marcusgarvey

So Jet is a very risky bet. And partly backed by Norwest Venture Partners. Which is in turn owned by Wells Fargo. Who is apparently violating the spirit of the Volcker Rule, if not the letter. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/21/us-wellsfargo-priv...

Remember this at the next bailout. http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/stock-news/3-reasons-the-...

Oh, pension fund investment dysfunction...the gift that keeps on giving. Recently it was revealed that CalPERS (the largest U.S. pension fund that manages investments for Cali. public employees), has no idea of all the fees it's paying to private equity firms to manage their money. It took an intrepid indy blogger to do this digging. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/calpers-admits-it-has...

It has now led to NYT Dealbook,the Sac Bee and the California treasurer picking up the scent.

And, by the way, this lack of fee transparency is just one of the the factors that contribute to private equity being a very overrated asset class. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has been sounding the alarm. If you're interested, she's one to follow.

>For me to start a blog and say unique things about marketing that haven't been said before and then get that noticed... I consider myself to be smart, but I don't know if I'm on that level.

As you know, marketing is all about the packaging, and how you sell the sizzle, not the steak. So even if you think it's all been said before, it doesn't have to stop you from saying it in your own way, with your own unique insights, distribution methods, etc.

...and here I was ashamed to tell anyone about my very recent addiction to jigsaw puzzles.

And I recommend reading this rather long, 4-part series from Der Spiegel for anyone who wants to know how we got to this point. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-ticking-euro-...

TBH, I'm more intrigued by the business model behind this site than the story itself. Research content on one 1 subject, membership at $10 a month. Who are its customers? Small traders and investors who can't pay for more costly info? I wonder if revenue is covering the cost of research.

How long will Uber's appeal take?

What happens if they lose?

Can other jurisdictions use this finding to change the way Uber operates?

Funny. The Greek economy has been criticized by many economic commentators for also having this kind of "closed-shop" paradigm. Not sure what their percentage is in comparison to the U.S.

>“The consumer has turned the definition [of healthy] upside down,” she says. “If it is non-GMO, natural, or organic, but high in sodium and high in sugar and fat, it’s okay.”

True and important to note when you're grocery shopping. Organic, natural, non-GMO do not mean that thing you're holding in your hand is actually good for you.

How did you like Ten Days to Self Discipline?

The problem with setting one price for water is that very rich people will always be willing to shell out what's needed while poor people who lack the means will suffer. Some kind of dynamic pricing based on a wealth/income/property value proxy might solve this.

Would love to see more stories like this. For example, how did Koreans come to dominate the black haircare industry?

Also wish the nail industry was healthier for these women to work in. It still seems to be a place where a lot of newly landed Asian immigrants find work and I wonder about the long-term health effects of working with those fumes. I knew a manicurist who suffered miscarriage after miscarriage -- surely the toxicity of the nail shop she owned may have had something to do with it. I have also heard, from someone who works at Sephora's corporate office, that nail polish is so flammable it is not allowed to be shipped by air. Harsh chems.

> The Justice Department levied a $775 million penalty and will install a monitor at the bank for three years to ensure compliance with the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement.

These deferred prosecution agreements are horrible. Every major bank has SEVERAL of them. Deter much? Absolutely not. Here's what a recent editorial in the Financial Times had to say about this [1]:

In the US, the most blatant expression of the failure to rein in the financial industry is the use of deferred prosecution agreements. These are deals which, despite sufficient evidence for criminal prosecutions, allow wrongdoers to pay fines and make commitments to improved conduct in return for avoiding the admission of criminal guilt.

In an important speech last Wednesday, US Senator Elizabeth Warren condemned the widespread use of DPAs against financial industry lawbreakers. Her main argument is that DPAs’ main punitive tool — fines — have far too little deterrent effect. A fine paid by a corporation is essentially a raid on its shareholders’ funds. What is more, the lag from the commission of a financial crime to the implementation of a DPA is long. Both mean that even huge fines (some have been in the billions) are highly unlikely to make much difference to the economic prospects of the responsible individuals when they decide whether or not to break the law.

To put it simply, too many get away with cheating. Criminal prosecutions would stand a better chance of holding culpable individuals to account — and therefore to discourage wrongdoing in the first place. Deterrence aside, there is also an important democratic value in lawbreakers being publicly branded as such.

So Ms Warren is right. DPAs, originally intended to deal with low-stake crimes with little chance of repetition, have become a blight on a financial sector that has proved capable of crimes that are neither low-stake nor one-off.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f26a9acc-e515-11e4-a02d-00144feab7...

I'm not condoning the encouragement of alcoholism. But I absolutely applaud anyone or any policy that recognizes that poor and homeless people are...people.

>Good odds they'll use it to buy a drink, which is fine because hell, I need a drink after a long day and I'm not even homeless.

Thanks for saying this. The homeless and the poor are human beings and should not be demonized for having the niceties that make anyone's life more joyful. (Kansas, I'm not so sure you're doing it right [1].)

I once read about and have since admired a very enlightened approach to this, in the UK: when measuring the average cost of living in addition to things like food and shelter they will also include the money that a household would need to take a one-week vacation.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/06/ka...

>I wish my errands were that eventful, but they just feel like chores.

"Attitude is the difference between an adventure and an ordeal," said somebody wiser than I.

>Being present in the world is a form of productivity for anyone creating things for people.

Beautifully said.

Where you stand depends on where you sit, so I understand Sam's annoyance with the question of bubble / no bubble. And I get that the tech media knows that it's a reliable source of pageviews. But it's not a spurious concern. Anyone who's got a 401K should be rightfully concerned, because asset managers of all stripes are now jumping into the pool. Zooming out, anyone who has a passing interest in the U.S., and indeed global economy, has a right to ask because the valuations are definitely being driven in part by low interest rates that our central banks have resorted to -- which are hurting savers, pensioners and anyone else on a fixed income. And if it ends badly I don't believe for one second that the hurt will only be confined to those with skin in the game. The global economy is far too financialized and integrated to hope so.

Funny. I can't recall where but a few days ago I overheard a teenage say something like, "I wanted to make a Tinder account but I didn't have a FAcebook, so I had to go make that first."

Mind you, it seems like a really low quality user for FB and not something I would want to hang a bubbilicious valuation on for them -- unless FB's able to track her activity off FB as well. And I think this is the case.

>We are usually so overworked, or constantly worrying about when we will work next, that we really have very little time to fight back or even to enjoy ourselves.

Bug or feature?

>from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite

It certainly feels like the entire developed world is at this awakening point. Some cultures are just built to handle it worse, or better, than others.

How this gets dealt with will be very telling for the larger environmental disaster the world is facing due to prices not reflecting their true costs.

Please reconsider describing your newsletter as "high value", which is corporate jargon and doesn't seem suited to your audience. Instead explain what someone signing up will get from it.

This cannot seriously be this Nazre's own website -- can it?!

Well it is super special to be both affordable to live in and have the kind of culture and community that would appeal to young cosmopolitan people. It's not very easy to find this combo these days.

Agree. Everything gets amplified, whether that be to the upside or the downside. George Soros has a book about this [1].

Also, one big issue in 2008 is that no one thought so many different asset classes would be correlated together and so many were caught out when the market devolved into just 2 meta asset classes : "risk-on" and "risk-off". Can the algorithms account for this?

Can they also account for the fact that we have never seen such a persistently low interest rate environment in so many major economies at the same time? Or is that off-model? Looking at their human counterparts, a recent article speculated that it has been going on for so long, and there has been so much turnover at the financial institutions, that there may be many young traders who literally have no experience of what happens when interest rates are put to more normal levels.

Things like the major dislocation from the Swiss franc devaluation show the fallibility of trend following models that fail to capture the known-unknowns:

"When the “off-model” event was the breakdown of parts of the wholesale money market in 2007, their surprise was just about forgivable: in the case of the Swiss revaluation [which even Goldman Sachs called a '20-plus standard deviation' occurrence], to have failed to visualise the possibility is rank incompetence [2]."

-- [1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=4842282&page=1&singl...

[2] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5a06ef16-b5e4-11e4-a577-00144feab7...

At what point do we start calling them "people"?

Excellent advice and goes back to the basic rule of know exactly who your customers are.

Well said!

Thanks so much for sharing this. Any thoughts on the role of Rap Genius as the online version of this? Truth told, I'm so repulsed by the brand that I haven't checked it out to see if anyone's using RG to annotate the news. Applying this kind of critical mark-up to the "news" is what interests me most.