Financial Markets and Economy
Fed faces battle to escape world's low interest rate grip (Reuters)
Evidence that the U.S. neutral rate of interest remains stalled near zero may slow Federal Reserve rate hikes even more than expected, tying the hands of policymakers until a rebound in global demand or other forces raise that key measure of the economy’s underlying strength.
Stock Slump Worsens Before Fed as MSCI China Decision Sinks Yuan (Bloomberg)
The global stock selloff deepened in Asia as anxiety over Britain’s potential exit from the European Union continued to weigh on risk assets ahead of the Federal Reserve’s policy review. China’s yuan fell after MSCI Inc. denied local equities entry into their indexes.
Blow for China as its stock markets are denied MSCI seal of approval (Telegraph)
China’s volatile A-shares will not be added to an influential tracker of worldwide emerging markets, in a setback to the country’s bumpy journey towards the financial mainstream.
Boom States and Bust States (Bloomberg View)
The fourth quarter 2015 state gross domestic product numbers are out today! I know, you’re excited too. The headline: 41 states and the District of Columbia saw real GDP grow in the quarter.
The Most Pessimistic Bull Market in History (Wall Street Journal)
Could this be the most pessimistic bull market in history? The S&P 500 is just one good day’s trading away from a new record, yet the usual rush into go-go stocks is nowhere to be seen.
Firms That Left U.S. Still Enjoy Perks (Wall Street Journal)
Companies that lowered their tax bills after turning in their American passports are still finding perks from their former citizenship.
Xi Jinping Says China Should Invest More In the Elderly (Fortune)
China’s population is rapidly aging, even as its economy and workforce decline.
China should increase investment in care for the elderly, President Xi Jinping told a meeting of the country’s top leaders on its aging population, official Xinhua news agency reported.
Chinese Investors Are Backing Tesla’s Up and Coming Rivals (Time)
On startup, Atieva, has already raised several hundred million dollars and plans to release an electric sedan by 2018.
A few miles from Tesla Motors’s Palo Alto headquarters, a Silicon Valley startup plans to challenge the electric car maker with a rival family of vehicles designed and built in the United States with major backing from Chinese investors.
Nuclear power ‘far from dead’ as U.S. sees startup of first reactor in 20 years (Market Watch)
The U.S. saw a nuclear reactor come online this month for the first time in 20 years, and more are set to follow—proving that nuclear power is alive and well in a post-Fukushima disaster world.
The Tennessee Valley Authority connected its Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor to the power grid on June 3.
4 Reasons Microsoft Wasted $26.2 Billion To Buy LinkedIn (Forbes)
Microsoft just announced a deal to pay $26.2 billion to acquire business social network, LinkedIn. It fails the four tests of a successful acquisition.
While the deal certainly rescues LinkedIn from a huge growth problem that slashed the value of its shares in February, it is unclear how Microsoft will generate a return on that $26.2 billion investment.
Fleeting ETF Seed Money Could Be Healthy Sign (ETF)
Last week, Trevor Hunnicutt of Reuters wrote an interesting story, “New ETFs face more skepticism from financiers,” that examined something new going on in the ETF industry: fleeting seed money for new ETFs.
Once an acquisition target, Twitter now invests in SoundCloud (Market Watch)
Twitter Inc. has made an investment in SoundCloud that could help the Berlin-based music-streaming service with building up its recently launched subscription service.
268,000 U.S. Homeowners Regained Positive Equity in Q1 (World Propety Journal)
According to Irvine, Ca-based CoreLogic, 268,000 U.S. homeowners regained positive equity in Q1 2016, bringing the total number of mortgaged residential properties with equity at the end of Q1 2016 to approximately 46.7 million, or 92 percent of all mortgaged properties. Nationwide, home equity increased year over year by $762 billion in Q1 2016.
Sleepwalking Into a Brexit Disaster (Fortune)
World stock markets continue to slide this morning in response to polls showing the British may vote June 23 to exit the European Union.
Brexit is also dominating Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit, taking place in London this morning. “This country is sleepwalking toward disaster,” Miriam Gonzalez, a Spanish lawyer who is married to former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, told the group. “In my life, I have never gone through another moment like this.”
The Hedge Fund Apocalypse (Driehaus Capital Management)
During a fairly average day this past March, I reviewed year-to-date performance numbers for a number of funds and indices that I monitor. After staring at the numbers for about 15 minutes, it hit me like a left hook. I called a friend and let him in on my epiphany, “Hey man, the great culling of hedge funds, and all things alternative for that matter, is now upon us. Buckle up, because the next 12 months are going to reshape the investment world.
Warren Buffett’s Favorite Valuation Tool Shows Stocks Are Even Less Attractive Than Record-Low-Yielding Bonds Right Now (Wall Street Examiner)
I recently detailed why using the ‘Fed Model‘ to buy stocks has never been more dangerous. In this post, I want to demonstrate another method that shows why stocks aren’t attractive relative to bonds right now.
Financial Scarcity Amid Plenty (Project Syndicate)
With interest rates at all-time lows and central banks buying everything that moves, the world is awash with credit. Yet, paradoxically, a dangerous shortage of international liquidity is putting the global economy at risk.
Chart of the Day: FTSE 100 Down 1%+ Four Days in a Row (Be Spoke)
The UK’s FTSE 100 has fallen more than 1% for four consecutive trading days! This has taken the index close to three standard deviations below its 50-day moving average. In our trading range chart of the index below, you can see that the UK’s stock market hasn’t been this oversold since last December.
Gold In Euros Surges 6.5% In June and 17% YTD On BREXIT Concerns (Zero Hedge)
Gold in euros has risen another 1.3% today due to deepening BREXIT jitters with just 9 days left until the referendum on June 23. The flight to gold and sell off in euros and sterling came as Irish, UK, European and global stock markets fell sharply.
Politics
President Obama Slams 'Yapping' Over 'Radical Islam' And Terrorism (NPR)
He called it yapping, loose talk, and sloppiness. President Obama dismissed criticism of his administration's avoidance of the term "radical Islam" and urged America to live up to its founding values Tuesday, speaking at length about inclusiveness and religious freedom.
The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump (Politico)
Many commentators have argued that Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential race can be largely explained by ignorance; his candidacy, after all, is most popular among Republican voters without college degrees. Their expertise about current affairs is too fractured and full of holes to spot that only 9 percent of Trump’s statements are “true” or “mostly” true, according to PolitiFact, whereas 57 percent are “false” or “mostly false”—the remainder being “pants on fire” untruths. Trump himself has memorably declared: “I love the poorly educated.”
How False Equivalence Is Distorting the 2016 Election Coverage (The Nation)
?On March 15, Donald Trump won Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois, dispatching Marco Rubio’s campaign to the ash heap of history and giving every impression that he had become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. Hillary Clinton also did extremely well that day, taking Illinois, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. The New York Times gave its prime spot—the top-right corner of the paper’s front page—to a story headlined “2 Front-Runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Find Their Words Can Be Weapons.”
Technology
iOS 10 proactively remembers where you left your vehicle with Parked Car feature in Maps (9to5 Mac)
Third party solutions like Automatic and various apps on the App Store can already do this, but iOS 10 builds finding where you parked your car right into the operating system. The new Parked Car feature proactively remembers where you left your vehicle and offers new features in Maps for adding more context.
An AI Wrote This Short Film—and It’s Surprisingly Entertaining (Singularity Hub)
“In a future with mass unemployment, young people are forced to sell blood.”
This is the opening line of a short film entered in this year's Sci-Fi London Film Challenge. It's dark, enigmatic, contemporary…and written by a computer. In fact, the film's entire screenplay is the work of a neural net trained on nothing but sci-fi scripts.
Health and Life Sciences
The Myth Of The Post-Antibiotic Era (Forbes)
The worst-case scenario would be that it would be like 1940, only without a raging World War. Keep in mind that by 1940, before the introduction of penicillin, deaths from infectious diseases in the US had been reduced by 90% from their 19th century levels [1]. This reduction was entirely due to the provisions of clean food, water, and vaccines. We have (or should have) better systems for delivering these public health goods than we did 75 years ago.
Life on the Home Planet
We're about to run out of a critical antidote to some of the world's deadliest snakebites (Business Insider)
At the end of June 2016, the last remaining supplies of a safe and effective antivenom will expire.
The antidote, known as FAV-Afrique, is what Doctors Without Borders (MSF) relies on to treat snakebites in sub-Saharan Africa. It can be used to treat bites from ten venomous snakes, including some of the most dangerous in Africa.
Ocean worlds could host life under layers of high-pressure ice (New Scientist)
Some planets around other stars – and even some moons in our solar system – could have life hidden under layers of weird high-pressure ice, in oceans far deeper than Earth’s.
Extreme pressures can create unusual forms of ice rarely seen on Earth.
