Financial Markets and Economy
Ten Good Pieces of Economic Data From All Around the World (Bloomberg)
It's been a big week for bullish economic data across the globe, from South Korean exports to European manufacturing figures.
The most important number of the week comes tomorrow: November's U.S. jobs report.
Why 2016 May Be the Year of 'Peak Housing' for Canada (Bloomberg)
The annualized 5.5 percent decline in this category was its worst quarterly showing since 2010, notes Macquarie Capital Markets Analyst David Doyle, who views the details of the report as "growing evidence that 2016 will be the year of 'peak housing' for Canada."
Abu Dhabi Sovereign-Wealth Fund Gets Entangled in Global 1MDB Scandal (The Wall Street Journal)
A futuristic 35-story tower where doors swoosh open with the wave of a hand houses a little-known firm long used by this emirate to deploy its oil riches around the world.
Italian Banks Flirt With Disaster Again as Renzi Teeters (Bloomberg)
They’re burdened with a mountain of bad loans. Their stocks have cratered. And they have to operate in an economy prone to recession and political upheaval.
How Banks Are Capitalizing on a New Wave of Big Data and Analytics (Harvard Business Review)
Digital is reconfiguring the world. Smart, always-connected devices and anytime/anywhere interactions are now givens, particularly among millennials, who expect such conveniences in banking and financial services.
Will OPEC's Cut Stop The Economic Time Bomb? (Forbes)
Over the past year we’ve talked a lot about the oil price bust and the threat it represented to the global economy. And in past months, we’ve talked about the approaching OPEC meeting, where they had telegraphed a production cut–the first in eight years. Still, not many were buying it.
Passive Investors Get Sucked Into Hong Kong Market Failures (The Wall Street Journal)
A controversial report from brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein in August accused passive investing of being “worse than Marxism.” In a capitalist outpost of the world’s biggest communist country, passive investing can indeed be ominous.
World's growing inequality is 'ticking time bomb' – Nobel laureate Yunus (Reuters)
The widening gap between rich and poor around the world is a "ticking time bomb" threatening to explode into social and economic unrest if left unchecked, Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus said on Thursday.
Coinbase ordered to turn over customers' records to IRS (CNet)
Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has been ordered to surrender records on customers' trades in the virtual currency to the IRS as part of a tax-avoidance probe.
Cramer explains how OPEC may have just ‘engineered the short-squeeze of a lifetime’ (CNBC)
The stock market gobbled up that short squeeze on Wednesday, as crude surged 9.3 percent on the news that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries finally reached an agreement to limit oil production for the first time in eight years.
Fallout from Italy's referendum will be both financial and political (The Guardian)
The eurozone crisis never went away; it was just overlooked in the Brexit upheaval. But you can rely on Italy to trigger thoughts of catastrophe and, sure enough, the arrival of this weekend’s referendum on constitutional reform has spooked markets.
Macau Casino Operators Tumble On New Capital Outflow Curbs (Barorn's Asia)
Travelers to and from Macau will need to submit a currency declaration form to customs under proposals being put forward by the Macau government in its latest attempt to curb money laundering.
Excessive Diversification Is Pointless And Damages Returns (Ensemble Capital, Seeking Alpha)
Most people think that if something is good, more is always better. But that's rarely true. One of the most important concepts in economics, The Law of Diminishing Returns, shows us that each new unit of something good tends to produce less good than the previous unit.
SHANE OLIVER: The 9 bad habits of highly ineffective investors (Business Insider)
In the upside-down world logic that applies to much of investing, there are a bunch of mistakes investors often make which makes it harder for them to reach their financial goals.
Weak business investment casts cloud over Canada’s growth rebound (The Globe And Mail)
Canada’s third-quarter gross domestic product report couldn’t have come at a better time for the Bank of Canada, shining some light into some frustratingly foggy corners of the economy just as it begins wrestling with next week’s interest-rate decision.
Treasuries suffer worst month since 2009 (USA Today)
U.S. Treasuries suffered their worst month since 2009 as investors fret President-elect Donald Trump 's policies will spell bad news for debt investors and also brace for hikes in short-term interest rates by the Federal Reserve.
Venezuela's currency value depends largely on one guy at an Alabama Home Depot (PRI)
The socialist government led by President Nicolás Maduro has had to contend with the collapse of oil prices, corruption and high inflation. For ordinary Venezuelans, that means their currency, the bolivar, has become mostly worthless — mostly, but not entirely.
7 investment strategies when rates are rising (Live Wire)
Bond yields have held their ground over the last few weeks, keeping the pressure on rate sensitive stocks. The question is whether this is a kneejerk market reaction or a meaningful shift? Chris Watling, CEO & Chief Market Strategist at Longview Economics, recently wrote on Livewire that: “With the beginning of the normalisation of the money creation system in the US and the UK, history would suggest that UK & US yields have made their generational lows.
'Peter principle' alive and well in fund management: James Saft (Reuters)
new study bears out the truth in asset management of the “Peter principle”, a theory coined by Laurence Peter, an academic who studied hierarchies. The Peter principle holds that managers are promoted up to the point at which they are incompetent.
China’s Car Market To Drive Off The Cliff, Cautions Morgan Stanley (Barron's Asia)
China’s auto makers were sold off today after Morgan Stanley published a high-profile bearish report.
Morgan Stanley now forecasts China’s car sales will grow by at most 4.3% in 2017 versus the bank’s previous 8% forecast.
10 Entrepreneurs to Follow in 2017 (The Huffington Post)
If you’ve recently decided to take the deep and exciting plunge into entrepreneurship, you’ll want to surround yourself with as many encouraging people as possible. These might include friends and family, other entrepreneurs, and online communities.
The 10 most important things in the world right now (Business Insider)
Hello! Here’s what you need to know on Friday.
Companies
The Biggest Loser: Vertex Pharmaceuticals Drops 4.7% (Barron's)
Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX) fell to the bottom of the S&P 500 today, earning the title of the Biggest Loser.
JPMorgan Tells Investors: Ignore Mainstream Media (Zero Hedge)
In the short-term, with additional rate hikes imminent and the record level of the USD, we are at an increased risk of repeating the scenario from January 2016 where fundamental and systematic investors were selling at the same time in the aftermath of a Fed hike (albeit, some risks are lower this time, such as higher Oil prices and a lack of focus on China/CNY).
Technology
Amazon and Seagate partner up on new Duet 1TB Hard Drive that automatically syncs your data to the cloudIn an attempt to simplify data backup, Seagate has announced the new Duet 1TB Hard Drive that automatically syncs all of its contents to Amazon’s cloud service. This partnership ensures that data is easily transferrable on-the-go while also taking the guesswork out of backing up your files.
Self-Driving Car Sensors Just Got Smaller, Cheaper, and Better All at Once (Singularity Hub)
Self-driving cars have advanced a lot in recent years—going from test track prototypes to fixtures on the roads of select cities. And while they still require human supervision on public roads, it’s predicted that in the not-so-distant future driverless cars will not only take over the road, they’ll do a much better job than we’ve been doing.
Concerns as face recognition tech used to ‘identify’ criminals (New Scientist)
What can your face say about you? Face recognition technology can pick up on things like your age, gender and maybe even your mood. Now, two researchers say it could even tell whether you’re a criminal.
NASA is developing metallic glass to make better robot astronauts (Science Alert)
NASA is working on a special kind of metallic glass to fit out its future robot explorers – a material that's hard-wearing, super-strong, and able to operate smoothly at very low temperatures.
Dogs Teach Bomb-Sniffing Machines New Tricks (Scientific American)
A dog’s sniff pulls a plume of fresh scents toward them, which fluid dynamicists say is a technique that could make for better bomb detectors. Christopher Intagliata reports.
Motorola isn't making a new smartwatch anytime soon (Engadget)
We might not see a successor to the 2015 Moto 360 in the near future, or even at all. Motorola and its parent company Lenovo have confirmed to The Verge that they're not working on a new smartwatch to be released in time for Android Wear 2's launch next year.
Bot-making service Motion.ai now supports Node.js (Venture Beat)
Bot creation platform Motion.ai now allows people to create bots with Node.js modules that can be used to do things like call on APIs or interact with databases.
Politics
GOP's Medicare plans run into wall in the Senate (Politico)
Interviews with more than a dozen GOP lawmakers reveal they’re not planning to pursue big changes to the popular health care program for seniors — at least not in the first year of the Trump administration.
Trump’s Breezy Calls to World Leaders Leave Diplomats Aghast (NY Times)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump inherited a complicated world when he won the election last month. And that was before a series of freewheeling phone calls with foreign leaders that has unnerved diplomats at home and abroad.
Trump picks retired Marine Gen. James Mattis for secretary of defense (The Washington Post)
President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, who has said that responding to “political Islam” is the major security issue facing the United States, to be secretary of defense.
Sanders and Warren issue joint statement slamming Trump's new finance industry alligator for his private DC swamp (Boing Boing)
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: "During the campaign, Donald Trump told the American people that he was going to change Washington by taking on Wall Street. Donald Trump’s choice for Treasury scretary, Steve Mnuchin, is just another Wall Street insider.
Trump promised to repeal Obamacare, but it turns out Americans like most of it, a poll finds (Los Angeles Times)
Despite sharp partisan differences over the Affordable Care Act, Democrats and Republicans, including voters who backed President-elect Donald Trump, strongly support most of the law’s key provisions, a new national poll indicates.
Deluged Immigration Courts, Where Cases Stall for Years, Begin to Buckle (NY Times)
Walk into the immigration court here, and scenes of a justice system in collapse abound.
In the overflowing courtrooms, one judge raced through hearings, opening 85 cases on a recent day, and several others were not far behind.
Health and Biotech
Australian students recreate Martin Shkreli price-hike drug in school lab (The Guardian)
A group of Australian high school students have managed to recreate a life-saving drug that rose from US$13.50 to US$750 a tablet overnight after an unscrupulous price-hike by former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli.
Life on the Home Planet
What Zen “Acceptance” and “Non-Attachment” Really Are (Patheos)
The practices of acceptance and non-attachment are critical to Zen and Buddhist practice – but they are easily misunderstood.
It can sound like we’re being asked not to care about things, or not to try to change things for the better.
Dozens of hearses to take Colombia crash victims toward final flight home (Reuters)
Dozens of hearses carrying the coffins of those killed when a plane flying Brazil's Chapecoense soccer team crashed into a Colombian mountain will leave Medellin for the airport on Friday to be flown home.
As winter nears, Dakota Access faces frigid weather and costly delays (Reuters)
Delays to the Dakota Access Pipeline have added millions of dollars to Energy Transfer Partners' construction tab – but even if the line is approved, the freezing temperatures will bring their own challenges to finishing the drilling process.
