Links for Aug 8 2016

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IN AUGUST 1960 Wolfgang Stolper, an American economist working for Nigeria’s development ministry, embarked on a tour of the country’s poor northern region, a land of “dirt and dignity”, long ruled by conservative emirs and “second-rate British civil servants who didn’t like business”. In this bleak commercial landscape one strange flower bloomed: Kaduna Textile Mills, built by a Lancashire firm a few years before, employed 1,400 people paid as little as £4.80 ($6.36) a day in today’s prices. And yet it required a 90% tariff to compete.

An inconvenient iota of truth | The Economist

Lawson says there were two previous waves in computing: The first was ruled by companies like Oracle, where IT departments bought software in bulk and forced it on employees. The second was ruled by companies like Salesforce, where sales or marketing or finance departments bought their own services and IT departments helped manage them. Now we're in what Lawson calls the "third age," ruled by Amazon, where companies skip the IT department and users entirely and instead sell technology straight to the programmers who build the apps and software that increasingly power our everyday lives. In this new age, multibillion-dollar startups like Stripe and GitHub, alongside tech titans like Microsoft and Google, sell their product straight to software developers, with no middleman — a recognition that as software continues to eat the world, it's programmers who are making and breaking new technologies. This is where Twilio fits in. It provides the service that lets Uber text you when your car is arriving, and that big financial-services institutions like ING are using to power their massive call centers. And any success it presently enjoys is because it rode that wave — before Silicon Valley even knew there was even a wave to ride.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson post-IPO interview - Business Insider

After a quiet start to the year, short sellers may be gearing up for a busy few months in Hong Kong. Short-seller Glaucus Research Group is actively looking into the market and may publish another two reports this year, director of research Soren Aandahl said in a phone interview last month. Glaucus released a report on July 28 saying Tech Pro Technology Development Ltd.’s stock was worthless, causing the shares to plunge 86 percent that day and another 56 percent the following day. The stock closed at 30 Hong Kong cents on Friday, compared to HK$2.27 the day before the report was made public.

Short Seller That Decimated Hong Kong Stock Eyes New Targets - Bloomberg

When the body goes into fasting mode, it stops producing as many growth-related hormones and proteins, which are also linked to cancer and diabetes. Instead, the body takes a little break to repair cells — a crucial process for improving longevity. This "maintenance state" may be the key to unlocking longer lives. Research in animals from the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California supports this idea. Mice that fasted for two to five days a month showed reduced biomarkers for diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, as well a rejuvenated immune system.

Silicon Valley 'biohackers' are fasting to live longer - Business Insider

Can the state engineer a happy country? The United Arab Emirates thinks so. Last week, the country’s government announced it had selected 60 “chief happiness and positivity officers” to travel abroad to study happiness and how to spread it. In February this year, it appointed its first minister of state for happiness, with a mandate to make the country and its population happier.

BBC - Capital - Will this be the happiest place in the world?

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But a report released Thursday by the Brookings Institution finds that what it calls advanced industries—which span the sectors of advanced technology services, advanced manufacturing, and energy production—have continued to grow and create good high-paying jobs. That said, this growth has not spread everywhere or in large enough measure. The study, by Mark Muro, Siddharth Kulkarni, and David M. Hart at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, finds that U.S. advanced industries added $2.8 trillion to the economy in 2015, making up 17 percent of the total U.S. economic output. From 2013 to 2015, these industries accounted for 60 percent of U.S. exports. They employed almost 13 million people nationwide and accounted for 11.3 percent of all U.S. job growth in 2014 and 2015, adding more than 600,000 new jobs.

US advanced industries are progressing unevenly - Business Insider

Presidential candidates who promise faster growth will have to face up to the labor-force constraint. In the 1970s and 1980s, millions of women entered the labor force. Since the mid-1990s, however, female participation has leveled off, and baby boomers are retiring. This labor-force reversal by itself shaves about one percentage point from the growth that is realistic over the next decade compared with the last quarter of the 20th century.

Can Clinton or Trump Recapture Robust American Growth? - The New York Times

When Froome turned pro in 2007 at age 22, he weighed 167 pounds. Now, at 31, he is often cited as weighing 147 (in his 2014 autobiography he said he was 66 kilos, or 145 pounds). The 20-pound weight loss has allowed him to thrive on the bike, especially in the mountains. In scientific terms, his power-to-weight ratio — a key measurement used to express an athlete's performance — is about 6.25 w/kg, the envy of just about every cyclist. After the trimming, Froome is thought to have increased his power to weight by 10%. "His success can be put down to a massive loss in weight, helping to explain his improvement from also-ran to Tour de France winner," William Fotheringham at The Guardian noted. "The engine was there all along," Jeroen Swart, a sports physician and exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town, told Richard Moore for Esquire. "He just lost the fat." It's not just about being light. Froome has an exceptional VO2 max — 88.2 — a key performance indicator that measures the maximum amount of oxygen an athlete can use. "The general population has a VO2 max of 35 to 40, with highly trained individuals in the 50s and 60s," AFP reported. "A few athletes have been measured in the 90s, including three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond. Phillip Bell, a senior sports scientist at GSK, told Esquire: 'Froome's values are close to what we believe are the upper limits for VO2 peak in humans.'"

How Chris Froome lost 20 pounds and started winning the Tour de France - Business Insider

Wiking says South Korea, for example, has gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries to one of its wealthiest within a generation, but that rapid rise has not been without social impact. Despite its wealth, the country only ranks 58th in the UN’s league table, and in a 2014 survey, its young people were the least satisfied with their lives compared to peers in developed countries, primarily due to academic stress and family expectation... Economist Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-Being, fully supports governments focusing on well-being as well as Gross National Product (GDP), but says she was a little sceptical of the UAE’s approach. “I am not in favour of having ministries and ministers of happiness,” she says. “I think the countries that have them – UAE, Venezuela, Ecuador, which are far from democratic – tell you all you need to know,” she noted, adding that political freedom was a globally-recognised component of happiness.

BBC - Capital - Will this be the happiest place in the world?

Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.” I first read about this history several months ago in Sebastian Junger’s excellent book “Tribe.” It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

The Great Affluence Fallacy - The New York Times

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The productivity of American workers unexpectedly declined for a third straight quarter, consistent with lackluster efficiency that’s characterized the economic expansion. The measure of employee output per hour decreased at a 0.5 percent annualized rate in the three months through June after dropping 0.6 percent in the prior quarter, a Labor Department report showed Tuesday in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 0.4 percent gain. Expenses per worker climbed at a 2 percent pace after being revised to a decline in the previous period.

U.S. Productivity Unexpectedly Falls for Third Straight Quarter - Bloomberg 

As Mr Bernanke notes, these revisions change the outlook for rate rises in slightly different ways. The latter two—a lower unemployment rate and a lower long-run interest rate—clearly imply that rates will rise more slowly to a lower overall level. The projection of a lower potential growth rate, however, is more ambiguous. It suggests, for instance, that the American economy is running closer to its "speed limit", or the pace of expansion at which inflation pressures begin to build up. That, in turn, could push some members toward a more hawkish stance.

Absence of evidence: The Fed is rethinking one thing too many | The Economist

There have been cheesy stories about super villains threatening to blow up the moon for decades, but the idea is about to become a little less crazy. A new plan by a billionaire and his associates could lead to moon mining, and change the energy and natural resources industries forever. Moon Express has cleared the initial hurdles from the US government to allow it to explore and commercialize space including the moon.

This Billionaire Could Change The Resource Industry Forever | OilPrice.com

This popular language-learning app (and PCMag's Editors' Choice for free language-learning software) is now available as a Windows Universal app. Get the same drills you've come to expect on your PC, with 16 languages to choose from for English speakers. You get the same fun progression through difficulty levels, starting by simply choosing the picture of the word in the other language and hearing it spoken, then you move on to typing translations and more. Setup is super simple, to boot.

The Best Windows 10 Universal Apps of 2016 | PCMag.com

On stage he’s a loveable, floppy-haired prince charming. Off camera – well let’s just say he needs a lot of personal space. He hates being a celebrity. He resents being an actor. To friends he’s known as ‘Grumpelstiltskin’. Hugh Grant: in all he’s famed for being moody, difficult to work with and a penchant for throwing baked beans at strangers. But could a bad attitude be the secret to his success? The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.

BBC - Future - Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered

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Marc Faber, editor of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, is well-known his perennially bearish take on the overall market. But there are also some specific stocks of which the investor known as "Dr. Doom" takes a particularly dim view — and right now, prime among those is Tesla. "What they produce can be produced by Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Nissan. Anybody in the world can make it eventually, at much lower cost and probably much more efficiently," Faber said Monday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

Marc Faber: Tesla shares are going to $0

Household debt — which includes things as varied as mortgages and credit cards — increased to $12.29 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, an increase of $35 billion, or 0.3%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit. "Overall household debt remains 3.1% below its 2008 Q3 peak of $12.68 trillion, but is now 10.2% above the 2013Q2 trough," the report said. The biggest increases came from auto debt and credit-card debt, which ticked up by $32 billion and $17 billion.

Americans have $12.29 trillion of debt — here's what it looks like - Business Insider

The world's billionaires are holding more than $1.7 trillion in cash — the highest amount since one firm began recording the measure in 2010. Because of what they perceive to be growing risks in the economy and world, the world's 2,473 billionaires are keeping 22.2 percent of their total net worth in cash, according to the Wealth-X Billionaire Census.

Billionaires are holding $1.7 trillion in cash

"Marrying because you are deeply attracted to someone and have fallen deeply in love with someone and are lusting [after] that person — all of these are rather recent ideas. "They come with romanticism; they have arrived in the west about 150 years ago. And never has love been the foundation for marriage — and certainly not in love and in passion." Perel said that, in the traditional model of marriage, "we want companionship, family life, social status, and respectability, and economic support." But our desire for those things didn't disappear when the modern, romantic model of marriage took hold. We simply added more requirements to the mix.

Esther Perel: Why modern marriage is so hard

The jobs report for July was even better news for workers than the headlines suggest. Jobs, weekly hours and hourly earnings all rose strongly for the month. The combined effect was to lift private-sector wage income by 0.8%, almost 10% on an annualized basis. While the pace is unlikely to stay so strong in coming months, a tighter labor market will continue to favor workers in their wage negotiations.

In Labor vs. Capital, Labor Is Now Winning - Real Time Economics - WSJ

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Investors who scored big gains by swooping in at the bottom of the last two U.S. equity selloffs now are backing away from the market. The number of officers and directors of companies purchasing their own stock tumbled 44 percent from a year ago to 316 in July, the lowest monthly total ever, according to data compiled by The Washington Service and Bloomberg that goes back to 1988. With 1,399 executives unloading stock, sellers outnumbered buyers at a rate that was exceeded only two other times.

Insider Buying Evaporates While S&P 500, Dow Average Cap Records - Bloomberg

Shigenobu Nagamori, Nidec Corp.'s billionaire CEO, has something to confess. The 71-year-old CEO thinks his employees are more important than investors, according to an interview with Bloomberg's Tom Redmond and Takako Taniguchi. That's because he believes shareholders would ultimately benefit from an effective workforce in the long run.

Nidec Corp.'s CEO Shigenobu Nagamori values employees over investors - Business Insider

The United States has made enormous strides in reducing motor vehicle deaths--and even so, a higher percentage of Americans die on the road than in other other high-income countries. Plausible estimates suggest that reducing drunk driving and increasing seat belt use in the US to levels that commonly prevail in other high-income countries could save thousands of lives each year.

CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST: US Motor Vehicle Deaths

Persistently depressed demand is also a serious problem. In addition to undermining firms’ incentives to invest in technology, it degrades the skills of workers who can’t find a job that matches their qualifications. Fifty years ago, Keynesian economists like Nicholas Kaldor and P. J. Verdoorn examined the close links between rising demand and rising productivity. It might benefit some of today’s economists to rediscover this research.

The Great Productivity Puzzle - The New Yorker

The visionary guitarist Carlos Santana himself admitted, “At Woodstock, I had to trust that I could find a way through all the layers and vortexes of psychedelic colors and madness around us. What made sense to me was I had this triangular pick in my hand, and that pick said to me, ‘This is who you are and what you do. You’re a guitar player. Play.’ Everything I did onstage that day centered around that.”

Guitar God Carlos Santana on New ‘Reunion’ Album | Digital Trends

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Shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are climbing 2.5% Friday after the tech company beat on earnings per share and revenue expectations.  This company "is in all the sweet spots," Those include high-growth industries including deep-learning/artificial intelligence, data centers, high-end gaming, virtual reality and self-driving vehicles. "They just became a powerhouse on their own," Cramer said, adding that "this was the most impressive of the semiconductor conference calls."

Jim Cramer -- Nvidia Is in All the 'Sweet Spots' - TheStreet

S&P Global Ratings sees a clear cause for concern as aggregate debt levels and leverage components that we use to help determine the financial profile of rated companies now exceeds that which we saw just prior to the most recent economic and financial crisis. The report measures leverage as the ratio of median debt to EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, a measure of operating cash flow). And that ratio hit the highest level in 10 years.

'This year is unlike anything we've seen in the history of finace' - Business Insider

There is insouciance: Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek winning his third gold at the 1952 Olympics in the marathon, an event he had never run before, and doing so by jogging alongside flat-out favourite Jim Peters and asking the Briton whether they were running fast enough. There is guts, a determination that is almost madness - the USA's Al Oerter, winner of discus gold at four successive Games despite a car crash that nearly killed him, replying to a doctor who told him to retire on medical grounds by saying: "This is the Olympics. You die before you quit." And there is making the impossible seem humdrum. Bolt has shattered world records after a lunch of chicken nuggets, with his shoelaces undone, and by running the last 10 metres with his arms spread wide and a huge grin on his face. There has been no-one else like him.

Rio Olympics 2016: Phelps, Bolt, Owens - who is the greatest Olympian of all time? - BBC Sport

We argue that fiscal stimulus funded by public debt is effective for increasing economic activity and employment even in recessions that are caused by overborrowing in the private sector. We analyze the impact of government spending on local economies between 2007 and 2009 and find evidence that the fiscal multiplier is higher in geographical areas characterized by higher individual household debt. The higher multiplier in those areas might be attributed to a direct increase in both household consumption and local economic slack.

Does Fiscal Stimulus Work when Recessions Are Caused by Too Much Private Debt?

The firm's minimum wage for its 18,000 hourly employees in the US will move from $10.15 an hour to a range of $12 to $16.50 depending on market and location. It's a move similar to that announced by Starbucks on Monday. In his article, Dimon wrote that a pay increase was "the right thing to do." Along with its wage increase, JPMorgan will invest over $300 million in "career-oriented education aligned to growing sectors," certainly a nod toward this reality that the firm's lowest-paid workers are also among its most vulnerable.

JPMorgan raising wages for hourly workers - Business Insider