With interest rates at embarrassingly low levels and with stocks at all-time highs, many investors have turned to key dividend-paying stocks to generate income and hopefully to achieve long-term upside. The week of August 12 brought the Merrill Lynch RIC Report, which is effectively a culmination of the firm’s top research ideas, views and advice for clients. The one common theme throughout this report was where to find yields. Before getting into stocks and sectors, it is important to realize that roughly 25% of the bonds in developed nations had negative yields. That is effectively a safety tax, and it erodes capital through time.
The burgeoning field of bioelectronic medicine has been buzzing recently with Google affiliate Verily (previously Google Life Sciences) and medical company GlaxoSmithKline joining forces in a $715 million deal to launch Galvani Bioelectronics. By tapping into our bodies’ natural electrical signals, these tiny, implantable devices have the potential to support a new class of therapies known as “electroceuticals.” A team of engineers from UC Berkeley have made a breakthrough in the emerging field by creating tiny, wireless sensors they’ve called “ultrasonic neural dust,” which provide biometric information in real time. They say this is the first device of its kind to monitor neural activity in living animals. The minimally invasive devices may help treat disorders ranging from inflammation to epilepsy. A report detailing their study was published last week in the journal Neuron.
"Neural Dust" Sensors Monitor Neurons' Electrical Signals | Digital Trends
Something's missing in the US fast-casual sector. Flashy and aromatic flavors found in Mexican food and Asian cuisine are proving immensely popular. Even more adventurous fare, such as Middle Eastern and African, is on the rise. But of all the varied and respected global cuisines, there's one glaring omission from the US restaurant market: French food, according to Nation's Restaurant News.
Why French cuisine is absent from chains - Business Insider
But a big, "revolutionary" change may be coming in 2018. "Revolutionary iPad model likely to be introduced in 2018F at the earliest, with radical changes in form factor design & user behavior on adoption of flexible AMOLED panel," Kuo wrote. Kuo has previously said — and Apple suppliers have hinted — that Apple's iPhone is getting a big redesign in 2017 with an edge-to-edge screen, much smaller bezels, and OLED display technology.
Ming Chi Kuo's iPad predictions: 2018 redesign and 10.5-inch version - Business Insider
The answer, I’d suggest, is that we look for surprising successful predictions. General relativity got its big boost when light did, in fact, bend as predicted. The theory of a natural rate of unemployment got a big boost when the Phillips curve turned into clockwise spirals, as predicted, during the stagflation of the 1970s. So has there been anything like that in recent years? Yes: economists who knew and still took seriously good old-fashioned Hicksian IS-LM type analysis made some strong predictions after the financial crisis that were very much at odds with what lay commentators, and quite a few economists, were saying. They – OK, we – declared that with interest rates near zero massive increases in the monetary base would not cause high inflation, that large budget deficits would not drive interest rates up or crowd out private investment, and that fiscal multipliers would be positive, in fact more than one, and would be considerably larger than estimates based on non-liquidity-trap episodes suggested. And all of that came to pass. Those of us who knew our Hicks, directly or indirectly, seem to have had a real advantage over those who didn’t. Can you say anything comparable about DSGE? Were there any interesting predictions from DSGE models that were validated by events? If there were, I’m not aware of it. Yet even while failing to offer any measurable gains in insight, DSGE had the effect of crowding out the stuff that actually did work.