Perovskite solar cells are one of the hottest prospects in clean energy research, offering good power outputs from low-cost materials that are relatively simple to process into working devices. But their rapid progress has not been without some stumbling blocks.

Perovskite Solar Cell Bests Bugbears, Reaches Record Efficiency - IEEE Spectrum

Tyler Cowen passes along the following chart, a modified version of one Matt Yglesias used to show the trend of total government expenditures (federal + state + local) and declare "2014 is the year American austerity came to an end"

Non-Chart of the Day: Where's the Austerity? | Mother Jones

Unlike a number of other nations — especially some countries in Europe — the US is currently not dealing with general price declines. However, the risks of such an occurrence have increased materially. This for example can be seen in the intermediate-term market-based inflation expectations, which have fallen to 2009 levels — when deflation was a serious concern.

Deflation Risk In The US Is Escalating - Business Insider

"Owning something that is financially valuable, emotionally pleasing and culturally significant has been practiced by the wealthy for generations," said Keith Heddle, managing director with Stanley Gibbons, a renowned U.K.-based rare-stamp auction house and investment advisory firm.

How—and whether—to invest in rare stamps and coins

Here’s what 33 months of negative Producer Price Index inflation in China look like: Of course, we’re now at 34 months, following December’s print. This clocked a 3.3 per cent year on year fall in the index — the biggest annual fall in more than two years. Dramatic. But the question is, should we care? Not only is the print less than shocking considering the state of commodity prices at the moment, consumer prices actually rose 1.5 per cent year on year in December, up slightly from 1.4 per cent in November.

Deflating China | FT Alphaville

As Chinese individual investors pour back into the world’s hottest stock market, they’re leaving their fingerprints all over the place. The most telltale sign: The Chinese equivalent of penny stocks, assets that have long held an allure for amateurs, are trouncing the benchmark index.

It’s Amateur Hour in the Booming Chinese Stock Market - Bloomberg

Software that was first put to work writing news reports has now found another career option: drafting reports for financial giants and U.S. intelligence agencies. The writing software, called Quill, was developed by Narrative Science, a Chicago company set up in 2010 to commercialize technology developed at Northwestern University that turns numerical data into a written story. It wasn’t long before Quill was being used to report on baseball games for TV and online sports outlets, and company earnings statements for clients such as Forbes.

Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street | MIT Technology Review

Value & Budget Housing Corporation, a privately owned Indian firm, mass-produces aluminium modules that can be slotted together into apartments of various sizes. China’s Broad Group can build a 30-storey block on a completed foundation in just 15 days, again using many factory-made parts. The MGI report notes that there is still vast scope for cutting the cost of building materials.

Schumpeter: Capitalism begins at home | The Economist

This year will be no exception. The global auto industry is undergoing three simultaneous technological transformations: the propulsion revolution, the connectivity revolution and the autonomy revolution.

The Auto Industry Is Undergoing 3 Revolutions At Once - Business Insider

Ultimately, autonomous cars might obviate individual ownership as cars ferry passengers to their desired destinations before heading off to pick up their next customer. Driverless cars could be a linchpin of a future “sharing economy.”

The Auto Industry Is Undergoing 3 Revolutions At Once - Business Insider

The corruption exposed in recent years is breathtaking in its scale, scope, and resistance to remedy. We have seen traders collude to manipulate LIBOR, the world’s leading interest rate benchmark, and the foreign exchange (FX) market, where daily transactions exceed $5 trillion. We have seen firms facilitate tax evasion and money laundering. We have seen financial behemoths taking concentrated risks that undermine their capital and their funding, threatening the financial system as a whole until they are bailed out by public support. And we have witnessed what are arguably the largest Ponzi schemes in history (see our earlier post).

Conflicts of Interest in Finance — Money, Banking and Financial Markets

Russia signed its new military doctrine into practice on Dec. 26 last year. The new doctrine had an explicit focus on the expansion NATO as the country's main external threat, coupled with the need for Russia to extend its influence into the Arctic while building ties with rising non-western nations like China and Brazil.

Russia Has A New Military Doctrine - Business Insider

Brazil’s size is often used to explain the country’s relative closedness. As the comparison with other large economies already indicates, this argument does not hold up to close scrutiny. While it is true that large economies tend to exhibit lower percentages of exports and imports to GDP, this feature fails to explain the exceptionally low levels of trade penetration observed in Brazil.

Why Brazil Is A Surprisingly Closed Economy - Business Insider

Looking at 2013 data from 176 countries available through the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) database, the average trade-to-GDP ratio is 96%. Even among the six countries with a larger economy than Brazil, the average is 55%.

Why Brazil Is A Surprisingly Closed Economy - Business Insider

It's every business traveler's nightmare: Flying in to town for an important meeting and finding that your suit is wrinkled beyond repair. One easy way to avoid creases is to wear your suit jacket on the plane instead of cramming it in your suitcase, said Eli Chess, managing partner at the custom menswear-maker Alabaster & Chess.

How to Pack A Suit For Travel - Business Insider

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based e-learning site offers more than 10,000 curated short-form, interactive videos taught by 1,000 teachers on a variety of esoteric topics, ranging from macrame to triathlon training to calculus to the martial arts. That approach puts Curious.com in the middle of the online-learning spectrum: between YouTube -- with its ocean of video tutorials that may (or may not) teach something useful -- and more formal, classroomlike sites such as Lynda.com and Coursera that focus on academic or professional topics.

Curious much? This e-learning site may have the answer - CNET

Many others would probably forego insurance altogether, deeming it unaffordable. They’d save the money previously spent on insurance premiums, but become highly vulnerable to the ruinous consequences of a serious illness. Medical debt is already the main cause of personal bankrtupcy, a problem that would probably worsen.

One economic risk few have noticed: Obamacare repeal - Yahoo Finance

The pressure is building on Vladimir Putin: Russia will be hit by a wave of bankruptcies unless it cuts interest rates very soon, a top financial official warned Monday.

Russia faces wave of bankruptcies - Yahoo Finance

By the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, Britons had amassed overseas assets worth about 750% of GDP. Today, following a post-crisis retrenchment, overseas investments amount to just over 560% of GDP. But the country still leads the G20 in overseas investments, by one estimate.

The current account: Britain’s biggest export: wealth | The Economist

Weak overseas income might, however, help explain why Britain’s economic recovery is yet to produce much cheer for its citizens, says Philip Lane, an expert in financial globalisation at Trinity College Dublin. Britain’s prosperity is misrepresented by counting only what is produced domestically. Since 2011 gross national income—a measure which accounts for capital flows too—has grown less than a third as fast as GDP. Low income from overseas affects firms’ investment, employment and wage decisions at home, argues Mr Lane.

The current account: Britain’s biggest export: wealth | The Economist

Materials scientists have discovered how to make black phosphorous nanosheets in large amounts, heralding a new era of nanoelectronic devices.

Black Phosphorous: The Birth of a New Wonder Material | MIT Technology Review

To be sure, valuations are more stretched now and this bull phase far more mature, but take note that price-to-earnings multiples and old age have never caused a bull market to end. Never.

ROSENBERG: Equities Remain Best Game - Business Insider

The European Central Bank is threatening to choke off funding to Greece’s lenders in the hope it won’t actually need to.

The Politics Behind the ECB's Threat to Cut Greece Funding - Bloomberg

Mango has own Facebook page after becoming hit with customers when he set up house in supermarket in Tiverton, Devon

Meet the cat that has lived in Tesco for four years - Telegraph

Spain's inflation rate has fallen to -1.1pc, a curse oddly welcomed by the pre-modern Partido Popular as proof that the country's "internal devaluation" within EMU is gaining traction. It certainly is, but the final outcome may not be what they think.

EMU deflation is the final betrayal of southern Europe - Telegraph

Behind it is an excess of capital as the world's savings rate hits a record 26pc of GDP, starving the real economy of demand. One culprit is the $12 trillion accumulation of foreign reserves by central banks. Another is the deformed structure of globalisation, which favours the owners of capital and concentrates of wealth. Add the demographic tipping point across the Pacific Rim and central Europe, and you have a portrait of worldwide "secular stagnation".

EMU deflation is the final betrayal of southern Europe - Telegraph

The European Central Bank will be forced to boost its balance sheet to €4.5 trillion in a colossal monetary blitz to prevent deflation engulfing the eurozone, economists at RBS have warned.

RBS bets ECB blitz to reach €4.5 trillion and reignite asset boom - Telegraph

British air is far cleaner than it was a few decades ago. Fewer people use coal-burning stoves; old industrial plants have been decommissioned. But since 2009 levels of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, coarse or fine particles that are linked to lung cancer and asthma, have fallen more slowly. The exact number of deaths caused by dirty air is unknown. But in 2010 a government advisory group estimated that removing man-made fine particulate matter from the atmosphere would increase life expectancy for those born in 2008 by an average of six months.

Air pollution: The big smoke | The Economist

Who in their right mind would think that Javier Mascherano was the best footballer on the planet in 2014? Only the man who was meant to take England to glory at the World Cup. Roy Hodgson eschewed the more obvious choices of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi to pick the defensive trio of Mascherano, Philipp Lahm and Manuel Neuer with his three Ballon d’Or votes.

The strange world of Ballon d'Or voting: starring Ronaldo, Messi and Mascherano | Football | The Guardian

The man largely responsible for the increased focus on North Korean human rights abuses is Michael Kirby, a retired judge from Australia who led the UN's Commission of Inquiry that compiled a damning 400-page report on the regime's gulag, where prisoners accused of high crimes such as trying to leave the country are subject to torture and starvation.

Kim Jong Un Hates This Judge: Michael Kirby on the Dictator's Future - Businessweek

The method we have developed is three-dimensional, that is to say, it allows us to know the 3D position of each projected pixel (patent submited US-B-8 272 752). It is only because of this technology that it is possible to change the user’s point of view. Catopsys is the only company possessing this technology in any environment and several International patents have been filed.

IMMERSIS by Catopsys — Kickstarter

The forests are often called the lungs of the Earth, but the description better fits the oceans. They produce half the world’s supply of oxygen, mostly through photosynthesis by aquatic algae and other organisms.

Humans Are Damaging The High Seas — Now The Oceans Are Doing Harm Back - Business Insider

After watching Chinese stocks surge 37 percent in just three months, some of the world’s biggest banks are souring on the booming market.

The Bulls Are Cashing Out of the Chinese Stock Market Rally - Bloomberg

The spectacular crash in oil prices has obvious benefits for Japan, which imports all of its energy, but analysts caution that cheaper oil may dash any hopes of the Bank of Japan reaching its 2 percent inflation target.

For Japan, cheaper oil is a catch 22

The regional Federal Reserve banks turned over a record $98.7 billion in profits to the U.S. Treasury in 2014, essentially recycling the earnings the central bank gets from the $4 trillion in securities it accumulated through three rounds of quantitative easing.

Fed paid record $98.7 billion in profits to Treasury in 2014

It's been awhile since most American workers have seen a decent raise. And a lot of them are getting fed up. As the government's monthly employment data continue to show a sustained pickup in hiring, the pool of jobless workers on the sidelines—ready to take whatever pay they can get—has been shrinking. When labor markets tighten, and there are fewer jobless candidates for each new position, Economics 101 suggests that wages should start rising. Judging from the latest monthly wage data, workers looking for a raise may be disappointed.

American workers fed up with stalled wages

The euro region is suffering from austerity fatigue, exemplified by polls showing Greece on the verge of dumping its government for one with less enthusiasm for spending cuts. Germany has been the principal architect of fiscal rectitude and the main opponent to any relaxation of deficit rules. What's happening in the heartland of German industry, however, suggests it's not just Germany's neighbors who are threatened by its economic intransigence.

Germany Gets Walloped by Its Own Austerity - Bloomberg View

Mario Draghi won a legal endorsement for the bond-buying plan he designed to save the euro, potentially easing resistance to a similar program that could be announced as soon as this month.

Draghi Buoyed as EU Court Aide Supports 2012 Bond-Buy Plan - Bloomberg

Yet there’s reason to believe the link between falling unemployment and rising wages has been severed. For one thing, it’s easier than ever for American employers to get the workers they need at low cost by outsourcing jobs abroad rather than hiking wages at home. Outsourcing can now be done at the click of a computer keyboard. Besides, many workers in developing nations now have access to both the education and the advanced technologies to be as productive as American workers. So CEOs ask, why pay more? Meanwhile here at home, a whole new generation of smart technologies is taking over jobs that used to be done only by people.  Rather than pay higher wages, it’s cheaper for employers to install more robots.

Robert Reich (Why Wages Won't Rise)

The next iPhone's camera may see a massive leap in image quality, Apple Insider reports — if it gets the rumoured inclusion of optical image zoom for the first time.

iPhone Camera May FINALLY Have Optical Zoom - Business Insider

As it happens, China isn’t sitting idly by as its smog chokes the living daylights out of its cities. It has pledged to boost its share of renewable energy from the current 8% to 20% by 2030. And that is in line with its plan for emissions to peak that same year. This is unlike the hot air policies coming out of the West. China is already making great strides in achieving its aims. It is the world’s top renewables investor, doubling its solar capacity year by year. It is the world leader in hydropower capacity and wind power capacity.

UCL Report On Renewables - Business Insider

In a note Tuesday, Rosenberg highlighted that because the federal budget deficit is shrinking, there is less need for the government to borrow money by issuing bonds. And at the same time, demand for treasuries is robust.

Shrinking Deficit Means Less Bond Supply - Business Insider

But except for Japan, global demand for solar remains strong, said Credit Suisse in its 2015 solar outlook report. The bank expects the solar market to grow 21% this year to 53GW with more geographic diversification. China remains the world’s largest market with 26% demand and 33% annual growth to 14GW this year. US will overtake Japan to be the second largest market with 16% share. Japan’s market share will slip from 18% to 11% and Europe will demand 16% of the solar generations. In addition, the residential rooftop market is just getting warmed up.

China Solar: Credit Suisse Sees Strong China, Lowers Japan Outlook - Asia Stocks to Watch - Barrons.com

If you took a poll in Muslim nations such as Jordan, there would “probably be overwhelming opposition to the Paris attacks AND overwhelming opposition to the right to blaspheme,” Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said on Twitter.

Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad Cartoon Raises Hackles in Turkey - Bloomberg

A bizarre video has emerged of a wasp and a tarantula having a deadly wrestling match in Congress, Arizona, US.

Wasp And Tarantula Fight Video In Arizona - Business Insider

Dennis Gartman told CNBC the Swiss decision Thursday to abandon a key part of its monetary policy is the worst central bank move he's ever seen. "This really is I think a silly decision on their part and it has inflicted enormous losses across the world to a great number of people," the editor of the Gartman Letter said in a "Squawk Box" interview. The Swiss franc rose nearly 30 percent against the euro following the Swiss National Bank's announcement that it would remove a 3-year-old cap of 1.20 francs per euro.

Gartman: Swiss made worst central bank decision

To keep Windows up to date, turn on auto-updates: Microsoft will install patches on or shortly after the second Tuesday of each month. However, recent versions of Windows, if patched, are no longer the main target. As a priority, you must also make sure your browser (including IE), all Adobe and Apple programs for Windows, and Oracle’s Java are up to date. Uninstall Java if you don’t really need it. Indeed, uninstall everything you don’t need: it will reduce your attack surface.

How can I make my PC completely secure? | Technology | The Guardian

Our study found that about three-quarters of the potential productivity growth comes from the broader adoption of existing best practices, or catch-up improvements. The remaining one-quarter—counting only what we can foresee—comes from technological, operational, or business innovations that go beyond today’s best practices and push the frontier of the world’s GDP potential. Efforts to improve the traditionally weak productivity performance of the large and growing government and healthcare sectors around the world will be particularly important.

Can long-term global growth be saved? | McKinsey & Company

The types of food we eat and the challenges for a healthy diet have changed significantly over the past 20 years. In particular we now know that added sugar is much more harmful to our health than we thought back then. We are now much less convinced that fruit juice — consumption of which is 15 times that in the 1970s — is much healthier than sugary soft drinks. And the need to cut down on red meat in our diets has become clearer, as has our need to reduce saturated fat intake rather than total fat intake.

Why It's Harder To Eat Healthy Today Than 20 Years Ago - Business Insider

“How radical is Mr Tsipras’ idea of a Paris Club-style debt restructuring? So radical that, according to three officials involved in the discussions, eurozone officials actively considered such a plan in late 2012. The French-led initiative would have led to Greece’s debt obligations being cut in tranches — much the same way bailout aid is granted — after meeting a series of economic reform commitments.”

mainly macro: Let us hope for a Syriza victory

Smartphones, tablets and PCs should appear this year that can send and receive data wirelessly more than 10 times faster than a Wi-Fi connection. As well as transferring videos and other large files in a flash, this could do away with the cables used to hook PCs up to displays or projectors.

Superfast Wireless Heading to Laptops and Smartphones in 2015 | MIT Technology Review

For the first time in 24 years not one company listed on Japan's stock markets went bankrupt, Teikoku Data Bank figures for 2014 show, a sign that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's effort to spur the economy, dubbed Abenomics, is working for companies in capital markets.

Japan Inc says goodbye to going bust in 2014

A portfolio of the stocks most hated by Wall Street analysts beat the overall stock market by a wide margin last year. Again.

Easy way to get rich: Buy the most hated stocks - MarketWatch

One day, it’s gold. The next, it’s equities. Most days, it’s crude. On Wednesday, it was copper. On Thursday it was the Swiss franc and Swiss stocks. And the move in those two makes those others look like minor-league hiccups.

Swiss mess could make oil plunge seem like minor hiccup - MarketWatch

The phone's most eye-popping feature?  The ability to store up to 320 GB (256 GB swappable microsSDXC; 64 GB internal NAND).  That's nearly ten times the storage on many smartphones.

DailyTech - CES 2015: Saygus's "Super Smartphone" Offers 320 GB of Storage

Congress is to vote on whether climate change is real. Seriously. The measure, which will come up in the debate about the Keystone XL pipeline, will ask the Senate to vote on whether climate change is real, caused by human activities, and has already caused devastating problems in the US and around the world.

Does climate change exist? The Senate is about to let us know | Environment | theguardian.com

There’s plenty of discussion about why the oil price collapsed (read Izzy’s take on the changed structure of the market, for one), but consider a broader question: if markets can be so wrong about the price of one of the most widely used and heavily traded commodities, what else are they missing?

Orderly adjustment and the 50 per cent club | FT Alphaville

Much of the coverage of deflation seems to miss the key point. Deflation is a sign that resources are being wasted. The lower inflation is, other things being equal, the more resources are being wasted. Wasted resources are probably a bit economics speak. What it means is that society as a whole - you and I - are worse off for no reason. There are also good grounds for thinking the sums involved could be very large, dwarfing the numbers the media normally frets about.

mainly macro: Why below target inflation is a big problem

Matt Yglesias of Vox has posted a list of “9 things only neoclassical economists will understand.” Well, the good news is, we at Bloomberg View don’t believe there is anything that you, the reader, can’t understand! That’s why I, your friendly neighborhood economics columnist, will explain Yglesias’ nine things in layman’s terms.

Nine Economics Mysteries Explained - Bloomberg View

It’s only January but Wall Street prognosticators are taking another look at their predictions for 10-year yields. Less than a month ago, the conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that Treasurys would weaken in 2015 as strong economic growth and a seemingly imminent increase of the Fed funds rate forced a correction. Most expected the year-end rate to be between 2.5% and 3%.

Wall Street is already rethinking its forecasts for 10-year yields - MarketWatch

When asked about what a QE programme might look like in an interview for the Irish Times, Coeure said: "The only thing I can say is that for it to be efficient it would have to be big."

ECB Benoit Coeure QE Has To Be Big - Business Insider

Still, then, the key question remains: Do sterilised interventions allow countries a way around the fundamental trilemma of international finance by providing them with a means of systematically affecting exchange rates independent of their monetary policies? Japan, Switzerland, and China provide some lessons on that score. In recent research (Bordo et al. 2012a), we demonstrate that despite differences across these three countries in their degree of exchange-rate flexibility and their extent of sterilisation the fundamental trilemma holds.

Notes for currency wars: The trilemma of international finance | VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal

HSBC's Steven Major was one of the few interest-rate gurus to correctly forecast the fall of Treasury yields in 2014. While most of Wall Street is again forecasting rates to rise in 2015 as the Fed comes closer to raising rates, Major is predicting a plunge.

HSBC's Steven Major 2015 Yields Forecast - Business Insider