Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Eighty people hold the same amount of wealth as the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people, according to an analysis just released from Oxfam. The report from the global anti-poverty organization finds that since 2009, the wealth of those 80 richest has doubled in nominal terms — while the wealth of the poorest 50 percent of…
The UK is becoming a nation of grafters. With living standards at their lowest in a decade and real-term wages falling 8 per cent since the financial crisis, more people are cramming extra work into evenings, weekends and even their lunch hours to supplement their main incomes. Officially, the average number of hours Britons work each week…
Alexis Tsipras, center, leader of Greece’s Syriza left-wing main opposition waves to his supporters after voting at a polling station in Athens on Sunday. Petros Giannakouris/AP hide caption itoggle caption Petros Giannakouris/AP Alexis Tsipras, center, leader of Greece’s Syriza left-wing main opposition waves to his supporters after voting at a polling station in Athens on…
It finally happened. This morning the European Central Bank actually pulled the trigger, launching an unfettered quantitative easing program, essentially creating new money and using it to buy government bonds. Here’s what you need to know. First off, the European economy is in terrible shape. Unemployment is, and has been, very high. It was 11.5%…
Q AMERICA’S Federal Reserve surprised markets in December by starting to “taper” (ie, gradually reduce) its programme of monthly purchases of government and mortgage bonds—a process known as “quantitative easing”, or QE—from $85 billion a month to $75 billion. Some worry that scaling back QE could endanger America’s recovery or create financial instability in emerging…
Bill and Melinda Gates have taken on some of the world’s messiest problems, funding projects to improve the design of toilets and condoms and even create urine-powered fuel cells. Now, in their annual letter published today, they’re outlining ambitions to tackle another messy sector: banking. The central thesis of the letter, which lays out goals for the 15-year-old Gates Foundation’s next 15 years,…
How big a hole is the U.S. daily newspaper industry in? We know the toll in newsroom jobs — about 20,000 lost in a little under a decade — and the fact that the industry as a whole took in about $26 billion less in 2014 than it did a decade earlier. We’re used to,…
Stewart Butterfield had one objective when he set out to raise money for his startup last fall: a billion dollars or nothing. If he couldn’t reach a $1 billion valuation for Slack, his San Francisco business software company, he wouldn’t bother. Slack was hardly starving for cash. It was a rocket ship, with thousands of…
Here’s a basic rule of investing. When everyone is crowded into a trade, run the other way. That’s what we have right now with the U.S. dollar DXY, +1.05% . A crowded trade. It is hard to find anyone who isn’t bullish on the dollar. So it makes sense to bet the other way. You…
END ID=”RES378917634″ CLASS=”BUCKETWRAP STATICHTML” We bet against this. Quoctrung Bui/NPR hide caption itoggle caption Quoctrung Bui/NPR We bet against this. Quoctrung Bui/NPR If you own a house, stock, bonds, or a retirement account, you’re betting that things are going to get better — that the lines on the chart will keep going up. Historically, this…