01-27-2016, 10:31 PM
Sir Robert Owen’s languid upper-class vowels and baggy London clubland suit don’t capture the indefatigable essence of the man. He represents the best of the British tradition of the rule of law. His report into the circumstances of the death of Alexander Litvinenko released last week is a classic of the genre – scrupulously evidence-based, impartial and judicious. It is what a rule-of-law society should produce... Russia can use command-and-control economics to create a Gazprom. It can never create a Google, an Apple, a BBC, a Siemens or even the Anglo-Saxon rock’n’roll culture. For that, it would need the rule of law and all the open democratic structures that support it... Not even China mandates the killing of its nationals anywhere in the world if they say something that President Xi Jinping considers libellous. This is the law not even of a communist dictatorship, but of a tsar. The reaction to Litvinenko’s death in Moscow was carelessly gleeful: a traitor had received his just comeuppance.
In 1948, 69 percent of American men reported having at least one experience with a prostitute, according to a study by The Kinsey Institute. By the 1990s, that fell to as little as 15 percent.
How sex tech could threaten the world's oldest profession - CNET
Huang Weimin, the hedge fund manager whose Chinese stock-index futures wagers returned more than 6,200 percent last year, has some advice for investors in 2016: Sell your shares now, before it’s too late. The 45-year-old former worker at a state-owned company, a virtual unknown until last year, has become a star of the Chinese futures market after a slew of timely bets on the direction of share prices propelled his Yourong Fund to the top of the country’s performance rankings. He’s carried the winning streak into 2016, returning 35 percent through Jan. 22 after selling stock-index futures just days before the market’s worst-ever start to a year.
Trader Who Made 6,200% on China Futures Says Go Short or Get Out - Bloomberg Business
The world is waking up to the petrodollar reversal issue… as well as its significant liquidity impact on EM countries (i.e. NOT oil exporters, but importers). This, as we’ve explained before, is down to the contraction of petrodollar base money in the global monetary system, which acted as a sort of unofficial float for a market-controlled an international fractional reserve system. There’s also a significant feedback loop connected to what we’ve previously described as the petrodollar vendor financing circle, wherein those who are long petrodollars extend duration by investing them in countries which redeploy them on growth projects, which create demand for commodities. Global growth-based commodity consumption, in this way, is underpinned by the availability of recycled petrodollars.
Petrodollars are eurodollars, and eurodollar base money is shrinking | FT Alphaville
Using Warren Buffett’s measure of total market cap-to-GDP, stocks are still well above their long-term average valuation even after the declines we have seen recently. In fact, the only time they were more expensive than today, even after the recent selloff, was during the height of the dotcom bubble in 1999-2000.