01-10-2016, 11:57 PM
Oil prices CLG6, -2.43% plummeted 60% between June 2014 and January 2015 to widespread acclaim that lower gas prices would act as a huge economic stimulus. When the big spending boost failed to materialize, we were told to be patient: Lower oil prices work with a lag. Almost a year later, we’re still waiting for consumers to spend that oil-price-tax-cut even as spending has slowed in the face of a renewed decline in energy prices.
And the award for the worst forecast of 2015 goes to... - MarketWatch
Recent studies have shown what any reader could have been easily guessed: Reading fiction — especially literary fiction — makes people more empathetic. According to a 2014 Carnegie Mellon study, reading fiction activates the same regions of the brain as real-life experience. A 2013 study found that people scored higher on tests of empathy and social intelligence after reading literary fiction.
I read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet. Here's what I learned. - Vox
Luther preferred to see the whole world burn and Christian Europe split into armed camps rather than yield an inch on abstruse points of doctrine. And burn they did. The killing did not end until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. By then the Thirty Years War had left a fifth of Germany dead.
The world's political and economic order is stronger than it looks - Telegraph
Russia's Vladimir Putin has gained little by overthrowing Europe's post-war order, and seizing a piece of recognized Ukrainian territory by armed force. He has kept Crimea but his attempt to foster revolt in the Donbass through agitators and proxies has fizzled, and in the process he has transformed what was previously a neutral Ukraine into a hostile rampart of the West. His hopes of dividing the Atlantic alliance have come to nothing. Europe has just renewed sanctions. They are biting deep. The country is shut out of Western capital markets. Unless oil recovers, the Kremlin will have exhausted its reserve fund by 2016, and will face a fiscal crisis by mid-2017.
The world's political and economic order is stronger than it looks - Telegraph
The warnings for weak earnings have been telegraphed for quite a while. But the expectations seem to be only getting worse. Estimates for Q4 earnings having been coming down in recent weeks, largely due to the persistent weakness in the prices for commodities like oil.