10 Sunday Reads

August 16, 2015 7:00am by

My easy like Sunday morning reads:

• Mind the Gap 2015: Why investors get less than their funds’ total return. (Morningstar)
• Doubt Starts Chipping Away at the Market’s Mind-Set (NYT)
• China Stock Futures Signal Deeper Pessimism: The Shanghai Composite has remained relatively flat since the yuan began sliding, but futures tell a more negative story (WSJ)
• Reassess Your Investments Before Next Panic (Moneybeat)
• Finding iPad’s Future (Above Avalon)
• Is There A Pension Crisis? (Shanker Institute)
• Tracking Police Violence A Year After Ferguson (FiveThirtyEight)
• Smoking Weed Can Be a Lot of Fun, but Let’s Not Pretend It Doesn’t Fuck You Up (Vice)
• The Slow Political Death of Chris Christie (Rude Pundit) see also Christie booed mercilessly — twice — at the Haskell (NJ.com)
• Attacks on Fiber Networks in California Baffle FBI (WSJ)

What are you reading?

 

 

Worst Summer for US Crude Futures Since 1984

Source: Bloomberg

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

What's been said:

Discussions found on the web:
  1. RW commented on Aug 16

    The U.S. Foreclosure Crisis Was Not Just a Subprime Event

    The crisis began in the subprime mortgage sector, but twice as many prime borrowers as subprime borrowers lost their homes over the full sample period.

    NB: The myth of subprime centrality to the crisis, like the myth of CRA and Frannie centrality, isn’t just rooted in conservative ideology or stupidity, it is rooted in one of the strongest human desires this side of envy: Shame and the avoidance of blame.

  4. RW commented on Aug 16

    St Louis Fed JOLTS job openings – hires, vs. average hourly wages (ht NDD)

    In general the two have tacked in tandem — except, most notably in the last year, with wages languishing and unfilled openings skyrocketing.

    …job openings have exploded in the last 18 months. They are higher now than at the height of the tech boom in 2000 when the series started. And yet wages, um, suck.

    What could possibly account for this anomaly? As opposed to labor market tightness, I hereby nominate employers who refuse to pay more than they did during the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession.

    NB: The problem could be a persistent cyclical demand shortfall or secular stagnation but it is not a supply shortfall or structural, at least in the sense that is normally defined WRT technology, worker skills, robots, etc.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Aug 16

      The unfilled openings, undoubtedly for trash salary or impossible job requirements, will be used to justify H1-B visa applications. Lather, Rinse Repeat. I’ve seen it over and over the last twenty years.

      I wish Hell existed, there would be a special place in it for these employers.

      BTW – look up the dictionary definition of “employ”, “emploer” = user, “employee” = one who is used (and abused)

    • willid3 commented on Aug 16

      of course . the old we cant find any one for minimum wage for the job that requires a PHD in math routine. course you never ever see this being done with executive jobs?

    • willid3 commented on Aug 16

      i suspect its actually pretty simple. companies dont want to pay cause while profits are doing well, sales arent. and while they can see a need for more labor, they will keep avoiding paying more for it as long as they can. which generally means adding more work to those they do employ. but they arent quite ready to increase wages, or even invest in productivity improving technology. until they are forced too

  5. VennData commented on Aug 16

    “…but futures tell a more negative story…”

    How do they do that? The futures guarantee you that? That is what has always happened in the past that the futures have always predicted the future?

    No, Rupert Murdoch. The markets don’t tell you anything.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Aug 16

      They tell you which way the herd is stampeding at the moment (or is wandering around dazed), but you are correct, they tell nothing of the future.

  7. VennData commented on Aug 16

    The GOP Chinese finger puzzle…

    “…the thing is, when you actually think about it, it’s not funny…”

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-gop-clown-car-20150812
    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/republican-assault-on-trump-may-only-make-him-stronger-20150807

    No Matt Taibbi we’re NOT going to be hominids in twenty years (idiotic.) And it IS Funny! It’s hilarious AND good like the best literary fiction, like Bob Lefsetz or Invictus.

    The more the GOP Establishment (that the GOP Base SHOULD hate more than Democrats) who funded and operated the GOP Media Machine that got themselves into this mess fights Trump the stronger it makes The Donald..

    That does not mean leaving Trump alone will weaken him. Creating all these crazies was going to turn on the GOP eventually like the nuttiest GMO fairytales.

    The American Right Wing Civil War may not fizzle out to let a “”””serious””” candidate in. Look at the loons, the Sunnis and Shias, these things can go on for centuries.

    Trailer Trash GOP you can’t keep your right-to-work job in a Bible Belt state, consume Football and Bud and really believe you’re ooing to being any sort of value-add in the next century, do you? That you deserve Medicare and Social Security without giving it to the brownskins? Do you?

    You’re a joke GOP voter. You’re getting everything you deserve: Donald Trump.

  10. Jojo commented on Aug 16

    This guy sounds like a real genius!
    ==============
    A Scientist Deploys Light And Sound To Reveal The Brain
    July 27, 2015 3:57 AM ET
    Chris Nickels for NPR

    Lihong Wang creates the sort of medical technology you’d expect to find on the starship Enterprise.

    Wang, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has already helped develop instruments that can detect individual cancer cells in the bloodstream and oxygen consumption deep within the body. He has also created a camera that shoots at 100 billion frames a second, fast enough to freeze an object traveling at the speed of light.

    “It’s really about turning some of these ideas that we thought were science fiction into fact,” says Richard Conroy, who directs the Division of Applied Science & Technology at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

    Wang’s ultimate goal is to use a combination of light and sound to solve the mysteries of the human brain. The brain is a “magical black box we still don’t understand,” he says.

    Wang describes himself as a toolmaker. And when President Obama unveiled his BRAIN initiative a couple of years ago to accelerate efforts to understand how we think and learn and remember, Wang realized that brain researchers really needed a tool he’d been working on for years.

    …

    http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/27/425068015/a-scientist-deploys-light-and-sound-to-reveal-the-brain

  11. Jojo commented on Aug 16

    This is a keeper for use when mixing it up with Republican nutters… :)
    ================
    What the Rest of the World Thinks About the Republican Party
    August 15, 2015
    By VICE Staff

    The race for the Republican nomination has been a wild source of entertainment (and consistent source of terror) over the past months—and the fun is just getting started. There’s a reason they call it the Grand Ol’ Party! As it stands, there’s a real possibility that we’re going to have a Republican president next year; and while we’re pretty sure it won’t be Donald Trump, at this point, anything could happen. So, in anticipation of what’s sure to be an emotional roller coaster of an election season—replete with all the name-calling, racial slurs, sexist gaffs, and cold hard cash that we’ve come to associate with American politics—VICE decided to ask our international offices what they think about the Republican Party.

    COLOMBIA

    What can you say about the political party that gotThe Terminator elected governor of the richest state in the second richest country in the world?

    The thing about Republicans is they remind me of that bigot uncle we all have but can’t manage to hate as much as we feel obliged to. Yes, their stances on issues like immigration and foreign policy is kind of a slap in the face to all of us south of the Rio Grande, but they are also a great reality check, especially for us millennials.

    …

    http://www.vice.com/read/what-the-rest-of-the-world-thinks-about-the-republican-party-622

  13. VennData commented on Aug 16

    Texas…

    “Everything was good, and everybody was getting these big checks, and everybody waited for their land to be leased, and then it all came to a screeching halt around the beginning of the year.”

    http://www.businessinsider.com/texas-oil-crash-fallout-2015-8

    Listen. Your OPEC-driven “free-market” model is over. Your skimping on education will come back to haunt you. Enjoy obscurity.

  14. willid3 commented on Aug 16

    so its a myth that pensions are in trouble. who knew that companies would use pension ‘income’ as if it were theirs., and when they actually had to fund it, essentially bail on it. its like a chemical company creating a product, then finding out its dangerous, but not telling any one about it. till 40-50 years later.

Posted Under