- Rather than outright default, many countries attempt rather successfully to keep nominal interest rates lower than would otherwise prevail.
- Over the long term, this “financial repression” results in a transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers.
- Investors shouldn’t give their money away, and at the moment, the duration component of a bond portfolio comes close to doing just that – because it doesn’t yield enough relative to inflation.
Monday, June 6, 2011
William H. Gross, Buy Cheap Bonds with Safe Spread, PIMCO, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Matthew McGough, The Lazarus File, The Atlantic, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 years - and revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic science - before LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. When they did, they found themselves facing one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Joshua Yaffa, The Information Sage, The Washington Monthly, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Meet Edward Tufte, the graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data.
Monday, May 16, 2011
James Pach, Fixing Japan’s Fiscal Mess, The Diplomat, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Massively indebted, Japan needs new funds to pay for recovery efforts and kick-start its economy. It's time to be innovative.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
James Gleick, What Defines a Meme?, Smithsonian, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Our world is a place where information can behave like human genes and ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Wil S. Hylton, What Happened to Air France Flight 447?, The New York Times, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- On May 1, 2011 the data cylinders from the plane’s black boxes were found on the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean and are expected to be analyzed in the coming weeks.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
William H. Gross, The Caine Mutiny (Part 2), PIMCO, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Low policy rates and the increasing negative real yields that they engender as inflation accelerates represent an immediate threat to investment portfolios.
- Bond prices don’t necessarily have to go down for savers to get skunked during a process of “debt liquidation.”
- PIMCO advocates a renewed vigilance, stressing bond market “safe spread” alternatives available globally, including developing/emerging market debt at higher yields denominated in non-dollar currencies.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Steve Coll, Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden, The New Yorker, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- No doubt there will be time to reflect more deeply about the news announced by President Obama last night. For now, I thought it might be useful to annotate some of the initial headlines.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian, The New Yorker, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1960
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Wigner observed that the mathematical structure of a physics theory often points the way to further advances in that theory and even to empirical predictions, and argued that this is not just a coincidence and therefore must reflect some larger and deeper truth about both mathematics and physics.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Tom Simonite, Reprogrammable Chips Could Enable Instant Gadget Upgrades, Technology Review, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Changing chip design on demand could allow TVs and other devices to upgrade their own hardware.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Suzanne Goldenberg, Has BP really cleaned up the Gulf oil spill?, The Guardian, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Officially, marine life is returning to normal in the Gulf of Mexico, but dead animals are still washing up on beaches - and one scientist believes the damage runs much deeper.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Martin Rees, The science of eternity, Prospect Magazine, 2002
Rating: 4/5 Link
- If humans do not destroy themselves they may spread beyond the earth into a universe that could last almost forever. Life would have tunnelled through its moment of maximum jeopardy.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
A. A. Gill, Dubai on Empty, Vanity Fair, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Acid Sea, National Geographic Magazine, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The carbon dioxide we pump into the air is seeping into the oceans and slowly acidifying them. One hundred years from now, will oysters, mussels, and coral reefs survive?
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Ami Sedghi, Fukushima nuclear power plant update, guardian.co.uk, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Japan is racing to gain control of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plan. Where does the most detailed data come from? Updated daily.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Paul Allen, Microsoft’s Odd Couple, Vanity Fair, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- It’s 1975 and two college dropouts are racing to create software for a new line of “hobbyist” computers. The result? A company called “Micro-Soft”—now the fifth-most-valuable corporation on earth. In an adaptation from his memoir, the author tells the story of his partnership with high-school classmate Bill Gates, until its dramatic ending in 1983.
Friday, April 1, 2011
William H. Gross, Skunked, PIMCO, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security now account for 44% of total federal spending and are steadily rising.
- Previous Congresses (and Administrations) have relied on the assumption that we can grow our way out of this onerous debt burden.
- Unless entitlements are substantially reformed, the U.S. will likely default on its debt; not in conventional ways, but via inflation, currency devaluation and low to negative real interest rates.
Monday, March 7, 2011
James Fowler & Dominic Johnson, On Overconfidence, Seed Magazine, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Humans are overconfident creatures, which boosts our persistence, ambition, and drive - but can also lead to disasters. We can make such false beliefs work to our benefit.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
William H. Gross, Two-Bits, Four-Bits, Six-Bits, a Dollar, PIMCO, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- A successful handoff from public to private credit creation has yet to be accomplished, and it is that handoff that ultimately will determine the outlook for real growth and stability.
- Because quantitative easing has affected all risk spreads, the withdrawal of nearly $1.5 trillion in annualized check writing may have dramatic consequences.
- Who will buy Treasuries when the Fed doesn’t? The question really is at what yield, and what are the price repercussions if the adjustments are significant.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
James Fallows & Eamonn Fingleton, The Myth of Japan's 'Lost Decades', The Atlantic, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The country's economy is stronger than it was in the '80s. Why Tokyo doesn't want the world to believe that.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Paul M. Barrett, Glock: America's Gun, BusinessWeek, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- How Austria's Glock became the weapon of choice for U.S. cops, Second Amendment enthusiasts, and mass killers like the alleged Tucson gunman Jared Loughner.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Tim Harford, What we can learn from a nuclear reactor, Financial Times, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle - engineers, psychologists and even sociologists - the connection is obvious.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Jon Ronson, Citizen Kubrick, The Guardian, 2004
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Michael Lewis, When Irish Eyes Are Crying, Vanity Fair, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- First Iceland. Then Greece. Now Ireland, which headed for bankruptcy with its own mysterious logic. In 2000, suddenly among the richest people in Europe, the Irish decided to buy their country - from one another. After which their banks and government really screwed them. So where’s the rage?
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Natasha Singer and Reed Abelson, Can Johnson & Johnson Get Its Act Together?, The New York Times, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Little red flags jut out from the shelves at a CVS drugstore in suburban Boston, alerting shoppers to shortages of nearly a dozen Johnson & Johnson products. Among them are Motrin, Rolaids, children’s Tylenol liquid and adult Tylenol, Mylanta, Pepcid AC and even some Neutrogena skin care products.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Andrew Hyde, The Tragedy of Nepal, andrewhy.de, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- A developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well.
Monday, February 7, 2011
William H. Gross, Devil’s Bargain, PIMCO, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Money has become the economic and political wedge for profound changes in American society.
- Perhaps the most deceptive policy tool to lessen debt loads is the “negative” or exceedingly low real interest rate that central banks impose on savers and debt holders.
- Old-fashioned gilts and Treasury bonds may need to be “exorcised” from model portfolios and replaced with more attractive alternatives both from a risk and a reward standpoint.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Paul Krugman, Can Europe Be Saved?, The New York Times Magazine, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved With Euros.
- There's something peculiarly apt about the fact that the current European crisis began in Greece. For Europe’s woes have all the aspects of a classical Greek tragedy, in which a man of noble character is undone by the fatal flaw of hubris.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Brian Hayes, The Semicolon Wars, American Scientist, 2010
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Every programmer knows there is one true programming language. A new one every week.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Amy Chua, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, The Wall Street Journal, 2011
Rating: 4/5 Link
- Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
Friday, January 7, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Graham Bowley, The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets, The New York Times, 2010
- The engine of Wall Street has shifted from the stock exchange floor to data centers in New Jersey, where computer-driven trading now accounts for 56 percent of all trading activity. While this Tron landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company. For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Joshuah Bearman, Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief, Wired, 2010
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The true story of a multi-billion dollar art heist and how they got away with it.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Nick Paumgarten, Master of Play, The New Yorker, 2010
Rating: 4/5 Link
- The many worlds of a video-game artist.
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