Financial Markets and Economy
These are the 9 biggest risks facing the world (Business Insider)
2016 has been a challenging year for the world so far.
Saudi Arabia now owns the largest refinery in the US (Business Insider)
Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco appear to be getting a divorce, breaking up their joint venture in U.S.-based refining assets.
The two companies joined together to create Motiva Enterprises LLC in 1998, a 50-50 joint venture that operated three refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. But Shell and Saudi Aramco have seen their interests head in different directions. "It is now time for the partners to pursue their independent downstream goals," said Abdulrahman Al-Wuhaib, a senior vice president of Saudi Aramco’s downstream unit.
Best Energy ETF of the Week: United States Natural Gas Fund, LP (Fox Business)
Crude oil made big headlines this week after it crossed over the $40-a-barrel mark for the first time this year. Natural gas was actually the real story this week: It outperformed crude, fueling a big jump in the United States Natural Gas Fund , which is an ETF that tracks its price.
Tesla bears should be worried about this 'crazy off-the-hook' metric (Business Insider)
Almost no other company in America generates passionate debate like Tesla. Despite the fact that Elon Musk has built the company up from nothing amid extremely trying circumstances, while simultaneously upending the rocket industry with SpaceX, many investors continue to scorn Tesla. It was little surprise then that Tesla’s announcement of its grid-scale battery systems was greeted with skepticism and outright derision in some quarters of the market. Tesla bears may come to rue that dogmatic view.
Threat of a synchronised downturn & G20 Finance Ministers' complacency (Prime Economics)
G20 Finance Ministers met in Huangzhou, China recently and refused appeals from both the IMF and the OECD for “urgent collective policy action” that focussed “fiscal policies on investment-led spending”. Instead the world’s finance ministers concluded that “it's every country for themselves”.
Warren Buffett has a simple test for separating investors from speculators (Business Insider)
There are investors.
And then there are speculators.
McDonald's Says its Wage Hikes Are Improving Service (Fortune)
Last year, McDonald’s MCD 0.75% joined a chorus of struggling U.S. companies offering workers pay hikes to help spur a turnaround. And it looks like the move is paying off for the fast-food giant.
Is It Time To Go Bargain Hunting In Valeant Pharmaceuticals Stock (Forbes)
Valeant Pharmaceuticals stock has proved to be a toxic choice – that is, for investors who purchased the stock recently, but before the company restated its financial results last Monday.
Why Short Sellers Are Backing Off GameStop (Fortune)
GameStop, one of the most shorted U.S. stocks, has started to attract institutional buyers and dissuade some traders betting against it as it fights off a consumer shift toward downloading video games and its depressed share price stabilizes.
Low Oil Prices Hit Luxury Retailers Hard (Fortune)
The dramatic drop in oil prices has hurt luxury retailers and other stores, in ways direct and indirect.
Coke Thinks Designer Milk Could Be a Billion-Dollar Brand (Bloomberg)
In its quest to slake the world’s thirst, Coca-Cola is intent on making milk a billion-dollar brand. But not just any kind of milk. Coke has joined forces with a dairy cooperative to create Fairlife, which produces a filtered, high-protein, low-sugar, lactose-free designer milk also called Fairlife. It costs about $4 for a 52-ounce bottle—more than organic milk and about double what the conventional stuff sells for.
Goldman Throws Up On Global Easing Party, Warns US Economy Close To Overheating (Zero Hedge)
“The dollar rally is far from over,” Goldman’s Robin Brooks said, just hours before this week’s FOMC announcement.
An Educated Guess on How Much ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Will Make for Disney (NY Times)
Enormous attention is paid to box office results, in large part because of the lack of transparency at movie studios: There is no other publicly available financial data for films. Production costs? Reporters have to pry estimates out of sources. Marketing budgets? “We don’t discuss marketing,” is the standard studio response.
The Fiction Of Earnings Growth (Forbes)
The financial establishment’s wonderful corporate earnings forecasts of last year are going up in smoke. It was all hype, probably with the goal to keep investors from selling, as that would have interfered with the selling from the establishment’s own portfolios.
Buying Dollars Gets Pricey (Wall Street Journal)
A scramble for U.S. dollars is rippling through global markets, driving up the costs that foreign companies and financial institutions pay to hedge against currency swings.
Profit Margins Tumble To Lowest In Four Years… And It's Not Just Oil's Fault (Zero Hedge)
One week ago, we were surprised to see that none other than data aggregator Factset has joined the "crusade" against fabricated non-GAAP numbers.
Ben Bernanke Thinks the Fed Should Consider Negative Interest Rates (Fortune)
What should the Federal Reserve do if the economy starts to tank? Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks one tool to consider is negative interest rates.
Politics
The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana (NY Mag)
In Bizarro America, the tea party never happened. Instead, the Great Recession sparked a left-wing populist movement that swept democratic socialists into statehouses all across the country. In Vermont, these Denmark-worshippers took full control of state government and implemented their radical agenda. They raised income taxes to unprecedented heights, upped the minimum wage to $15 an hour, made all state universities tuition-free, and established a single-payer health-care system. As he signed the last of these programs into law, Governor Bernie Sanders declared that Vermont would serve as a blue-state model, one that the Democratic Party’s 2016 ticket could use to say, “See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.”
Trump’s disingenuous Ted Cruz smear: Birtherism is back, still dangerous and wrong (Salon)
Perhaps President Obama was waiting for the prime opportunity to describe “birtherism” as a symptom of a broader pathology afflicting the Republican Party. Lucky for him, that moment arrived during a joint press conference this week with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when CBS News reporter Margaret Brennan asked Obama if he bears any responsibility for the polarized politics that brought us “someone as provocative as Donald Trump.”
Technology
The world's first solar airport no longer pays for electricity (CNN)
Three years ago, they began adding solar panels — first on the roof of the arrivals terminal, then on and around an aircraft hangar. The success of those initial efforts led to a much bigger endeavor.
"We wanted to be independent of the electricity utility grid," Jose Thomas, the airport's general manager, told CNNMoney.
Parents, Teens and Digital Monitoring (Pew Research Center)
The widespread adoption of various digital technologies by today’s teenagers has added a modern wrinkle to a universal challenge of parenthood – specifically, striking a balance between allowing independent exploration and providing an appropriate level of parental oversight. Digital connectivity offers many potential benefits from connecting with peers to accessing educational content. But parents have also voiced concerns about the behaviors teens engage in online, the people with whom they interact and the personal information they make available.
Google just proved how unpredictable artificial intelligence can be (Business Insider)
Humans have been taking a beating from computers lately.
The 4-1 defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence (AI) is only the latest in a string of pursuits in which technology has triumphed over humanity.
Health and Life Sciences
Generally speaking, sweepingly pessimistic statements about society should be taken with a grain of salt. When someone claims pop music is getting much dumber, or college kids are much more prone to mental illness, odds are pretty good the claim in question is a bit overblown. Overall, we’re often more attuned to the negative stories and anecdotes than positive ones, meaning that news coverage of terrible events, for example, can cause us to develop a distorted view of things.
Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain (Ars Technica)
After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of a simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it.
How Gut Bacteria Are Shaking Up Cancer Research (Bloomberg)
Top scientists at Roche Holding AG and AstraZeneca Plc are sizing up potential allies in the fight against cancer: the trillions of bacteria that live in the human body.
Life on the Home Planet
FBI says car hacking is a real risk (CNet)
If you're not already worried about your car being hacked, you really should be, the US government says.
Connected cars are becoming "increasingly vulnerable" to cyberattack, according to an advisory issued Thursday by the FBI and the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Everything we know about the FlyDubai plane crash that killed 62 in Russia (Business Insider)
Winds were gusting before dawn Saturday over the airport in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don when a plane carrying 62 people from a favorite Russian holiday destination decided to abort its landing.
The timing was tricky. Two planes had landed just a few minutes before the FlyDubai plane aimed to touch down.
