10 Monday AM Reads

February 23, 2015 7:00am by

Welcome back to the last full work week of the shortest month of the year. Start it off right with these morning train reads:

• Dear Silicon Valley: Here’s your wake-up call (Business Insider)
• The active fund management model is not fit for purpose (FT) see also Why Active Management Fell Off a Cliff – Perhaps Permanently (Reformed Broker)
• Forget the tech bubble. It’s the biotech bubble you should worry about (Quartz)
• Paulsen: Look Deeper at Valuations (Guru Investor)
• Marketing Is Dead, and Loyalty Killed It (Harvard Business Review)

Continues here

 

 

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  1. Concerned Neighbour commented on Feb 23

    I believe I posted that Wellscap paper on this very blog not long – and about 120 S&P 500 points lower – ago. Meanwhile profit growth for the S&P 500 is now expected to be negative for the first quarter. I must have missed when that was priced in.

    Mr. Paulsen suggests we get into international stocks, which is fascinating. To be sure, European and Japanese stocks are practically going up 1% daily as “investors” celebrate deflation, huge and growing debt burdens, and mediocre to negative earnings/revenue growth.

    The central bank training of “investors” is truly magnificent; Pavlov would be proud. But in so doing, they dare not ever upset the apple cart, so we’ll have NIRP for a long, long time, and probably a few more rounds of QE for good measure. If we think stocks are bubblish now (they are), I suspect we haven’t seen nothing yet.

    • VennData commented on Feb 23

      Ahh… more predictions.

      How many more rounds of QE? Infinity? Three? four? Is that your prediction? S&P earnings will drop this year? Make sure to remind us, either way.

    • Concerned Neighbour commented on Feb 23

      We are seven years into the recovery, and central banks worldwide are doing a record amount of cumulative QE. The recovery is so strong that most central banks are easing further/increasing QE, not tightening. So yes, NIRP and QE infinity.

      If the Fed increases interest rates this year, feel free to pile on the crow. It’s not going to happen. If anything I expect it’s more likely we’ll start hearing rumors of QE4 in the 4th quarter.

  3. VennData commented on Feb 23

    Congress still has no plan to prevent a shutdown

    http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-still-has-no-plan-to-prevent-a-shutdown-2015-2

    ​While Jihadists are on TV threatening to gun malls, the GOP can’t think of anything but stopping Obama’s talking points.

    ​The GOP is the problem in America.

    If you think otherwise imagine Obama holding up funding of Homeland Security right now. Infuriate you? Yeah, well that is MADE UP… like all the other impeachable offenses that were MADE UP.

    The GOP hold up, stall, shut down, and cut taxes in the face of more debts because of their “ideology”

    Wake up GOP Voter. YOU are screwing up our country. GO! Do a personal tax inversion and screw up some other country. Stop voting. Get out. America, Love it or leave it.

    And take Rudy Guliani with you. The man loves Putin, an ENEMY of America.

    http://www.salon.com/2014/03/04/rudy_giuliani_unlike_obama_putin_is_“what_you_call_a_leader”/

    ANYONE who loves our enemy and accuses OUR Cmmander-in-Chief of not loving our country is the guy who does not love his country. Rudy Guliani is not fit to be mayor of anything. He is an ass. He is Mayor Ass. The Mayor of Assland.

    Leave America Guliani lovers. Go someplace with no taxes. Take your articles of impeachment and your Fox News nonsense and leave!

    Go to your Ayn Rand paradise, use Rubles, and impeach yourself.

    • VennData commented on Feb 23

      People against tax inversions don’t love their country

      – Rudy Guiliani

  7. RW commented on Feb 23

    Robert Samuelson on History, Inequality, and Productivity

    Robert Samuelson was inspired by a graph in the new Economic Report of the President to tell readers that the real problem for the middle class is not inequality but rather productivity growth. His point is that if we had kept up the Golden Age (1943-1973) rates of productivity growth it would have mattered much more to middle income families living standards than the rise in inequality since 1980.

    This is true in the sense of if I were six feet five inches, I would be taller than I am, ….

    NB: Yes it’s just another Monday and Robert Samuelson is, as usual, confused about facts and the economy but his column today is sufficiently loaded with factual error, non sequitur and misdirection that a few points beyond Dean Baker’s detailed take-down linked above seem worthy of mention:
    (1) confidently stated, plausible-sounding assertions crafted into well-constructed prose requires a certain degree of skill;
    (2) practicing that skill when ignorant or biased may not be particularly malicious; e.g, dunning-kruger effect, bullshitting or just holding down a lucrative gig by writing what pleases the owner(s) of a newspaper, however;
    (3) it still seems important to remember practicing that skill is a key element of     affinity fraud — the art of gaining trust with the intent to betray it — and the line between derp and evil is not necessarily sharp and bright.

    • VennData commented on Feb 23

      Guess which “problem” the Republicans are going to “solve”

      Go ahead. Guess.

      GOP voter. I invite you to go do your personal tax inversion to the nation of your choice. Hurry before the next election.

    • VennData commented on Feb 23

      Send your unemployed to go fight to protect Saudi Arabia from their Sunni neighbors

  10. Jojo commented on Feb 23

    Vox
    Monday, February 23, 2015
    Hot days are worse than cold ones, and this economics research proves it
    Updated by Matthew Yglesias on February 16, 2015

    Everybody talks about the weather. But now someone has subjected it to rigorous mathematical analysis to produce important conclusions about economic growth. Specifically Tatyana Deryugina and Solomon Hsiang find that hot days are bad for the economy — not just in poor countries with an overwhelmingly agricultural workforce, but in the United States of America. Here in the US, “productivity of individual days declines roughly 1.7% for each 1.8°F increase in temperature above 59°F.” That means that “a weekday above 30°C (86°F) costs an average county $20 per person.”

    ….

    http://www.vox.com/2015/2/16/8046031/extreme-cold-extreme-heat

  13. Robert M commented on Feb 23

    Let’s hear it for the V-JER’s!
    Around the Solar System: We currently have spacecraft in orbit around the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, a comet, and Saturn, and two operational rovers on Mars. All of them keep sending back spectacular photos (The Atlantic)

  15. intlacct commented on Feb 24

    Venn in fine fettle today!

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