My easy-like Sunday morning loll around in bed reads:
• Yellen Sees Rate Rise in 2015, Gradual Tightening Thereafter (Bloomberg)
• How ‘Mathiness’ Made Me Jaded About Economics (Bloomberg View) see also The 20 Most Influential Economic Papers Of All Time (Business Insider)
• Like Buffett, Another Folksy Investor Turns Patience Into Profit (MoneyBeat)
• The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry (WSJ)
• The Risks of Owning an Individual Stock (Alpha Architect)
• The Fall and Rise of Lawyers (CNN)
• 20 years of data reveals that Congress doesn’t care what you think. (Upworthy)
• The Software Behind Frank Gehry’s Geometrically Complex Architecture (Priceonomics)
• The Iraq Invasion: What We Knew Then (Bloomberg) but see Forget What We Know Now: We Knew Then the Iraq War Was a Joke (Rolling Stone)
• The 10 Best Brunches in Manhattan (Zagat)
What are you reading?
Still Waiting For a New High in Breadth
Source: Bespoke Investment Group
Free Trade and the Export-Import Bank
The gods must have a great a sense of humor. Why else would they arrange to have the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank both come up as great national issues at the same time?
…most of the strongest proponents of the TPP are also big supporters of the Export-Import Bank. They apparently have zero problem touting the virtues of free trade while at the same time pushing an institution that primarily exists to subsidize exports.
NB: One could say this was just another case of cognitive dissonance and American political perversity but the TPP and Ex-Im Bank do have one essential feature in common: They both tilt the economic playing field in favor of specific corporations/lobbies.
Joke! Reversal of US pro Sunni policy in Middle East, Saudis irked.
Iraq nation building, more busting a status quo “detent”. US ousting Saddam Hussein busted the Saudi Sunni Wahhabis’ status quo containing Iran with the Shiites suppressed in Iraq. If the US had refrained from paying off the Sunnis?
My belief is that the invasion of Iraq was not for the stated reason (WMD), nor for the money. My suspicion has been that the invasion was driven by one or both of the following reasons:
1. Though Syria and Iraq were rivals/enemies, Iraq was was paying Syria to support Hezbollah. Hezbollah was very successful, and improving in their ability to bleed Israel, and also worked with Syria to control Lebanon. Break Iraq, and you stop this. This was a German theory. You could argue that this continues today in the continuation into the fall of Syria.
2. Saudi Arabia was more deeply involved in 9/11 than anyone realized. Direct war on Saudi Arabia wasn’t considered possible, so the US destabilized Iraq as a mechanism for harming Saudi Arabia and strengthening rival Iran.
“Bruce Bartlett arguing that Fox News may have succeeded too well in capturing American conservatives. It is “the dominant – and in many cases, virtually the only – major news source for millions”. Viewers undergo “self-brainwashing”. They “refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox, and believe whatever appears on it as gospel truth”
PDF – from https://thebrowser.com
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2604679
Damage by Congress to US “soft power”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/united-states-economy-power/393650/
Army Corp of Engineers responsible for Katrina ?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/us/decade-after-katrina-pointing-finger-more-firmly-at-army-corps.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
Oh the humanity!
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/05/humanity-weeps-as-candy-crush-saga-comes-pre-installed-with-windows-10/
PSA from Argentina…
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.ca/2015/05/argentinian-public-service-announcement.html#comment-form
Bobby Jindahl sold his soul.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/bobby_jindal_runs_for_president_louisiana_governor_allowed_creationism_in.html
Here’s a person, his family, that you can tune out.
The PSA from Argentina in formerlawyer’s post is linked from tywkiwdbi.blogspot.ca – it’s a website where a retired medical professor trolls the internet looking for things he finds interesting and then posts them (kind of like reddit only longer form and much more interesting). It’s worth checking out, but be forewarned, it is an incredible time sink.
– Schools are also borrowing “their brains out”. And that’s the reason I’m selling my municipal school bonds.
http://jugglingdynamite.com/2015/05/21/schools-keeping-up-affluent-appearances-with-mounting-debt/
– “Yellen Sees Rate Rise in 2015, Gradual Tightening Thereafter (Bloomberg)”
Disagree & agree. I see short term rates remain at these low levels for a LONG, LONG time. Unless, the money starts to flee EVEN the US. Then the FED WILL crank up (short term) rates to a surprisingly HIGH level (overnight ??). Along the lines of the “Volcker Surprise” in 1981 ?
Long term rates are already on their way to MUCH MUCH higher levels. (say 10%). But I am not sure when we’ll see those levels. In 6 months time ? 12 months ? 18 months ? 24 months ? Or already next quarter ?
– I love the way how ALL FED chair-men/-woman Always have an ability to speak A LOT OF words and – at the same time – being able to avoid to say anything meaningful. We had “Greenspeak”, the “Bernanke Babbling” and now “Yellen Yapping”.