain come from? (WSJ)
• Slack and the State of Technology at the end of 2015 (Stratechery)

Continues here

 

 

 

 

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Discussions found on the web:
    • Iamthe50percent commented on Dec 17

      Interesting, so both parties would screw retirees with IRA’s and 401k’s.

    • VennData commented on Dec 17

      Yeah, except for the Democrats

  2. Molesworth commented on Dec 17

    The Research Affiliates article is funny.
    Look! We’re like Steve Jobs. We’ve got the same charts and everything.

  6. Jojo commented on Dec 17

    A History of Money
    Why Very Low Interest Rates May Stick Around
    Neil Irwin
    DEC. 14, 2015

    The Federal Reserve will most likely raise interest rates this week for the first time in nearly a decade. To understand what it means — and doesn’t mean — consider a previous year in which interest rates were on the rise.

    In 1920, borrowing costs soared to their highest levels since the end of the Civil War. Some people were terrified of what it was doing to the economy. Higher rates “would practically legalize usury,” a real estate trade group warned. A Democratic senator complained that “manufacturers, merchants and businessmen are entitled to stability” after a steep rise in rates. The Federal Reserve was “confronted with conditions more or less abnormal,” acknowledged a governor of the central bank, William P. G. Harding.

    The interest rate that caused this anxiety? A mere 5.4 percent on the 10-year United States Treasury note — lower than the rates during the entirety of the 1980s and most of the 1990s.

    …

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/upshot/why-very-low-interest-rates-may-stick-around.html

  7. Jojo commented on Dec 17

    The awakened force of a star
    17 December 2015

    Perfectly timed for the release of “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens”, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a cosmic double-bladed lightsabre. In the centre of the image, partially obscured by a dark Jedi-like cloak of dust, an adolescent star shoots twin jets out into space, demonstrating the fearsome forces of the Universe

    This celestial lightsabre lies not in a galaxy far, far away, but within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. More precisely, it resides within a turbulent patch of space known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, which is located just over 1350 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter).

    Bearing a striking resemblance to Darth Maul’s double-bladed lightsabre in Star Wars Episode One, the spectacular twin jets of material slicing across this incredible image are spewing out from a newly formed star that is obscured from view, cloaked by swirling dust and gas.

    ….

    http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1526/

  8. winstongator commented on Dec 17

    A little over 15 years ago, The Sopranos started on HBO. That is the line I remember when cable TV shows flexed their creativity and freedom. It’s been a pretty rapid march for me to watching little to no network TV shows.

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