10 Thursday AM Reads

The news flow never stops, and neither does our braised, slow smoked morning train reads:

• Everybody Plays the Fool (Sometimes)  (Above the Marketsee also 5 money habits of the filthy rich you can learn now (Time)
• Would Charles Dow Be Selling Stocks? (Irrelevant Investor)
• Low or High Inflation? Nope, Stealthy Government Debt Liquidation! (Alpha Architectsee also Euro falls on way to worst quarter; dollar best since 2008 (Reuters)
• Bill Gross: March Madness (Janus)
• Has labour lost out to capital? (FTsee also Why China May Have the Most Factory Robots in the World by 2017  (Real Time Economics)
• Frenemies: a story of Iran, Israel, and the United States (Vox)
• Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth (Scientific American)
• I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life (Buzzfeed)
• Aasif Mandvi: Everything I’ve Done in My Career Has Terrified Me (LinkedIn)
• In defense of Trevor Noah’s stupid, tasteless tweets (Washington Post)

What are you reading?

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  1. hue commented on Apr 2

    Mourn With Me the Greatest Entrepreneur of All Time (Inc.) http://bit.ly/19Lipts Rest in peace Gary Dahl, the man who convinced Americans to pay $4 a piece for pet rocks. that is nearly 18 bucks inflation adjusted for a ROCK

    Walmart Emerges as Unlikely Social Force (NYT) http://nyti.ms/1MFvyWD social justice or smart biz, who cares? i’ll take it

    Meerkat is dying – and it’s taking U.S. tech journalism with it (BGR) http://bit.ly/1P2i99O

    yes rd, WWJD and irony is delicious! Love thy neighbor, except he’s an unmarried dude, never see him with chicks, i think he wants to sleep with me, hell no he’s not buying tires in my store. lesbians, now that the male fantasy, free tires (just jokes people)

  2. VennData commented on Apr 2

    John Boehner: ‘The world is on fire’

    ​”Just hours after a friendly return visit with Netanyahu [yesterday], Boehner made clear … he’s not backing down and will remain firmly engaged in the nation’s foreign policy. ‘I wouldn’t have believed that I would be involved in as much foreign policy as I am today,’ Boehner said in his hotel near [the] Old City. ‘And it certainly isn’t by choice. It’s just that the world is on fire. And I don’t think enough Americans or enough people in the administration understand how serious the problems that we’re facing in the world are.’ …

    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/boehner-israel-jerusalem-isil-netanyahu-iran-116600.html

    ​http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hyperbole​

  3. RW commented on Apr 2

    The CR is that financial crises tend to make for prolonged recoveries and symptomatically that does seem to be the case but just how essential they are to the causal web of lengthy recovery remains an open question; e.g., is a financial crisis more akin to disease or fever?

    The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis #25,452

    It’s always a great day when I have the opportunity to have a substantive exchange with the incredibly erudite Brad DeLong, especially when I am quite sure that I am right. Brad is convinced that the financial crisis is the evil doer responsible for our prolonged downturn instead of the good old-fashioned housing bubble often featured in these pages. He points to the surge in non-residential investment coming in 2007 and 2008. He argues that this surge, along with a rise in exports, would have offset the fall in residential construction and consumption, had it not been for the financial crisis.

    I see a somewhat different picture.

    …if we look at the economy after the financial markets had stabilized (2011 or 2012, pick your year) and ask what component of GDP would be higher if we did not have the financial crisis, it’s hard to see a candidate. Brad’s pick of non-residential investment doesn’t hold water. Perhaps we can claim a bit better picture on net exports if people had not turned to the dollar as a safe haven, but this involved many factors other than the financial crisis. Also, the conscious decision of foreign central banks to prop up the dollar to sustain their export markets has to swamp this effect.

    NB: Loan volume seems to be picking up in Europe, the UK in particular, and Baker links to a commercial RE index indicating where a significant portion of that volume is going.

    Remember that an expensive AKA ‘strong’ (sic) dollar is generally not economically positive for exports, current account and domestic employment but it does encourage ‘export’ of dollars abroad for various reason some of which are, shall we say, speculative.

  4. Jojo commented on Apr 2

    For all you people who use Tylenol – you been pranked! Questionable if it does anything at all per this article.
    ————–
    The Limits of Tylenol for Pain Relief
    By Nicholas Bakalar
    April 1, 2015

    Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is widely recommended for the relief of back pain and the pain of knee and hip arthritis. But a systematic review of randomized trials has found that it works no better than a placebo.

    Australian researchers reviewed three randomized trials that compared acetaminophen with a placebo for the relief of spinal pain, and 10 trials that compared their use for easing the pain of osteoarthritis. All together, the analysis included 5,366 patients. Acetaminophen was given orally in doses between 3,000 and 4,000 milligrams a day, except for one study in which a dose of 1,000 milligrams was administered intravenously.

    The review, published online in BMJ, found high quality evidence that Tylenol is ineffective in treating low back pain or disability. It also found evidence that the drug quadruples the risk of an abnormal liver function test, but the clinical significance of that finding is unclear.

    http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/the-limits-of-tylenol-for-pain-relief/

  5. Jojo commented on Apr 2

    “Poverty Shrinks Brains from Birth (Scientific American)”
    ———-
    Suggest reading this critique:

    Tuesday, 31 March 2015
    Income, brain, race, and a big gap

    Usually I do not set my readers puzzles. It is not seemly. However, the recent coverage of a paper published in Nature has set me a puzzle which I would like you to help me solve. Are the authors of the paper, the reviewers and the editors of Nature Neuroscience aware of what has been left out of this study? Did they spot the gap which calls into question the conclusions, or just choose not to mention it? Let me tell you the story, and then you can judge for yourselves.

    Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. Nature Neuroscience (2015)doi:10.1038/nn.3983 Published online 30 March 2015

    http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/income-brain-race-and-big-gap.html

  6. Molesworth commented on Apr 2

    Sorry, off topic, but I know Mr Ritholtz has been following this Indiana stuff.
    Here’s what I don’t get. What are the Indiana legislators saying is the purpose of the law?
    In other words, what injustices are they trying to protect against or what are they “saying” they are protecting against?
    What issues have come up that prompted this? Do we know this is about LGBT? Or is it Muslims? Or what? I can’t find it anywhere that Indiana legislators have suggested what they are trying to do. I just find others interpreting what they have done. All I hear about is the baker not wanting to make cake for a gay wedding.
    So, is that what they meant to do and what they said they were doing? Discriminate against gays? I just don’t get it.
    Do you?

    • rd commented on Apr 2

      The politicians are all saying that the bill was not intended to permit discrimination – most of them have been very careful about not leaving any footprints to indicate otherwise. However, numerous amendments to prohibit discrimination were rejected before the final bill was passed – several sites have posted a number of those amendments.

      However, numerous lobbyists and Christian leaders have stated that one reason for the bill was so that companies would not have to provide services to gay marriages (see my post above of the NPR interview this morning). Their lobbyists worked hand in hand with the legislature to craft the wording. However, many of these people sincerely believe that denying services to gay weddings is not discriminatory – instead they believe they are being discriminated against because they are being forced to participate in things that they abhor.

      The Indiana and Arkansas bills (an one or two others) were carefully crafted to include corporation as protected from liability unlike the original religious freedom bills that were focused on preventing the state from interfering with individual practice of religion (one original driver was to allow Native Americans to smoke peyote as part of their religious ceremonies).

      In my view, this is another step in the path that started in the 1950s and 60s with respect to civil rights for blacks where a major group objects to interacting with other groups based on long-held beliefs, often based on their interpretation of religious principles. It takes decades of concerted effort for these beliefs to lose their strong footholds. Even now 50 years later, there are still strong pockets of resistance to eliminating these beliefs regarding race etc. in the US (as we witnessed in Ferguson). Women are another group facing these types of challenges in parts of the US and many other places in the world – watch the painful steps in integrating women in the military today.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Apr 2

      Yes, is baking cake against his religion? How so when he does it for others?

    • ripshred commented on Apr 2

      Sorry BR but Scott Walker is just killing it with ‘Wally’,
      The Economist

    • thegonch commented on Apr 3

      I would think the problem is not baking a cake, but in decorating it in a way that celebrates the LGBT ceremony — two grooms on top of a wedding cake, “Have a gay birthday” written on a birthday cake.

      Didn’t the Jews solve this kind of issue by hiring a Shabbas Goy? Perhaps the fundamentalist Christians could follow a similar practice…

  7. intlacct commented on Apr 3

    re Charley Ellis interview – Ellis said more people wanted to say ‘thank you’ to David Swensen (and/or Warren Buffett) than any one else. I’d like to hear more. It is hard for me to think of someone (investing-wise) to say ‘thank you’ to than John C. Bogle. Any idea why those two would be higher ranked (either according to you or Mr. Ellis).

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