My easy like Sunday morning reads:
• For Markets, It’s the Treacherous Season: Despite the Fed’s decision to delay raising interest rates, stocks and commodities swoon at week’s end. Shades of past market crashes, Long Term Capital Management’s fall, and the Panic of 1873. (Barron’s)
• Global economic issues fuel deflationary fears and help drive policymakers to keep rates low. (Fidelity)
• If Investors Bail, Will Your Bond Fund Flail? (WSJ)
• Is Pension-gate the next big scandal to rock the financial services industry? (Evidence-Based Investor)
• The Experience Fallacy (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• The richest places in America all have one thing in common (Wonkblog)
• More Than Half of Jeb Bush’s Tax Cuts Would Go To the Top 1% (CTJ Reports) see also Study: 53 percent of Jeb Bush’s tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent (Vox)
• What the World Got Wrong About Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (NYT)
• How ‘Netflix and chill’ became internet slang for having sex (Fusion)
• After the Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh Shows He Has a Head for Business (NYT)
What are you reading?
Strong Dollar, High Inventories to Slow U.S. Factory Output
Source: Bloomberg Briefs
What!!! – Jeb is letting the “99%” rif-raf get 47% of his tax cuts. His brother did much better than that. I think multi-millionaires “Club for Growth” better rethink whether they want to continue supporting a Commie like him.
“…If you have heard about Jeb Bush’s new tax plan by reading political reporters, you have probably heard that it is a “proposal to reform the tax code” that will “crack down on hedge fund managers” (CNN), that it is “mainstream and ordinary” with “a populist note” (NPR), that it “challenged some long-held tenets of conservative tax policy” (the New York Times), and has “a nod to the populist anger roiling both parties” (The Wall Street Journal). It is, in other words, the same sort of coverage George W. Bush received when he unveiled his tax cuts in 1999, and which the campaign successfully cast as a populist departure from traditional Republican priorities…”
“…On the other hand, if you have learned about the tax plan from some of the new policy-focused writers, you have drawn a very different impression. It is a “large tax cut for the wealthiest” (the Upshot) and a reprise of the Bush tax cuts, but “with more exclamation points” (Wonkblog). The difference lies between journalists who write narratives drawn from quotes from campaign sources and those who build their coverage on data. George W. Bush was fortunate that data-based journalism barely existed 16 years ago. His brother is counting on the power of narrative to obscure the data…”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/how-jeb-bushs-tax-cuts-suckered-the-media.html
Data, not narratives.
The cartoon on this “pensiongate” is just fantastic.
http://www.thenation.com/article/pensiongate-christie-campaign-donors-won-huge-contracts/
Agreed!
The war against genetically modified organisms is full of fearmongering, errors, and fraud. Labeling them will not make you safer.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/are_gmos_safe_yes_the_case_against_them_is_full_of_fraud_lies_and_errors.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_tw_top
Ben Carson Says a Muslim Shouldn’t Be President
“…The president of the United States should not be a Muslim, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson declared during an interview airing Sunday morning. And Islam, a faith professed by some 3 million Americans, is not constitutional, the retired neurosurgeon said.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/ben-carson-muslim-president-213851
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/09/20/ben-carson-says-a-muslim-shouldnt-be-president/
The ” religious rights” party. Laughable.
How one US state went from two quakes a year to 585
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-how-one-us-state-went-from-two-quakes-a-year-to-585-2015-9
A Coincidence! Get our “Climate Science” guys on this and we’ll have half of America blaming the earth quakes on Jerry Brown and Hillary Clinton within the week.
Letter To President Obama: Investigate Deniers Under RICO
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/09/19/letter-to-president-obama-investigate-deniers-under-rico/
The Creativity of the Permahawks
” …the BIS not only claims that low interest rates cause financial instability, but goes on to expound a sort of widow’s cruse theory of interest rates, in which low rates today lead to even lower rates tomorrow, because they produce bubbles that weaken the economy further when they burst. That’s pretty wild stuff; you wouldn’t want to take it seriously without a lot of evidence, which the BIS does not provide.
“Or put it this way: if, say, Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders were to invent whole new, dubious economic theories to justify the policies they clearly want for other reasons, everyone would be coming down on them hard for being flaky and irresponsible. Yet when the BIS — which was, once again, dead wrong on inflation — does the same thing, it’s taken very seriously.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/09/19/the-creativity-of-the-permahawks/
Right wing kooks from Jim Grant to Ken Langone parrot this silliness. What data do they have?
They say we wouldn’t have all this copper, iron ore and gold if companies couldn’t borrow at low rates. Really? The bond buyers just can’t help themselves??? Six years after the GOP Media Machine and Sarah Palin shouted ‘Drill baby, Drill.’
The Conservatives aren’t. They are so busy fighting rear guard actions of their comical predictions that they snuff out logical conversation.
What Do You Think the Chances Are that Jeffrey M. Lacker Is Right in 2015?
…I cannot think of a single case since he became Richmond Regional Federal Reserve Bank President in 2004 in which any of Lacker’s dissents from the Federal Reserve have shown positive insight into the actual state of the economy. …
Without ever giving any signs that twelve years of being wrong has induced any humility.
Or any attempts to mark your beliefs to market.
Or any rethinking of intellectual positions and ideological commitments at all…
Foreign bases cost Americans, benefit contractors, foreign garrisons are useless in times of airlift and sealift capacity, provide negligible benefits to local economies, present the ugly American and are in 50% of the worlds countries. Why?
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/20/garrisoning_the_globe_how_u_s_military_bases_abroad_undermine_our_national_security_and_harm_us_all_partner/
The Nolan Bill will deny pay to Congresscritters during any government shutdown! Will it pass, hell no, but still…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/congress-pay-shutdown_55fc81c5e4b08820d918b9fc
I am split on this…
http://fortune.com/2015/09/18/coca-cola-taxes-irs/
Though not a banker, a CEO is going to jail:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/20/us/peanut-butter-salmonella-trial/index.html