Perspective
WSJ – Daily Shot: US Census Bureau, Piper Jaffray – Construction & GDP Correlation 9/13
WSJ – Daily Shot: Moody’s – Impact of Irma on Southwest US 9/13
FT – Chart of the day, offshore tax haven market-share edition – Cardiff Garcia 9/11
- “In all the micro-data we have access to, offshore wealth turns out to be extremely concentrated: the top 0.1% richest households own about 80% of it, and the top 0.01% about 50%.” – Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman
Worthy Insights / Opinion Pieces / Advice
Economist – The lessons of fidget spinners 9/9
- “Sales might have peaked, but they have changed toys.”
Economist – Mobile technology is revamping loyalty schemes 9/7
- “If you want loyalty, get big data.”
- “When Caesars Entertainment, a casino group, went bankrupt in 2015, auditors valued its loyalty database at $1bn, more even than its property on the Las Vegas strip.”
Markets / Economy
WSJ – Daily Shot: US Real Household Median Income (2016) 9/13
WSJ – Daily Shot: US Real Household Income by selected income percentiles 9/13
WSJ – Daily Shot: US Real Household Income by ethnicity 9/13
WSJ – Daily Shot: BMO Wealth Management – Bloomberg – Declining Corporate R&D 9/13
Energy
WSJ – Daily Shot: Bloomberg – Retail Gasoline Price Spike 9/13
- Never waste a good crisis…
FT – Nigeria to resist cuts to its oil output, minister says – Anjli Raval 9/12
Finance
VC – Comparing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Other Cryptos – Jeff Desjardins 9/11
Shipping
WSJ – Daily Shot: Baltic Dry Index 9/11
- “The Baltic Dry shipping index hit the highest level in a couple of years amid better demand for iron ore.”
China
FT – Life sentences, $290m fine for Ponzi scheme in China – Edward White 9/11
- “The two men who led a massive Chinese lending scam were sentenced to life behind bars by a Beijing court on Tuesday.”
- “Ding Ning, the 35-year-old founder of Ezubao, was sentenced to life imprisonment after being charged with fraud, smuggling precious metals, illegal procession of firearms and illegally crossing China’s border. The company’s former chairman Ding Dian was also sentenced to life.”
- “Ezubao was established in 2014 and became one of China’s highest-profile peer-to-peer lending sites, promising investors annual returns of up to 15%, write Edward White and Xinning Liu. According to the official Xinhua news agency, the Ponzi scheme raised more than Rmb50bn ($7.6bn) from 900,000 investors before arrests were made in early 2016.”
- “The Beijing Intermediate Court issued fines of Rmb1.9bn (US$290m), which one Chinese lawyer said could mark a new precedent for fraud cases in China. Another 24 people linked to the scam, were handed sentences ranging from three to 15 years.”
- “Ezubao’s risk controller was quoted by Xinhua in 2016 as saying ‘95% of [our] projects are fake’.”
India
Economist – Panipat, the global center for recycling textiles, is fading 9/7
- A lesson of what happens when companies fade away when they don’t innovate, invest in R&D, and squeeze their capital and labor.