Financial Markets and Economy
Pound Pares Decline as U.K. Officially Starts Brexit Process (Bloomberg)
The pound touched a one-week low against the dollar as the U.K. prepared to start the process by which it will leave the European Union.
Double-Edged Sword: Home Prices Keep Rising, Home Inventory Keeps Falling (Forbes)
You are thinking about selling your home. A similar place nearby sells for more than you thought it would. You list your home. This is how the housing market is supposed to work. As a result, over time, price growth should beget inventory growth. That’s not how things have been going lately.
Asia Stocks Ex-Japan Rise on U.S. Confidence, Rate Outlook (Bloomberg)
Asia stocks outside of Japan climbed back toward a 21-month high as confidence in the U.S. economy grew and Federal Reserve officials signaled a gradual approach to rate increases. Japanese shares fell as over three quarters of companies in the Topix index traded ex-dividend.
Tax Cuts Don't Lead to Economic Growth, a New 65-Year Study Finds (The Atlantic)
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush raised taxes, and GDP growth increased over the next five years. In 1993, President Bill Clinton raised the top marginal tax rate, and GDP growth increased over the next five years. In 2001 and 2003, President Bush cut taxes, and we faced a disappointing expansion followed by a Great Recession.
Crude oil marches higher ahead of U.S. supply data (Market Watch)
Oil prices continued to climb on Wednesday, boosted by supply disruptions in Libya and hopes official U.S. inventory data will show a drawdown in supplies at a major storage hub.
West Virginia Bill Would Ease Requirements for Drilling Approval (The Wall Street Journal)
A bill that would make it easier for oil and gas companies to use modern drilling techniques has pitted West Virginia’s Republican-led legislature against farmers and other groups.
More Than Obamacare Repeal, Small Businesses Want Congress to Rein In Costs (NY Times)
LaRonda Hunter, a business owner in Fort Worth, Tex., views the Affordable Care Act as a literal job killer. Fearful of triggering the law’s employer mandate, which requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance or pay penalties, Ms. Hunter has held off on expanding her small chain of hair salons.
New research shows immigration has only a minor effect on wages (The Conversation)
Economic arguments against immigration often take two forms – immigrants either suppress the wages of workers, or immigration creates higher unemployment. But our research shows that the impact of immigration on the labour market in Australia over the last 15 years is negligible.
Goldman Favors Emerging Markets on Growing U.S. Value Gap: Chart (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. sees a buying opportunity in developing nations after the S&P 500 Index’s post-election rally pushed its valuation to more than a decade high relative to the emerging-market benchmark.
Equity Research Faces "Major Disruption" As Study Finds "Less Than 1%" Of Reports Are Actually Read (Zero Hedge)
What if we were to tell you that for the bargain basement price of just $10,000 per hour you could buy yourself the privilege of a 1-hour conversation with an equity research analyst from a top-notch investment bank, would that be something that might be of interest to you?
US Economic Confidence Drops to Lowest Level Since Election (Gallup)
Americans' confidence in the U.S. economy tumbled along with the Dow Jones industrial average last week. Though still in positive territory, Gallup's U.S. Economic Confidence Index (ECI) dropped six points to a score of +5 for the week ending March 26.
Two-thirds of Americans give priority to developing alternative energy over fossil fuels (Pew Research Center)
President Donald Trump is promising major changes on climate and energy policy, including efforts to increase production from fossil fuel energy sources such as coal.
JPM Warns Shift To Passive Investing Increases Systemic Risk, Will Make Crashes Worse (Zero Hedge)
After nearly a decade of central planning by global monetary authorities, the hedge fund industry has found itself unable to generate any alpha since 2011.
Companies
Fox Business Tops CNBC in Back-to-Back Quarters for First Time Ever (The Wrap)
Fox Business Network picked up its first back-to-back quarterly victory over CNBC in Business Day viewers after beating its rival in the first quarter of 2017.
Chipotle Regains The Lead in New Mexican Food Poll (Forbes)
They lost me for a good long while, after just too many people got sick just too many times. But now, according to at least one recent study from Market Force Information, Chipotle Mexican Grill is back on top of the very full, very busy, so called fast casual sector of the growing Mexican Immigrant food explosion that really does threaten to give us a pretty darn good taco truck on every corner.
Human Poop Found in Coke Cans at Manufacturing Plant (Gizmodo)
File this story under shit you didn’t want to know. Police in Northern Ireland have opened an investigation to find out exactly how human feces found its way into a shipment of cans at a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Technology
Apple’s AI chief describes potential for reinforcement learning (Venture Beat)
Artificial intelligence has made great progress in helping computers recognize images in photos and recommending products online that you’re more likely to buy. But the technology still faces many challenges, especially when it comes to computers remembering things like humans do.
As the Oculus Rift turns one, Facebook is still responsible for where VR goes next (Venture Beat)
The virtual reality system very well may have been the most important consumer gadget to be released last year, and for all the critiques and praise that have pushed it through 2016, it’s clear we’re still looking at a technology that hasn’t scratched its fullest potential.
The Tesla Model 3 Will Only Have A Center Screen, Get Over It (Jalopnik)
A follower of Elon Musk on Twitter literally begged for the upcoming Tesla Model 3 to have a traditional speedometer for those who wouldn’t be using Autopilot, but Elon ain’t having it.
Samsung is unveiling the Galaxy S8 today, and we're covering it live (Engadget)
Samsung's forthcoming Galaxy S8 is one of the worst-kept tech secrets in recent memory — but we're still interested in what Samsung is going to unveil today all the same.
New Study Says Robots Took All Of Detroit's Jobs, Not Mexico (Zero Hedge)
As Trump gets ready to renegotiate NAFTA and impose tariffs on companies looking to outsource production to Mexico, a new study from MIT and Boston University suggests that industrial robots, not Mexico, may be the bigger factor contributing to the high levels on unemployment in the Midwest.
The Robots Win: Blackrock Bets On Computers Over Human Stock Pickers, Fires Dozens (Zero Hedge)
The writing had been on the wall – and countless online articles – for a long time and on Tuesday it finally hit the world's largest asset manager, where in the war between passive-investing robots and active-investing humans, the humans lost.
Politics
Obamacare Dodged a Bullet. What's Next? QuickTake Q&A (Bloomberg)
The failure of House Republicans to pass a bill backed by President Donald Trump to “repeal and replace” Obamacare means the Affordable Care Act remains, in Speaker Paul Ryan’s words, “the law of the land.” What’s next? Trump says the ACA is “imploding and soon will explode” and that Democrats will beg him to for help with a new law.
Although serial fabrication is currently popular in the White House, we believe facts matter. This is pertinent when examining President Donald Trump’s statements on Mexico.
Trump's order signals the end of US dominance in the climate change battle, and could 'make China great again' (The Guardian)
Is Donald Trump's determination to send US climate change policy back into the dark ages an "existential threat to the entire planet," as the architect of many of Barack Obama's green measures warns? Or is global momentum towards a cleaner, safer future "unstoppable," as the UN's climate chief said recently?
The federal government no longer acknowledges that climate change has a cost (Think Progress)
Climate change is going to be (and already is) incredibly expensive.
But under a new policy from the Trump administration, federal agencies will be able to write off the cost of climate change — defined in cost-benefit analysis as the social cost of carbon — as zero.
Under Trump, U.S. airstrikes have already killed hundreds of civilians (Think Progress)
Over the weekend, the U.S. government confirmed that it launched an airstrike in Mosul, Iraq, which killed as many as 200 Iraqi civilians. Rescue workers on Sunday told the Washington Post that they had removed over 100 bodies from the ruins of one house, and they are still working to clear the rest of the neighborhood.
Confirmation bias? Trump’s torrent of lies has an insidious effect on the psyche (Alternet)
There’s a problem with the media’s repetitive refutation of Donald Trump’s lies: It makes them more credible. Research finds that repeating a lie, even to refute it, imprints it on our brains, and they become more memorable than the refutations.
No, Tax Reform Is Not Going To Be Easier Than Replacing ObamaCare (Forbes)
Following the collapse of the House GOP health plan, President Trump and many congressional Republicans say they will pivot to tax reform. Passing that initiative, they insist, will be easier.
Republicans vote to block resolutions on Trump's tax returns (The Hill)
The House and its tax-writing committee voted on Tuesday to block Democratic resolutions demanding President Trump’s tax returns.
Donald Trump proposes spending nearly $1 billion to build 50 miles of his border wall (Salon)
Last month, a preliminary Department of Homeland Security report found that President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall could cost as much as $21.6 billion and span for over 1,200 miles.
Red state legislatures are taking away workers’ raises and paid leave (Think Progress)
On the first of the year, any residents of Johnson County, Iowa making the minimum wage got a boost: their pay rose to $10.10 an hour as a locally passed ordinance from 2015 went into effect. Linn County residents got a raise to at least $8.25 an hour.
Trump’s executive order puts the world on the road to climate catastrophe (Think Progress)
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that effectively guts national efforts to address climate change. If he isn’t stopped, the endpoint of this approach is the ruination of our livable climate and the needless suffering of billions of people for decades to come.
White House’s explanation for Kushner’s secret meeting with a Russian banker unravels (Think Progress)
On Monday, the New York Times broke news about a previously undisclosed December meeting between Jared Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, head of Vnesheconombank, a state-owned Russian bank that is still under American sanctions placed on it by the Obama administration in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Numbers don’t lie: North Carolina’s anti-trans bill to cost the state at least $3.76 billion (Think Progress)
This month marked a full year since North Carolina’s Republican state lawmakers forced through HB2, a bill requiring discrimination against transgender people in public venues. The legislature is now gridlocked over removing the discriminatory law in its entirety, but it remains on the books.
Donald Trump launches an attack on climate-change policy (The Economist)
Donald Trump continues his assault on environmentalism. On March 28th he signed an executive order instructing America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw and replace Barack Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan.
Trump’s climate rollback could cost taxpayers billions (Think Progress)
Climate change is not just an environmental problem; it’s an economic problem, as well. The consequences of climate change — more intense precipitation events, longer and more destructive wildfire seasons, increased risk of drought or flooding, sea level rise — will harm plants and wildlife, but they will also damage crops, reduce availability of natural resources, and destroy infrastructure.
Trail of broken promises: Donald Trump’s lengthening list of empty lies and idle boasts (Salon)
The pattern Donald Trump follows in making promises has been clear since he first rode that gilded escalator in Trump Tower to his presidential campaign announcement nearly two years ago.
Four-and-a-half false statements EPA head Scott Pruitt made in just one interview (Think Progress)
President Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday to start the effort to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) standards, which are aimed at cutting carbon pollution from electricity plants, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Clean energy employs more people than fossil fuels in nearly every U.S. state (Think Progress)
Nationally, clean energy jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs by more than 2.5 to 1, according to a new Sierra Club analysis of Department of Energy jobs data. And when it comes to coal and gas — two sectors President Donald Trump has promised to bolster through his upcoming executive order on energy regulation — clean energy jobs outnumber jobs dealing with those two fossil fuels by 5 to 1.
How The White House And Republicans Blew Up The Hour\se Russia Investigation (The New Yorker)
The evidence is now clear that the White House and Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have worked together to halt what was previously billed as a sweeping investigation of Russian interference in last year’s election.
Health and Biotech
Severe Eczema Drug Is Approved by F.D.A.; Price Tag Is $37,000 a Year (NY Times)
The Food and Drug Administration approved on Tuesday an expensive drug to treat people with a serious form of eczema, a potential breakthrough for people who have suffered for years without relief. But it will not come cheap.
Life on the Home Planet
Cyclone Debbie Leaves `War Zone' After Hitting Aussie State (Bloomberg)
A huge clean-up operation is under way in the Australian state of Queensland after a powerful cyclone swept through the region, tearing roofs off buildings, downing trees and forcing tourists to bunker down at luxury island resorts.
The spread of cryotherapy (The Economist)
Nestled between a nail parlour and a tanning salon on Wilshire Avenue in Santa Monica, an upscale part of Los Angeles, is a newer kind of spa. Opened last year, CryoZone invites customers to spend $75 for three minutes in a cryogenic chamber cooled to -110°C for fledgling freezers and -132°C for chilling connoisseurs.
