News You Can Use From Phil’s Stock World

Financial Markets and Economy

Buffett Says Bonds Unattractive, If Not Terrible for Reinsurers (Bloomberg)

Warren Buffett, who built Berkshire Hathaway Inc. by reinvesting premiums from insurance units, said low bond yields have hurt the prospects of that strategy.

A Leak Wounded This Company. Fighting the Feds Finished It Off (Bloomberg)

The first phone call that changed Michael Daugherty’s life came in May 2008. Daugherty was a happy man, running a good business in a nice place. That’s how he talks about it, like the opening five minutes of a movie, setting up how great everything is before disaster strikes. His Atlanta-based company, LabMD, tested blood, urine, and tissue samples for urologists, and had about 30 employees and $4 million in annual sales.

The market's most crowded trades could be causing dangerous bubbles (Business Insider)

The market may be blowing up some bubbles through excessive crowding.

In an Age of Privilege, Not Everyone Is in the Same Boat (NY Times)

Behind a locked door aboard Norwegian Cruise Line’s newest ship is a world most of the vessel’s 4,200 passengers will never see. And that is exactly the point.

In the Haven, as this ship within a ship is called, about 275 elite guests enjoy not only a concierge and 24-hour butler service, but also a private pool, sun deck and restaurant, creating an oasis free from the crowds elsewhere on the Norwegian Escape.

Wall Street not rewarding low-expectation earnings beats (Market Watch)

Earnings beats this season have been cheapened, with lower-than-usual expectations making for little fanfare with investors when companies top the Wall Street consensus.

IBM is betting big on blockchain (Quartz)

Large businesses (especially those in financial services) have been trying to figure out how they can tap into the blockchain, the technology underpinning the bitcoin cryptocurrency. They’re intrigued by the possibilities of a transparent and cheap ledger system capable of creating an immutable record of transactions and monitoring sensitive data, like health records. But keeping that type of record secure—especially if it’s housed in the cloud—is a major concern. With an announcement on Friday, IBM is trying to get ahead of those questions.

Government risks giving away billions through Starter Homes policy, charity warns (The Telegraph)

The Government risks effectively giving away billions of pounds through the controversial starter homes policy unless vital changes are made to the legislation, a charity has warned.

Under the proposed starter homes programme, originally announced in 2014, 200,000 first-time buyers would be able to purchase new houses or flats at a 20pc discount to the market rate.

Asset Performance for the First Four Months of 2016 – Hi Ho Silver (Jesse's Cafe Americain)

"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The [first world] war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda ; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.

Facebook is slapped with a shareholder lawsuit over its proposal to issue class C shares (Quartz)

A Facebook investor has slapped the social network with a lawsuit in an attempt to halt a proposal to issue a new class of shares.

What Are The Three Signs Of A "Disorderly" Currency Market: Richard Koo Explains (Zero Hedge)

One of the biggest ironies in recent months has been the Bank of Japan's recurring insistence that it would promptly intervene in the FX market if the ongoing "disorderly" moves in the Yen do not stop.

Politics

Trumpology: A Master Class? (Politico)

The personality that looms largest over the 2016 campaign did not emerge on the political scene as an unknown. In fact, Donald Trump might be one of the most deeply studied presidential candidates ever. Beginning in the early 1990s, as the real estate mogul dealt with corporate calamities, and until last year, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, a half-dozen serious biographies have been written about a man who has imprinted himself on American culture in towering gold letters. But those biographies—which dig into Trump’s family history, his early business successes and later financial disasters, his tabloid sex scandals and the television showmanship that saved him—had largely receded into the depths of Amazon’s bestseller list. 

The Last Great Republican Rupture (Wall Street Journal)

Nobody quite understood why he did it, but on the second night of the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Mo., Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, sitting in shirt sleeves with the New York delegation, mischievously grabbed a Ronald Reaganplacard from a North Carolina politician and tore it in half. It was the showdown night of the convention—where Reagan was waging a long shot bid to deny Gerald R. Ford, the sitting president, his own party’s nomination—and tensions were high.

Technology

Fixing the American Commute (Curbed)

Few Commmuters today would describe the experience of traveling underneath the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York as exceptional. But that’s exactly how newspaper writers of the day described a then-miraculous train trip in 1909. This system of iron-clad tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey, a progressive transit project finished during the first decade of the 20th century and overseen by builders, engineers, and statesman such as William Gibbs McAdoo, was "one of the greatest railroad achievements in the history of the world,"

The Robot War Is Coming – And It’s Not Against Robots (The Daily Beast)

The last time I spoke at West Point, I was asked by a cadet if I worried that increased automation would lead to an eventual robot war. I joked that I wasn’t worried about the Cylons from “Battlestar Galactica” or Skynet from the “Terminator” movies. The reason I’m not scared of these scenarios is because everyone else is.

Health and Life Sciences

The Bulletproof Diet is everything wrong with eating in America? (Vox)

When I first heard about the Bulletproof Diet — the "revolutionary" plan for weight loss — I tried to turn a blind eye. I really did.

But then, there were rumblings around the newsroom. "My Silicon Valley Facebook friends are posting about it a lot," said one colleague. Another wanted to know whether there was any science to the claims that butter-laden coffee could actually help achieve a new level of mental clarity. When the "cult" turned up in the New York Times, my editor said we should be writing about it, too.

A neuroscientist says there’s a powerful benefit to exercise that is rarely discussed? (Quartz)

When I was about to turn 40, I started working out regularly after years of inactivity. As I sweated my way through cardio, weights, and dance classes, I noticed that exercise wasn’t just changing my body. It was also profoundly transforming my brain—for the better.

Life on the Home Planet

The woman who wants to completely reinvent our lawns (Vox)

The lawn, as we know it, is an anachronism: It’s a living fossil from the 1950s, the era of Levittown, glorified suburban sprawl, and better living through chemistry. And our lawns require a lot of chemistry. Landscapers often apply chemicals to lawns at more than double the concentrations used in industrial agriculture.

San Francisco’s long shadow (Washington Post)

East of San Francisco, beyond the Bay Area’s rabid housing market and high-tech office parks, is a different California where the air is hotter, the land is cheaper and the homeowners are enduring a more precarious version of the American dream.

You get there on Interstate 580, through 80 miles of suburbs and farmland, up into the bald hills of the Diablo Range that are suitable for neither. 

The Mind-Boggling Scale of Mount Saint Helens's Crater (Scientific American)

On this day in 1980, an earthquake beneath Mount St. Helens got everyone's attention. Within two months, much of her summit would be lying on the North Fork Toutle River valley floor, the lush forests stripped away, and our views of her changed forever.