10 Monday AM Reads

November 23, 2015 7:30am by

Short but action packed work week. Kick it off right with our artisanal morning train reads:

• Three Lessons From Yale’s Endowment Fund (Morningstar)
• Can You Pick the Guys Who Pick the Guys Who Pick the Best Stocks? (MoneyBeat) see also Faulty Assumptions (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Anatomy of a NIMBY: Grief over growth is perennial, but it hasn’t always been this bad. How a detente over development failed and fueled the rise of the modern neighborhood preservationist. (Seattle Weekly)
• The Asteroid Hunters: It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either.  (Popular Mechanics)
• The Big Issues Of The 2016 Campaign (FiveThirtyEight)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Professor Scott Galloway of NYU and L2.

 

Continues here

 

 

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    • VennData commented on Nov 23

      No changing the colors of my FB page to New Orleans.

    • rd commented on Nov 23

      The drumbeat of fear-mongering is ramping up with “Why Paris Could Happen Here”. Of course it could and variants of it are occurring regularly; its just not usually Islamic extremists doing it, so the xenophobic approach isn’t viable. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichol killed more people than the Paris terrorists. We allow our mentally ill population to have access to guns while the psychopathic criminal element is armed like a Third-World dictatorship. Guns in bars etc. are a common occurrence, as if nothing bad can happen when you arm angry drunk people. The US has tens of thousands of violent deaths each year. mostly from guns while others are knives and bombs – inner city hospitals get training equivalent to battlefield trauma surgeons to deal with the constant flow of gunshot wounds. Most of these deaths would be viewed as highly unusual in Europe and Canada, but they are just normal here. So it is very hypocritical to view what would be a small percentage increase of what much of the US population already undergoes in fear everyday as something extra-ordinary? Instead of getting rational gun regulation and addressing root causes of poverty and violence, the fear-mongers want to focus on intrusive information gathering on the general population.

      http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-paris-could-happen-here-1448231559

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 24

      Probably a lot. But the Democratic Party has also abandoned the working class in favor of Wall Street contributors (see Third Way & DLC) and fringe causes. Instead of arguing about TPP, we are getting arguments about how many Syrians to let jump in line ahead of Mexicans and others who have been waiting for years. Ask the man in the street if he cares who rules Syria. He barely cares who runs his State.

  3. rd commented on Nov 23

    The drumbeat continues for the American consumer to step up to the plate, increase their indebtedness, reduce their savings etc. to maintain GDP growth and increase corporate earnings. Apparently prudent consumers are being un-American.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-housing-rebound-hasnt-lifted-the-u-s-economy-much-1448221840

    A few comments on this:

    1. Selling homes still involves a lot of cost. You won’t see any significant cash out of a home sale until you have at least 10% equity. So maxing out a HELOC means you can’t afford to sell your house and then buy another if you need to move.
    2. Many HELOCs are not available at low interest rates unless you have more than 20% equity. So just being not underwater doesn’t mean you can tap into your equity easily.
    3. For many people, their home is a major part of their life savings once the mortgage is paid off. With an aging population, why would they wipe out their retirement savings unless forced to?
    4. Considering all of the stories that the same media keep writing about people’s lack of retirement savings, I would have assumed that they would be cheering an increase in home equity as one form of savings, especially because the gains are often tax free. Instead, it seems to be a constant parade of “consumers are not spending enough” stories when it comes to housing. Have the realtors and mortgage bankers taken over the media again?

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 23

      Morocco has the Sun. Every day. Chicago doesn’t. And Seattle almost never does.

    • DeDude commented on Nov 23

      Nope the hot desert sun is in Arizona whereas the wind is in Chicago. Each area has its own optimal sustainable energy source. So right now a Moroccan like project would be viable for Arizona – another 4 fold increase in solar collection efficiency before it would be viable for Chicago.

    • rd commented on Nov 23

      Seattle has tides and waves, along with geothermal (big geothermal potential when you consider the volcanos next door).

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 24

      Hey, I’m not arguing about non-fossil energy sources. I’m just objecting to the idea that solar is an easy choice everywhere. And China has a hammerlock on vital resources for solar. They are the Saudi Arabia of solar.

    • VennData commented on Nov 23

      Pfizer to American Troops: Drop Dead.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 24

      Since Pfizer is going to be foreign, then let’s ban their drug “imports” like we do Canadian drugs. Sorry, Pfizer, we can’t trust foreign drugs.

  7. RW commented on Nov 23

    For Dividend Hungry Investors, BDC Stock Boom Turns Into A Bust
    This year, instead of offering retail investors income during a volatile market, the BDC sector collectively has lost value, even when counting dividend yields as high as 20%. Some of those payouts have been slashed by as much as a third, and other BDCs are even selling assets to repair their balance sheets.

    That’s probably a familiar story for those suffering from the crash of dividend stocks like upstream oil and gas master limited partnerships, pipelines, and even alternative energy yieldcos. But, instead of backfiring amid collapsing commodity prices or issues of oversupply, the losers in the BDC space like Fifth Street have problems entirely of their own making.

  8. VennData commented on Nov 23

    Another prediction of doom!

    “…His worry is that by waiting for the unemployment rate to fall to 5 percent, as it did in October, the Fed has delayed too long to achieve a soft-landing. That level is already around the 4.9 percent rate Fed officials reckon pushes up prices, but that estimate could be too low and a recent pickup in wages suggests joblessness could already be beneath the inflation trigger, he said.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-23/the-case-for-how-the-fed-has-already-made-its-policy-mistake

    Another clown predicting the future. The GOP Media Machine has made you all think predicting the future is even remotely possible. It isn’t. This is nonsense.

    • Iamthe50percent commented on Nov 24

      The fine is not nearly enough. It’s probably cheaper to pay the fine than make the (reasonable) changes. OTOH, a successful fine would bolster the case for an employee lawsuit.

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