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That means Carter could spend ten years in jail for the Facebook comment. The judge also gave him an unusually high bond, $500,000, which his family can’t afford to pay.

Teen Justin Carter Faces Trial And Jail For Facebook Comment – Business Insider

Their predicament is similar to that of older workers also coping with unemployment and declining salaries, except that this young generation must ultimately shoulder the costs of entitlement programs such as Medicare as their parents retire.

It’s Up To Millennials To Save The Economy – Business Insider

Steelmaking scrapes by on microscopic margins that make even airlines look like paragons of profitability. This is most apparent in Europe, whose steelmakers are the most beleaguered. Yet China, where the industry is booming—it has enjoyed almost all of the global production growth in the past decade—faces many of the same problems.

Steel: An inferno of unprofitability | The Economist

Twenty years ago, these guys would have looked like small fish to a traditional bank. Even after their businesses had grown exponentially, they couldn’t supply the kind of collateral that banks demanded. Yet these merchants needed money, and they needed it fast. So they turned for help to “shadow” bankers, like Wang.

Why I Became a Chinese Shadow Banker – Bloomberg

ON A list of cutting-edge materials for high-tech applications, you might not expect to see wood near the top. But an experiment by Teng Li and Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland may soon put it there.

Battery technology: A pile of wood | The Economist

Central bankers everywhere else are watching these experiments closely, among them Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. He and his counterparts around the world, seared by the worst financial crisis in 75 years, are searching for ways to halt borrowing binges before they morph into bubbles, and to push lenders to shore up their defenses before the next crisis arrives.

Central Bankers Hone Tools to Pop Bubbles – Yahoo! Finance

17% of the stocks in the S&P 500 currently trade at trailing PE ratios that are at least double the index average of 14. Seems it’s easier to just slap a hold on something than stick your neck out and call out a bad value. And that’s not even touching the subject of companies with bad business models (or execution) no matter their valuation.

Where Analysts See The Next Stock Bargains

Jonathan Feldman, who was accused by the SEC of trading billions of dollars of stock and options in ways that misled other investors, was found by the judge to have engaged in a practice regulators say has grown more prevalent in recent years: “naked short selling.”

Naked Short Selling: The SEC’s Tall Task Ahead – Seeking Alpha

The Bank of Japan should expand its quantitative easing and keep interest rates virtually at zero until 1 percent inflation is achieved, so as to help ensure an escape from nagging deflation, the OECD said on Tuesday.

BOJ Should Keep Easy Policy Until Inflation 1 Percent: OECD

“A big mistake the market makes is looking at the VIX as an indicator of stock market risk. Why? Because it’s an asset class and it’s more traded for yield than protection,” Pringle said.

Stock ‘fear gauge’ flawed, Citi equity trading chief says – Yahoo! Finance

“At the moment, the energy transition is at a crossroads,” says Peter Englehard from RWE, one of Germany’s big four utility companies. “It is driven by subsidies and administrative intervention, where it should be more market-based. We have to bring more market into this, otherwise it will drown in too much subsidised power.”

BBC News – Can Germany afford its ‘energy bender’ shift to green power?

The PC industry’s implosion continues. In the second quarter of the year, sales were down 10.9%, according to Gartner.

THE PC INDUSTRY CONTINUES TO IMPLODE: Sales Are Down 11% This Quarter – Business Insider

Overall the best long-term predictor is Wright’s Law, which improves its accuracy over Moore’s law by framing its horizon in terms of units-of-production instead of absolute time.

Moore’s Law trumped by Wright’s Law | EE Times

Developers will spend more than $134 billion annually by 2020 on solar-energy systems, up 51 percent from this year, as falling panel prices make electricity produced from sunlight cost-competitive with power from other sources, according to a report from Navigant Consulting Inc. (NCI)

Solar Market Seen Exceeding $134 Billion by 2020, Navigant Says – Bloomberg

I hope the Fed knows what it is doing. It has chosen to tighten monetary policy even though core PCE inflation is actually lower right now than it was when the Fed previously thought it dangerous enough to launch further QE. America is one shock away from a slide into outright deflation, and the eurozone is half a shock away.

The Bernanke Fed is playing with deflationary fire – Telegraph Blogs

Neighbouring Estonia found itself having to bail out Club Med states with a per capita income two and a half times as high after it joined EMU. Latvia may find itself embroiled in an even bigger debacle if the contractionary fiscal and monetary policies of the eurozone push Slovenia, Portugal, Spain, and Italy over a cliff, and push Greece and Cyprus into yet deeper crisis.

Mad Latvia defies its own people to join the euro – Telegraph Blogs

Using Germany as a case study, it’s clear that the existence of a short-time work system stabilises the economy and reduces job losses by roughly 20% during a recession. However, short-time work is a lot less effective for Anglo-Saxon labour markets.

Short-time work: Does it save jobs? | vox

Young men in gangs are significantly more likely to suffer from a mental disorder and need psychiatric help than other young men, says a UK study.

BBC News – Gang violence cause of high levels of mental disorders

at least one of every nine counties has a life expectancy lower than Nicaragua’s. Parts of West Virginia and Mississippi fare worse than Bangladesh and Algeria.

Disease and death in America: A poor bill of health | The Economist