Financial Markets and Economy
Fed's March Policy Message May Be Crimped by Muscular ECB Move (Bloomberg)
Dramatic action by the European Central Bank is raising questions about how far the Federal Reserve can diverge from its peers.
Yep, US companies tried to hide a ton of bad news from investors last year (Business Insider)
US companies tried to hide a lot of bad news from investors in 2015.
Money Is Flooding Back Into One of Wall Street's Most Popular 2016 Trades (Bloomberg)
The upturn in U.S. core inflation and rise in oil prices are causing money to pour into a trade that was one of Wall Street's favorites heading into 2016, according to Société Générale SA.
The biggest force powering the stock market is starting to disappear, and it could be a huge problem (Business Insider)
Since the beginning of the post-crisis bull-market run, the biggest buyer of equities hasn't been retail investors or institutions but companies themselves.
Oil price 'may have bottomed out' (BBC)
There is evidence that oil prices are stabilising and could even begin to rise again, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.
It said lower oil output in the US and other countries was helping to curb the glut in the supply of oil.
An important negative feedback loop in the markets is breaking down (Yahoo! Finance)
The strength of the U.S. dollar and its negative impact on the U.S. economy is one of the measures pointed to by the Federal Reserve’s most dovish policy makers, who argue that the Fed should hold off on further interest rate hikes.
How To Be Wrong As An Investor (A Wealth of Common Sense)
One of the best and worst things about the financial markets is that they’re never going to be perfect. There will always be something to worry about because even stability can breed instability. This is one of the many things that makes the markets so challenging.
Is International Business Machines Corp's Stock Price Jump Sustainable? (Fox Business)
IBM stock has been on a nice run of late. After bottoming out at $120.96 a share on Jan. 27 — about a week after announcing Q4 and 2015 annual earnings — IBM shares closed Tues, March 8 at $139.03, good for a 15% pop. The rebound in the global markets has helped boost a number of stocks that had been beaten down of late, but there may be more going on with IBM's upward share price movements than simply getting swept up in the good mood.
Shkreli's Bankrupt Drug Company Gets Offer From Hedge Fund (Bloomberg)
KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc., the drug company that plunged into bankruptcy after the arrest of its former Chief Executive Officer Martin Shkreli, is getting some help for its plan to buy a treatment for Chagas disease.
Hedge fund Black Horse Capital LP offered to buy at least 40 percent of the company for $10 million on the condition that Shkreli holds no more than 20 percent of KaloBios’s voting shares, according to a filing Thursday in Delaware bankruptcy court.
After 20 Years, It’s Harder to Ignore the Digital Economy’s Dark Side (HBR)
In 1995, I published The Digital Economy, a book that became one of the first best-sellers about the internet in business. To mark its 20th anniversary, my publisher asked me to write a dozen mini-chapters for a new edition. As I revisited it, I was struck by how far we’ve come since 1995 and by how many concepts in the book have withstood the test of time. “The digital economy” term itself has become part of the vernacular.
New China Stocks Chief Vows Decisive Intervention If Needed (Bloomberg)
China’s new stock regulator vowed to step in “decisively” if needed to stem the sort of stock-market panic that resulted in a $5 trillion wipeout last summer, adding that it was far too early to think about the state rescue fund leaving the market.
Draghi-Dip-Buyers Send Stocks, Crude To 2016 Highs; Gold Slammed (Zero Hedge)
So this happened…
Politics
Marco Rubio and other Republicans paved the way for Donald Trump's 'narrative of bitterness and anger' (Business Insider)
A visibly pained Marco Rubio told reporters Saturday morning that he doesn't know whether he'd be able to support Donald Trump if the Republican frontrunner wins their party's presidential nomination.
A day after chaos erupted at Trump's Chicago rally, Rubio said he's concerned that the real-estate magnate is feeding civil unrest, leading the country to "chaos" and "anarchy."
Trump Pins Rally Chaos on Sanders's Supporters, Defends Own (Bloomberg Politics)
A day after violent protests prompted Donald Trump to cancel a rally, the Republican presidential front-runner blamed the activist group MoveOn.Org and supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders for the chaos, while defending his own “harassed” supporters.
Trump blames 'our communist friend' Sanders for Chicago clashes (Business Insider)
U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Saturday blamed supporters of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders for protests that shut down his Chicago rally, calling the U.S. senator from Vermont "our communist friend".
Technology
Robots took the manufacturing jobs — and they're not coming back (Vox)
In debates leading up to Tuesday's Michigan primary, everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders has touted plans to revive American manufacturing. It's no secret that manufacturing has been leaving the US for a while, and everything from new trade policies to targeted corporate tax reforms to repealing Obamacare has been cited as the key to bringing manufacturing jobs back to America.
Some of the ideas candidates offered to boost US manufacturing make sense, and others make less sense.
Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1 (Rolling Stone)
Welcome to robot nursery school," Pieter Abbeel says as he opens the door to the Robot Learning Lab on the seventh floor of a sleek new building on the northern edge of the UC-Berkeley campus. The lab is chaotic: bikes leaning against the wall, a dozen or so grad students in disorganized cubicles, whiteboards covered with indecipherable equations. Abbeel, 38, is a thin, wiry guy, dressed in jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. He moved to the U.S. from Belgium in 2000 to get a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and is now one of the world's foremost experts in understanding the challenge of teaching robots to think intelligently. But first, he has to teach them to "think" at all. "That's why we call this nursery school," he jokes.
Health and Life Sciences
Everything Is Crumbling (Slate)
Nearly 20 years ago, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice, a married couple at Case Western Reserve University, devised a foundational experiment on self-control. “Chocolate chip cookies were baked in the room in a small oven,” they wrote in a paper that has been cited more than 3,000 times. “As a result, the laboratory was filled with the delicious aroma of fresh chocolate and baking.”
Is fermented food a recipe for good gut health (BBC)
Fermentation as a way of preserving food dates back thousands of years, but it is now being held up as a potentially important source of friendly, health-giving bacteria. So should we all be eating sauerkraut and kimchi?
Allowing bacteria to form in a sealed jar of vegetables over a few months might not seem like the most appealing way to create an appetising dish, but fermentation has a lot going for it.
Life on the Home Planet
Scientists have discovered a bacteria that can eat plastic (Business Insider)
We manufacture over 300m tonnes of plastics each year for use in everything from packaging to clothing.
Their resilience is great when you want a product to last. But once discarded, plastics linger in the environment, littering streets, fields and oceans alike.
We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction (The Atlantic)
Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic.
