10 Weekend Reads

February 28, 2015 7:00am by

Quite a week this was. Settle into to your favorite easy chair, pour yourself some fresh brewed Sumatra, and enjoy these longer form weekend reads:

• In Greenbacks We Trust (NYT Magazine)
• False Hope: Most trading strategies are not tested rigorously enough (The Economist)
• Dark Leviathan: The reluctant king of the hidden internet (Aeon)
• The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle (First Look)
• Poison Pill: How the American opiate epidemic was started by one pharmaceutical company. (Pacific Standard) see also Vitamins Are a Waste of Money—And They’re Not Helping You, Anyway (The Atlantic)
• Whatever happened to the teenage entrepreneurs whom Peter Thiel paid to forgo college? The Rich Man’s Dropout Club (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• What do you think about machines that think? (Edge)
• The CIA’s secret psychological profiles of dictators and world leaders are amazing (MoJo)
• One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake:  Meet the Ultimate WikiGnome (Medium) see also User: Giraffedata (Wikipedia)
• The Long, Strange Purgatory of Casey Kasem (GQ)

This weeks Masters in Business podcast is with Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading. (Full series is here).

 

S&P 500 Returns During the QE Era

Source: Bianco Research

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  2. rd commented on Feb 28

    “The most valuable part of the fellowship for many wasn’t the freedom or the money but the network they were plugged into. Although less structured in its early days, the fellowship now offers retreats, internships, summer housing, and teams of advisers who work in and around the industries to which the fellows aspire.”

    I assume that these types of benefits are available to pretty much anybody who is thinking of eschewing university and simply becoming an entrepreneur.

    A primary reason that the university degree has become essential for most employment is because corporate America has largely abandoned their internal apprenticeship and training programs. Instead they bemoan that they can’t hire enough qualified staff away form their competitors.

  6. RW commented on Feb 28

    Russia is sinking and the price of oil is the least of it.

    A Final Interview With Boris Nemtsov

    There are paramilitary militias, Goebbels-style propaganda and armaments. There is one leader and one party. Russia is becoming a fascist country — at least that’s what Boris Nemtsov told me a few hours before he was gunned down on Friday in central Moscow. His death came just two days before he was to speak at a major anti-government rally.

    Nobody knows who committed this horrific murder, but it is likely the result of a witch-hunt perpetrated by the Russian media and Kremlin leaders. At a so-called Anti-Maidan rally two weeks ago, pro-Putin thugs wearing paramilitary uniforms declared that they would extinguish any anti-government protests with blood. They started with Nemtsov. ….

  7. Concerned Neighbour commented on Feb 28

    That chart is pretty telling. My guess is we’ll see a similar chart for Europe over the next 1.5 years, despite stocks starting from a much higher level on a valuation basis. Central banks seem oblivious to rapidly growing bubbles; that, or perhaps they simply don’t care. I suspect it’s the former, because we’ve witnessed their lack of prescience time and again.

  8. intlacct commented on Mar 1

    “The CIA studied the Vietnamese leader and revolutionary in the 1950s.

    Findings: The report remains classified, but a 1994 article by Thomas Omestad in Foreign Policy (not online) cites a retired Marine who saw it while working with the agency. The source told Omestad that the CIA misread Ho’s political motivations and goals. A product of the Cold War, the profile “exaggerated Ho’s Marxism and underestimated his ardent nationalism.””

    These are based on my vague recollections from Stanley Karnow’s tome:

    I guess the CIA missed the decades wherein the Vietnamese resisted outside domination. I guess they missed when Eisenhower said if there was election he would garner 90% of the vote. I guess they missed the part where Ho appealed to us for aid before going to the Soviets.

    • rd commented on Mar 1

      It was even bigger than misreading Ho Chi Minh. The CIA missed that the most powerful person in the government was actually a different person altogether (kind of like thinking that W was calling all of the shots in 2003 just because he was President).

      http://www.c-span.org/video/?308235-14/hanois-war

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