10 Tuesday AM Reads

July 21, 2015 7:30am by

My slightly ironic two-fer-Tuesday morning train reads:

• It’s a Bull Market. Get Intelligent About Stock Market Investing. Take a look at the real Nasdaq 100 (Bloomberg) see also Getting High on Their Own Supply: Corporate stock buybacks put a floor under earnings (Bloomberg)
• Ask Me Anything: Varoufakis (Reddit) see also Grexit remains the likely outcome of this sorry process: Unless the economy behaves very differently than in the past, it will be trapped in a vicious circle (FT)
• Silicon Valley Doesn’t Believe U.S. Productivity Is Down (WSJ) but see Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’ (The Guardian)
• Donald Trump Is The World’s Greatest Troll (FiveThirtyEight) see also What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war (Washington Post)
• How Different Groups Think about Scientific Issues (Pew Research) see also 13 Tricks to Appear Smart on Twitter (Cooper Review)

Continues here

 

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  2. VennData commented on Jul 21

    Donald Trump needs to apologize to Bowe Bergdahl

    • VennData commented on Jul 21

      GOP apologize to Max Cleland and John Kerry.

    • VennData commented on Jul 21

      Illinois Republicans must apologize to Tammy Duckworth

  4. cjb commented on Jul 21

    re: “you’re richer than you really think.” psychobabble b.s. you have to live in the world you live in, and I live in the U.S. Midwest. I don’t give a crap how my income compares to others around the world. This is the phony line of reasoning akin to what your mother would say to get to you finish your dinner in the 1950’s – “there’s children starving in China.” It’s the same bunk that the Koch bros. tried via you tube a few years ago. It’s an attempt to make you believe you are closer economically to the very wealthy than to the least wealthy. This reasoning tries to make you believe you are part of their “club” when in reality you will never be close. I know a lot of struggling business owners who fall for this, and vote against their best interests in the process.

  5. RW commented on Jul 21

    Controlled experiments in economics are generally not feasible but in the past eight years we have had a series of “natural experiments” supporting the Keynes/Hicks framework and refuting the neoclassical framework. One of the ad hoc hypothesis of the latter set is that the countries experiencing chronic deep recessions have structural problems that must be reformed before progress can be made with cuts to public spending being the kind of reform normally asserted as beneficial.

    What little evidence supports this position is rather weak but, more to the point, there is a growing body of increasingly robust evidence that rather flatly contradicts it. Proponents, not surprisingly, resist.

    Finland and the Euro: Is Finland’s Finance Minister Confused?

    That is the conclusion that readers might draw from a piece by Neil Irwin in which he interviews Alexander Stubb, the Finnish finance minister, on the merits of the euro for Finland. Finland is often cited by euro critics because its economy is mired in recession even though, unlike Greece, it has always maintained low budget deficits and its government is not corrupt and highly efficient. The problem cited by critics …is that the being in the euro prevent Finland from devaluing its currency to regain competitiveness.

    Stubb dismisses the current weakness as a rough patch: …

    • willid3 commented on Jul 21

      well is that an example of your job (and life) depends on you not noticing some isnt true?

    • rd commented on Jul 21

      Finland’s problems are all because Nokia missed the boat on smartphones. Macroeconomic and monetary policies would not be the cause since clearly Germany is doing fine.

    • willid3 commented on Jul 21

      you know if that happened in the US, the CEO would still have their job. and a certain party would be working on a legislation to make finding out about the fraud almost impossible to find out.

    • rd commented on Jul 21

      Three comments about teacher grading:

      1. The teachers, principals, and parents know who the good and bad teachers are. The problem is they can’t do anything about it. Instead, they pair a good teacher with a bad teacher in a grade to try to provide support – this negatively impacts grading of the good teacher who is having to do one-and-a-half jobs. This is similar to the UAW problem where the union was so focused on the battle of job protection for everybody that they lost the war. Just culling one teacher per school per year would make a huge improvement over a decade or two.

      2. The big problem with teacher testing is the sheer bureaucratic incompetence in implementing it. They keep changing the instructional materials and tests (at huge cost), but don’t have them ready for the start of the new school year. Instead they get rolled out throughout the fall. Some “baseline” tests are given after a substantial amount of the new material has already been covered because the baseline testing didn’t occur until November. This would be like a coach unable to inform his team what the game plan is until after half time of the Super Bowl and then blame the players for not executing.

      3. It is not possible to compare an inner city and suburban school in today’s society and expect them to have anything remotely the same in the way of outcomes. The inner city schools typically have fewer adults in the classroom (aides are almost impossible to get consistently for a myriad of reasons) while the children’s behavior problems are often substantial. There is virtually no parent engagement (if they even live with parents) in the inner city. Outdoor play and reading at home is virtually unheard of – they often live in very unsafe neighborhoods and reading is not part of the culture. Recess and lunch at school are virtually the only time in the week where they will play outside. Many of the children are immigrants for whom English is a second language (if they speak English at all). The one thing most of the kids have in common is poverty – most of the kids are eligible for free lunches and many also get free breakfast snacks.

    • willid3 commented on Jul 21

      i always figured that trying to test results where the input is so different that the test data and results are useless, every child is different. and their parents are too. if parents dont care about education (and many do not. just take a look school boards and state boards of education). those 2 inputs have as much to do with the output as the teacher does.

      are there ‘bad’ teachers. sure there are. at least 20% of them are ‘bad’ in some way (same rules seems to apply to every thing). problem is how to identify them. some actually hate teaching so they dont put to much into it. some hate the kids (why in the world they went into teaching no one can tell). some got burned out ( after all if you keep tying to teach the kids and they dont seem to learn. course they are different kids,. but the same ‘failures’ occur over and over again. could that be the teacher? or the culture?
      and we seem to think that private schools can fix the education problem.
      except it easy to do if you can control who is enrolled (they can decide to not take a child. thats not an option for public schools). plus there is the much more (usually) engaged parents, when you pay 12,000 or more a year for school, you tend to be much involved. course there are always exceptions. not always in that ‘investment’ enough to keep the parents engagement (for some its just another way to engage in the time honored keeping up with the jones).
      course we have been complaining about education since the 1900s. back when most never saw high school. or made into and it out grade school and my father (he was match professor in the 60s-90s) was complaining then about students.

    • rd commented on Jul 21

      My spouse is a teacher in an inner city school and most of the teachers there are busting their butts, working nights and weekends. Some of the teachers (a relatively small percentage) are just going through the motions – some are near retirement, but others are surprisingly early in their career. I know I would go nuts doing a job where I was putting in time (possibly decades), but there are some people who are willing to just go through the motions in a tenured job where your pay goes up every year, you get a pension at the end, and there is lots of vacation and holidays. It is necessary to be able to move them aside – their co-workers know who they are as do the principals. Unfortunately, it is a five year battle with the union to get rid of them which takes a lot of time and effort. I think that is a failing on the part of the union and it is why Scott Walker was able to win in Wisconsin as well as the Japanese and Korean car manufacturers setting up shop in the South.

    • willid3 commented on Jul 21

      can speak to why the foreign car companies are usually in south. mainly cause they dont like unions. but oddly enough they mirror the pay the domestics pay, and benefits too. but they dont like them mainly cause how their own domestic unions operate. and dont think that any of them dont have them , they all do. Germany, Japan, South Korea. course today’s UAW is nothing like it was in the past. and the reason most of the unions ended up way they did? was because of companies. after all its hard to tale serious companies that in their past hired thugs to kill

  10. VennData commented on Jul 21

    IBM. United Technologies. Verizon weigh the “venerable” Dow. The price weighted index is like looking at Ladies Home Journal for advice on how to pick up sluts.

  11. DeDude commented on Jul 21

    The last paragraph of this one is just priceless

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33607790

    “investigators refused to open a case on his allegations of torture, suggesting that his bruises were self-inflicted and that he was keen on sado-masochism”

    – Oh Putinska, the places you will go.

  12. VennData commented on Jul 21

    Why have you Muslim Brotherhood members of the elite stopped publishing Peter Schiff? He was right!

    Gold is only priced so low in paper terms!

    Rand Paul will MAKE America switch to Gold.

    Peter Theil! Ayn Rand! Freedom from all my prior posts claiming specific gold price targets, they have all been warped by hackers hired by Geithner and Lew! Rick Santelli is the Donald Trump of gold traders turned professional red-faced shouter!

  13. RW commented on Jul 21

    European economic logic is essentially incoherent but the political calculus makes sense, not at the midpoint of union but as you approach the limits of cynicism and nationalism.

    The Euro, From Cash to Kesh

    Ruling out any writeoff of Greece’s debts, Angela Merkel is quoted today as saying “A classic haircut of 30, 40 percent of debt cannot happen in a currency union….” This echoes what Wolfgang Schäuble said last week: “….everyone knows that a debt haircut is incompatible with membership in the monetary union.”

    …on closer analysis the German position is as absurd as it looks on the surface. It is a weak play for intellectual legitimacy. What it’s really about, of course, is the fact that Greek maturities are spread out over the coming decades, and that restructuring their terms will postpone the reality of default to future politicians. A writedown is immediate and pins the loss on the folks currently in control. ….

    • willid3 commented on Jul 21

      course we have just about always thought we were declining.

      might might or might not be a good thing. good cause it makes us work harder bad because we juimp conclusions

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