Financial Markets and Economy
Consumption-Led Global Growth May Not Be Sustainable, BIS Warns (Bloomberg)
The global economy’s recovery from the financial crisis may be overly dependent on domestic consumption and at risk of failing, according to the Bank for International Settlements.
U.S. factory orders rise for second straight month (Reuters)
New orders for U.S.-made goods increased for a second straight month in January, suggesting the recovery of the manufacturing sector was gaining momentum as rising prices for commodities spur demand for machinery.
The World’s Most Radical Experiment in Monetary Policy Isn’t Working (The Wall Street Journal)
During Japan’s go-go 1980s, Hiromi Shibata once blew a month’s salary on a cashmere coat, wore it a few times, then retired it. Today, her daughter’s idea of a shopping spree is scrounging through her mom’s closet in Shizuoka, a provincial capital.
Calling a Top in Stocks Has Become a Cottage Industry (Bloomberg)
There’s a simple reason the future always feels uncertain but the past seems relatively orderly: No one has any idea what the future holds, while hindsight allows us to assume that the past was more predictable that it actually was.
Brought Down by Long Bust, Texas Oilmen Pray for Another Boom (The Wall Street Journal)
Just 2½ years ago, when a barrel of oil sold for about $100, John Schiller and his wife, Kristi, were living luxuriantly in Houston high society.
Company insiders are dumping stock at levels 'rarely seen,' report indicates (CNBC)
Chief executives may profess loving a pro-business president in the White House, but they are saying something else with their money, and that could be a worrisome sign.
Wall Street Cops Reined In as SEC Braces for Trump Budget Cuts (Bloomberg)
When Wall Street bond dealmakers congregated in Las Vegas last week for their annual get-together, one group of folks was conspicuously absent: SEC enforcement officials.
TD's Misra Says March Hike Creates Optionality for Fed (Bloomberg)
Priya Misra, head of global rate strategy at TD Securities, and Jay Pelosky, founder at Pelosky Global Strategies, discuss market expectations for a March rate hike by the Federal Reserve.
The Big Problem With China’s Bridge and Tunnel Addiction (Bloomberg)
With a global portfolio that includes Club Med and Cirque du Soleil, as well as assets in real estate, insurance, and pharmaceuticals, Fosun Group is one of China’s most active dealmakers. Still, the 46.2 billion-yuan ($6.7 billion) railway project it unveiled in September was noteworthy.
OECD: There are 4 big risks facing the world economy (Business Insider)
The world economy will witness modest growth in the next few years but it could be derailed by financial and policy instability, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Japan's Economic Growth Below Estimates In Last Quarter (Associated Press)
The figure released Wednesday was slightly higher than the preliminary estimate of 1.0 percent annual growth for the world's No. 3 economy. It was below economists' forecasts for growth of 1.4 percent or higher.
Of liquidity and lemons: Why Wall Street is like a used car lot (The Conversation)
A small group of dealers, who met under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, agreed to trade only with each other and established a minimum fee for their service. At that time, most trading involved the buying and selling of government bonds.
The Mathematics of Getting Rich by Investing in Stocks (The Balance)
One of the things that amazes me about investing is the truism that is oft repeated: It only takes one great investment, held for a very long time, to change your family's destiny forever.
Schwab and TD Ameritrade: Fee Wars, What is it Good For? (Barron's)
Fee wars broke out into a multi-front affair last week as the action bled into the brokerage arena. Charles Schwab (SCHW) took the first shot early February. Then Fidelity dropped its online trading commission on stocks and exchange-traded funds to $4.95 last week, which prompted pretty much every online broker to slash prices including TD Ameritrade Holding (AMTD), and E*Trade Financial (ETFC).
The High Cost of Cheap Labor (Modern Farmer)
At least half of all farmworkers in the United States are undocumented Mexican immigrants. And “documentation” often dictates inclusion in a guest-worker program that’s been compared to slavery.
The unprecedented expansion of the global middle class (Brookings)
Seven years ago I published a set of projections suggesting that the emerging middle class in developing countries was about to surge (Kharas, 2010).
Eurozone Capital Flight Intensifies: Target2 Imbalances Widen Again (MishTalk)
A quick perusal of Target2 Balances for January shows capital flight from Italy and Spain to Germany intensified again.
Core Factory Orders Growth Slows To Six-Month Lows (Zero Hedge)
Desite a positive headline print (+1.2% vs +1.05 expectations), January's Factory Orders ex-transports rose just 0.3% month-over-month – the weakest growth since July 2016.
JPM: "We See Increasing Risk Of Sell-Off In The Near Term" (Zero Hedge)
First it was Goldman, then Citigroup, now, completing the trifecta of suddenly bearish big banks is JPMorgan, whose US equity strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas writes that while the fundamental backdrop remains supporting, the "short-term downside risk" in the S&P is increasing.
US Consumer Spending Highest Since 2008 As Economic Confidence Hits Record High: Gallup (Zero Hedge)
Perhaps it is the last hurrah of the Trump post-election euphoria but according to Gallup there were two notable development in February.
Companies
Snap Inc. had its first down day in the stock market since going public on Thursday.
Shares of the parent company of Snapchat fell 12% in trading on Monday to as low as $23.79, below the opening price of $24 a share. They were about 16% lower than their high after the initial public offering.
Delta Air cuts first-quarter operating margin forecast, citing higher costs (Reuters)
Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL.N) on Monday cut its operating margin forecast for the current quarter, citing higher costs, and said it expected passenger unit revenue, a closely watched revenue metric, to be at the lower end of its forecast.
The Bad News and the Really Bad News for Retailers Fighting Amazon.com (The Wall Street Journal)
Here is a thought that should make investors in U.S. retailers tremble: Amazon.com could inflict roughly the same amount of cumulative pain on its competitors over the next three years as it did over two decades as a public company.
The Vietnam airline famous for bikini-clad flight attendants is now worth more than its national carrierVietnamese private budget airline VietJet's market capitalization surpassed that of state-owned Vietnam Airlines on Monday, only a week after it was listed.
Newspapers are becoming magazines, and the New York Times is leading the way (One Man And His Blog)
The New York Times has redesigned the opening spread of the print edition to make it more of a digest of everything the outlet is doing across all media. So, yes, that include capturing the best of its journalists’ tweetstorms on there.
GM to cut another 1,100 jobs (CNN)
The company is eliminating the third shift at its Lansing Delta Township plant, which makes three SUVs built on the same platform — the Chevrolet Traverse, the Buick Enclave and the GMC Acadia. But the new version of the Acadia is being built on a smaller platform, so production of that car moved to a Spring Hill, Tenn., plant last summer.
Technology
To help solve the last mile delivery headache, Ford could one day turn to drones, autonomous vehicles and even transforming electric tricycles. But also cars.
Repairing My Tesla Model S Has Been an Utter Nightmare — and It's Mostly Tesla's Fault (The Motley Fool)
That's how long it's been since my Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Model S was involved in an accident and I still don't have my car back.
The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine May Not Be as Smart as You Think (MIT Technology Review)
Artificial intelligence and big data could be helping to fuel an unprecedented propaganda campaign—but there’s little hard evidence to prove it so far.
Nvidia’s Jetson platform can power drones with good artificial intelligence (Venture Beat)
The platform includes the Jetson TX2 “embedded AI supercomputer,” a chip and its surruonding hardware that can power 4K video drones that consume only about 7.5 watts of power. Drones with the TX2 solution can operate two cameras simultaneously.
Politics
Donald Trump's Worst Deal (The New Yorker)
Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings.
White House aides defend Trump's wiretapping claim (Associated Press)
White House officials on Monday defended President Donald Trump's explosive claim that Barack Obama tapped Trump's telephones during last year's election, although they won't say exactly where that information came from and left open the possibility that it isn't true.
Trump, Putin and the New Cold War (The New Yorker)
On April 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the K.G.B., ordered foreign-intelligence operatives to carry out “active measures”—aktivniye meropriyatiya—against the reëlection campaign of President Ronald Reagan.
G.O.P. Health Bill Faces Revolt From Conservative Forces (NY Times)
After seven years of waiting longingly to annul President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, Republican leaders on Tuesday faced a sudden revolt from the right that threatened their proposal to remake the American health care system.
WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents (NY Times)
In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents in history, WikiLeaks released on Tuesday thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.
G.O.P. Repeal Bill Would Cut Funding for Poor and Taxes on Rich (The Upshot)
Republicans in the House have performed major surgery on the Obamacare replacement plan they circulated a few weeks ago. But compared with the Affordable Care Act, the new plan still shifts a lot of benefits from the poor to those who earn more.
Did Trump adviser Roger Stone admit to working with WikiLeaks while on the campaign? (Salon)
President Donald Trump’s close adviser Roger Stone — better known as a notorious right-wing hatchet man and conspiracy theorist— doesn’t seem to have learned much from his boss’s own bad experiences with Twitter.
In dramatic shift, White House suggests secret intelligence proves Obama wiretapped Trump Tower (Think Progress)
In a tweetstorm he posted on Saturday, President Trump accused former President Obama of wiretapping him ahead of the election last year. He framed the allegation as a fact, but didn’t provide any evidence.
Trump official admits Americans will have to pay for his infrastructure projects (Think Progress)
In his first address before Congress last week, President Trump promised that during his presidency, “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land.”
Trump Has Royally Screwed Congressional Republicans (New Republic)
President Donald Trump’s White House hunkered down unexpectedly Saturday to formulate a response to the president’s bizarre, unhinged tweets that morning accusing former President Barack Obama and members of the Obama administration of illegally “wire tapping” Trump Tower telephones in the weeks before the election.
Right-Wing Media Scramble To Recast Obama As Trump-Era Villain (Media Matters)
In science, nature abhors a vacuum. On cable news, Fox News abhors not having a Democratic villain. So the network is trying to bring back former President Barack Obama for the starring role.
Removing unauthorised immigrants is difficult and expensive (The Economist)
Tears stream down Arturo’s cheeks and onto his red jumpsuit as he imagines being deported to Mexico. Deep grooves line his face, a map of the hardships he has experienced since coming to America illegally three decades ago, aged 14.
House GOP Health Bill Adds Up To Big Tax Cut For The Rich (Associated Press)
The House Republicans' health care bill adds up to big tax cuts for the rich.
The bill would cut more than 20 taxes enacted under President Barack Obama's heath law, saving taxpayers nearly $600 billion over the next decade. The bulk of the money would go to the wealthiest Americans.
Mika Brzezinski is Officially Done With Donald Trump: ‘This Presidency is Fake and Failed’ (Mediaite)
On a day replete with doom and gloom on Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski closed out the show with some grim analysis.
Trump’s dangerous, irrational military buildup: Expensive solution to a nonexistent problem (Salon)
An axiom of Trump’s campaign rhetoric held that the American military has become a hollowed-out shell of its once-mighty self. It seems reasonable to suggest that 15 years of wars in central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere have worn down our soldiers, their equipment, and their ability to wage war.
Trump's tweets aren't distractions. They're self-destructions. (P M Carpenter's Comentary)
While many of Trump's leftist critics may not be the pure embodiment of historian Richard Hofstadter's most famous essay, it strikes me that they are, at least, borderline exemplars of American politics' paranoid style.
Life on the Home Planet
Texas’ largest jail may be forced to stop jailing people because they’re poor (Think Progress)
A year and a half after Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail as she tried to get the money to pay her way out, the largest jail in the state may now be forced to change its ways.
With Carnival Over, Brazil Braces for the ‘End of the World’ (Bloomberg)
Brazil’s unpopular and unelected president, Michel Temer, has done much to pave the way for recovery in Latin America’s largest economy. Yet with his inner circle crumbling and support in Congress wavering, an ambitious reform agenda now looks like a tall order.
