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Institutional Investor (May 30)

2016/ 05/ 31 by jd in Global News

Firms “are doubling down on machine learning and other quantitative investing efforts.” More advanced than rule-based algorithms, “with machine learning, a computer sifts through billions of data points, picking up patterns. Armed with this knowledge, it learns trading behaviors such as buying dips or selling high over time, based on what it has gleaned about the market from past and present data.”  Despite the inroads, however, human ingenuity remains essential.

 

New York Times (May 30)

2016/ 05/ 30 by jd in Global News

Though European leaders are congratulating themselves for the latest debt agreement for Greece, “there is little to celebrate. Greece is bankrupt in all but name…. The reality is that Greece can’t be squeezed any harder.” The latest agreement is more of the same. “This crisis will never end if European leaders keep pushing policies that have repeatedly failed.”

 

The Economist (May 28)

2016/ 05/ 29 by jd in Global News

“A nuclear nightmare” is in the making. “It is past time for the world to get serious about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions…. So clear and present is the danger that even rivals who clash elsewhere in Asia must urgently find new ways to work together.”

 

Wall Street Journal (May 26)

2016/ 05/ 28 by jd in Global News

“The European Commission wants to apply local-content quotas to streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime’s video offering.” They might also impose other restrictions and taxes. This is the wrong principle. “Brussels is showing that its main concern whenever a new technology comes along will be how to hobble it with the same overregulation that afflicts old technologies.”

 

Financial Times (May 25)

2016/ 05/ 27 by jd in Global News

News that the cross-border payment system Swift “has at least woken up to the challenge facing its business” is encouraging. “But this is not just a problem involving cross-border deals. Cyber crime is increasingly a threat to the whole financial industry. This is one digital challenge that banks cannot duck.”

 

USA Today (May 25)

2016/ 05/ 26 by jd in Global News

President Obama is right to visit Hiroshima and also not to apologize. “The bombings, as horrific as they were, saved the lives of millions of civilians and soldiers who surely would have died had the United States gone ahead with an invasion of Japan. Many of those lives were Japanese.” Instead Obama “should present an America that, while not apologetic, is empathetic. There is something appealing about the world’s only true superpower…showing a bit of humanity.”

 

Bloomberg (May 24)

2016/ 05/ 25 by jd in Global News

“More young adults now live with parents than partners. It’s the first time that this has happened in the U.S. in more than 130 years.” Much of the cause is economic, but “millennials and their parents may also simply be more comfortable with living together” than previous generations.

 

Institutional Investor (May 23)

2016/ 05/ 24 by jd in Global News

Autonomous driving (AD) will transform society and it could prove the best (or worst) of times for insurers. Nobody really knows. “Futurologists assert that the safety advances and insurance industry disruption caused by AD technology will be unlike any since the advent of automobiles in the late 19th century. According to KPMG, over the next 25 years, there will be an 80 percent decline in accident frequency.”

 

Washington Post (May 22)

2016/ 05/ 23 by jd in Global News

“With the Asian economic juggernaut coming to an end, due to lower growth in China, an aging Japan and South Korea, and India’s ongoing problems with corruption and a bureaucracy that impedes structural reform, the continent must be viewed from another angle: as a department store of many of the world’s gargantuan political and military challenges. Indeed, unless Asia’s strategically consequential states can significantly mitigate, if not resolve, the region’s political and military deficits, Asia’s rise will never be completed.”

 

The Economist (May 21)

2016/ 05/ 23 by jd in Global News

Before the WWII, available date suggests business “cycles aged like people…. the odds of tipping into recession rose as an expansion got older.” Since then, however, the data is counter-intuitive, indicative of “ageless recoveries.” “Since the 1940s age has not withered them: an expansion in its 40th month is just as vulnerable, statistically, as one in its 80th (each has about a 75% chance of surviving the next year).”

 

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