Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
While the turmoil that rocked bond and currency markets in past weeks has been mostly absent from equities, it won’t be forever, options traders speculate. They’re building hedges against equity swings to levels not seen in eight months, according to contracts tied to the benchmark gauge for U.S. stock volatility. Judging by the most popular…
It’s an unprecedented move in higher education, but a welcome one. The U.S. Secretary of Education has pledged to forgive the loans of as many as 350 thousand students who were defrauded into taking on huge student loan debts by online schools owned by Corinthian Colleges. More students may also be eligible. In the New…
Jamie Dimon, who has overseen both a large increase in the stock price of JPMorgan Chase and the bank’s transition into a criminal enterprise, is now officially a billionaire. We wish him all of the future success that he deserves. Gawker.
ITT Educational Services, one of the country’s largest for-profit college operators, has fallen into a financial and regulatory spiral that many observers say it is unlikely to emerge from. The company, which had 51,000 students as of March, is slowly running out of options to stay afloat. Except, of course, for one: enroll more students….
The American dream of equal opportunity, based on the conviction that intelligence, hard work and character are the keys to success, may be on life support. These days children raised at the top or bottom fifths of the income pyramid tend to stay there, even as adults. Higher education is considered a major contributor to economic…
With the Nasdaq sitting at new highs having finally eclipsed the previous record of 5,048 set in March of 2000 and with consumers not-so-eagerly awaiting their chance to get in on the supposed wave of the wearables future by purchasing their very own Apple Watch, we learn that the fate of the tech bubble now…
In many cities around the world—New York, San Francisco, London—most people find the rent to be unaffordable. Buying is out of the question. Perhaps that is because your city’s housing stock is now just another fungible financial instrument, like pork bellies. You, the middle class resident of a major urban area, may have complained at…
Gold’s traditional role as a store of wealth has been usurped by contemporary art and apartments in cities such as New York and London, according to Laurence D. Fink, head of the world’s biggest asset manager. “Historically gold was a great instrument for storing of wealth,” the chairman of BlackRock Inc. said at a conference…
Slack announced yesterday that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. The company hasn’t spent a penny of the $120 million it raised just last October. When Slack raised that money, founder Stewart Butterfield said it was enough to last them 60 years. Besides creating a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool, why exactly would a company take…
Paul Tudor Jones—whose net worth is $4.6 billion—is one of the most famous hedge fund managers in American history. He is a heavy donor to Republicans. And he is warning of the possibility of class-based revolution in America. Also, he has some ideas. We will say this about Paul Tudor Jones: he is not the…