10-01-2015, 09:30 PM
This is the best time to borrow money in recorded history. That’s right: Interest rates are lower today than they were when FDR or Napoleon or Henry VIII or Genghis Khan or Charlemagne or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great or even Hammurabi were around. Or, if you want to put a year on it, lower than at any time since the ancient Sumerians made the first loans, payable in either silver or grain, back in 3000 B.C. That, at least, is what Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane found when he went digging through the historical record.
This is the best time to borrow money. In all of history. - The Washington Post
About five years ago, machine learning reached a point where software could, with guidance from senior lawyers, effectively take over the time–intensive task of legal discovery, in which one party in a lawsuit combs through its documents to determine what it must show to the other side before trial.
Work in Transition | MIT Technology Review
The Dutch drink a lot of milk, eat a lot of cheese, and are now the tallest people in the world. Could there be a connection? The author of a new book on the Netherlands, Ben Coates, explains how the Dutch became not only voracious but also very discerning cheese eaters.
A nation of tall cheese-eaters - BBC News
The fund’s staff highlight the central difficulty in using conventional monetary policy to reduce financial risk: the immediate costs are likely to outweigh the longer-term and uncertain gains, unless the crisis that is thereby forestalled is severe. But crises as big as the one in 2008 are thankfully rare. It would be unwise to direct monetary policy to ward off lesser financial upheavals, in the light of evidence suggesting that even quite large rises in interest rates would make them only a little less likely over the medium term.
Repeat prescription | The Economist
But the immediate effect of higher interest rates would be to intensify financial risk, by raising borrowing costs even as weak demand curbs household earnings and corporate profits. Banks would also become riskier in the short term as asset prices fell and bad debts piled up.
Repeat prescription | The Economist