10 Thursday Noon Reads

May 7, 2015 12:00pm by

Late night at the TunnelTop bar in SF, slow getting in gear this morning. (How ever do you West Coast finance folks do this?) My morning noon reads:

• What 118 Fed Rate Increases Since 1948 Show as Economy Falters (Bloomberg)
• The trouble with factors (Humble Student of the Markets)
• There’s an Uber for Everything Now (WSJ)
• Fed’s Yellen: Stock Valuations ‘Generally Are Quite High’ (WSJ) but see Hilsenrath’s Take: This Is Not An Irrational Exuberance Moment (Real Time Economics)
• Billionaires versus big oil: A growing number of the world’s wealthiest people, from both ends of the political spectrum, are banding together to bet on new technologies that could displace fossil fuels. (Fortune) see also Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption (Gizmodo)
• Google Didn’t Kill Glass, It’s Just Making It Sexier (Fast Company)
• FiveThirtyEight Dissects The Deflategate Report (538)
• An Illustrated Guide to the British Election (Politico)
• In China, Pigs Are Flying. Almost. (Sinosphere)
• Stunning first shots from National Geographic’s 2015 Traveler Photo Contest (Quartz)

What are you reading?

 

Vanguard Dethrones Pimco as Largest Bond Fund

Source: WSJ

 

 

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Discussions found on the web:
    • VennData commented on May 8

      ​This’ll help America. Cut the science funding.

  2. Joe commented on May 7

    The West Coast riff for traders is easy…. you simply get up East Coast time and go to bed on West Coast time. I’d like to see a a 6 months of the year split w/ markets on each time half the time. I ain’t holdin’ my breath….

  3. hue commented on May 7

    The New Bookkeeper Is a Robot (wsj http://bit.ly/1cb5nq5 ) Al Go can do all of our jobs right now. that’s why they hated Al Gore for inventing the internet(s)

    The Lessons (the) Google Ventures Learned From Secret (nytimes http://nyti.ms/1Ild5KP )

    The Price of Nice Nails (nytimes http://nyti.ms/1crt5PS) those poor peeps inhaling chemies. a nail couple could live on $50k and save the other $50k for 10 years and have 500k in cash lol //// Tippi Hedren Nailed It (the beeb http://bbc.in/1P3P5Bl) ever wonder why so many VNmese got off the boat in nail shops?

    • hue commented on May 8

      i used to take a nap at 3 pm. got up at 4:30: in by 5:30 a.m., off at 1 p.m. nap in the afternoon and bed at regular hours. i was tired and sleepy in the entire 2 years in SF

      but you wake up and the first college or pro game is already on on a Saturday morning.

  4. rd commented on May 7

    The lead paint in Baltimore housing is picking up a lot of traction in the media. Eliminating lead in gasoline has been identified as the likely cause for the major drop in violent crime over the past couple of decades. Now we are dealing with lower-level, but still pernicious poisoning of kids in old housing (mainly poor but gentrification is exposing middle and upper class people as well).

    Nobody has talked about it yet that I have seen, but Detroit’s policy of razing entire neighborhoods of old, abandoned houses may pay big dividends a couple of decades from now as the lead paint in house interiors will be dramatically less prevalent since they eradicated the interiors altogether. There will still be lead in the soils outside the homes from the use of leaded gasoline and exterior lead paint, but that is a less intense pathway than living and breathing lead all day inside, especially for infants and toddlers.

    A federal program to bulldoze and dispose of abandoned or foreclosed pre-1978 houses could pay major dividends in the coming decades by further reducing lead contamination of children. However, since it would be backed up by science, it is likely to go nowhere in this Congress, even though it would open up large swathes of cities for redevelopment which should open up lots of investment opportunities and construction jobs.

    http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/baltimores-toxic-legacy-of-lead-paint/

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/freddie-grays-life-a-study-in-the-sad-effects-of-lead-paint-on-poor-blacks/2015/04/29/0be898e6-eea8-11e4-8abc-d6aa3bad79dd_story.html

    http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/05/07/lead-poisoning-criminal-behavior

  6. rd commented on May 7

    I read through the Exponent Deflategate report. One of the things the NFL is going to have to do is to up their game significantly on measurement processes. The allowable range of the footballs is 12.5 to 13.5 psi. However, the average difference between the two gages was 0.35 psi, a third of the entire allowable range. On top of that, the officials appeared to hand the gages back and forth, so that Exponent had to assume that they swapped gages between measuring the Patriots and Colts balls at half-time. If this did not actually occur, then the gages would be much less accurate in actual usage, indicating operator error, than they monitored in the laboratory against a high-quality gage.

    I expect moving forward, that each gage will be coded and each official will record which gage they use for making each measurement so that there is a complete record. Its also an opportunity for the NFL to brand an “Official NFL Ball Pressure Gage”.

    • rd commented on May 7

      BTW – I predict we are going to see huge foam pressure gages at the first Patriot’s away game instead of big foam fingers.

    • constantnormal commented on May 7

      Should there even BE a next Patriots game? What if Bernie Madoff had said, “OK, you got me, I won’t do it again” … should he have been allowed to continue “managing” OPM? Should Lance Armstrong have been banned for life from cycling?

      What does it mean when one of the NFL’s star teams gets caught cheating?

      We all know why … the money in professional sports (as in government, finance, corporate management, etc) is incredibly corrosive to any semblance of morality and ethical behavior. But when a team gets caught, and no substantive penalty is levied, what message does that send?

    • rd commented on May 7

      My betting is that Brady gets a 2-game suspension with Goodell offering a reduction to one game (opening day) if Brady drops all appeals before training camp. Missing the first game will be highly symbolic and embarrassing for Brady. A big fine for Brady is probably coming as well. For the team, I see a big fine and/or a mid-round draft disappearing in 2016. Goodell will want to squash any hints that this type of locker room culture is acceptable. The two equipment guys are toast. They will be lucky of they can handle equipment for a high school team in the future.

      I don’t see the infringement or the level of proof as anywhere close to New Orleans Saints affair. However after Spygate, Goodell has to lay on the wood to New England. However, this is the equivalent of a civil proceeding. not a criminal one so you just need the preponderance of the evidence (“probable”) to initiate action.

    • gordo365 commented on May 7

      There is no money in selling “official NFL ball pressure” gages. There is big money in branding. So expect the “Half time ball pressure report – brought to you by AMCE”

    • intlacct commented on May 8

      Seems like monitoring a violent, urban outbreak is a sensible thing to do. What am I missing?

    • willid3 commented on May 7

      just have the company buy its stock. seems to work out great. for executives.
      ]
      does kind of call in to question the supposed better management in the private sector and just how well ‘mr market’ does in managing (or mis managing) the economy huh?

    • kaleberg commented on May 7

      When the economy is bad, there is nothing to invest in that will produce a reasonable return. People don’t have money to spend, because they are unemployed. Companies are cutting back their spending, because they don’t see any point in buying goods or services. Interest rates are down, because the Fed is trying to stimulate the economy. Your only choice is to buy stocks, because if everyone buys stocks, the prices go up and up.

      This has been the behavior of the US markets since the early 1990s. The economy was in recession, but the market was booming. Then, as now, there was a serious capital glut, with much more money chasing too few investment opportunities. If paychecks had been rising, this wouldn’t have been a major problem, but paychecks have been flat or down for nearly 40 years now. Instead we see the stock market as a place to preserve capital, not to provide investment returns.

    • willid3 commented on May 7

      i figure it the duality of man thing. they want to stay in the EU, but dont want to do things needed to be done to do so. course its not exactly reasonable that the EU wants to push them in a depression and expect them to pay back what is owed. sort of expecting Germany to pay back their debts from WW1. didnt turn out to well then. probably wont turn out well this time either. course wasnt that long ago that Germany was the the sick man of Europe. and oddly enough its not like Germany doesnt have a pretty a good safety net, they have a better one than the US does.

    • rd commented on May 7

      A mutual suicide pact.

      The Greeks don’t want to collect any taxes.

      The Germans and French don’t to give the Greeks an inch (or 2.54 cm).

    • rd commented on May 8

      I am quite sure that you are aware that the cause for the budget woes is really Obama’s immigration policy, Hillary’s Benghazi failures and cover-up, and gay marriage.

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