Let's start the weekend reading off with some fun before we get serious.
HUMOR
Jon Stewart sums up every NFL fan's true feelings about DeflateGate (SB Nation)
Jon Stewart devoted eight delightful minutes of television to laughing with Gronk and at Tom Brady before arriving joke that pretty much explains how we look at DeflateGate.
"And by the way, if you think for a second I wouldn’t have chastised you if you had committed these acts while in my team’s uniform …
"…You would be right."
Desperate Residents of Austin Completely Surrounded by Texas (The Borowitz Report, NewYorker)
AUSTIN (The Borowitz Report) – In a deepening humanitarian crisis, residents of the city of Austin report that they are completely surrounded by Texas, a situation that locals are calling “dire.”…
The city is hoping that the United States will use its military might to liberate the isolated municipality and transform it into an independent state along the lines of Kurdistan.
Financial Markets and Economy
U.S. Companies Are Spending Like Crazy And Still Have A Record $1.73 Trillion In Cash (Forbes)
Last year, Microsoft made headlines when it announced it was spending $2.5 billion on a gaming company halfway across the world in Sweden, in what was its largest acquisition to date under new CEO Satya Nadella.
House Flippers Are Back Together With Wall St. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Bloomberg)
Real estate buyers seeking money to renovate and flip U.S. houses are getting help from some of the world’s biggest investment firms.
Colony Capital Inc., Blackstone Group LP and Cerberus Capital Management are among the companies that have started making bridge loans to investors who buy homes to sell them quickly for a profit. Borrowing costs — traditionally the highest in residential lending — are tumbling as the firms compete for customers.
Jobs in Home Construction Just Surged the Most Since 2006 (Bloomberg)
Friday's jobs report epitomized an ongoing labor market recovery that hasn't been without its caveats. While payrolls rebounded in April, a revision to March meant that the slowdown earlier this year was worse than initially thought. Hourly pay rose, though less than expected.
The $364 Billion Real Estate Threat Inside China’s Biggest Banks (Bloomberg)
Fitch Ratings has called real estate the “biggest threat” to Chinese banks as surging loans tied to properties coincide with defaults and falling sales.
Robert Reich: Nike is everything that’s wrong with the U.S. economy (Salon)
Tomorrow President Obama will be giving a speech promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Paradoxically, he’s chosen to give it at Nike headquarters in Oregon.
Nike isn’t the solution to the problem of stagnant wages in America. Nike is the problem.
It’s true that over the past two years Nike has added 2,000 good-paying professional jobs at its Oregon headquarters, fulfilling the requirements of a controversial tax break it wrangled from the state legislature. That’s good for Nike’s new design, research and marketing employees.
Despite jobs report, warning signs abound (USA Today)
Economists got it right last month: 223,000 jobs were added to the economy in April, in line with the 228,000 expected, while the unemployment rate fell to 5.4%. Wages even picked up slightly, logging 2.2% growth.
All in all, not bad. But not great, either. And considering the fundamental challenges to the economy, it's unclear whether any momentum in the job market will prove sustainable.
Another Chinese Firm Defaults on Its Dollar Bond (Bloomberg)
China’s credit markets sent their latest sign of stress Friday as coal importer Winsway Enterprises Holdings Ltd. became the nation’s second company to default on a dollar-denominated bond this year.
U.S. Airlines Made More Than $6.5 Billion In Baggage And Reservation Fees In 2014 (Huffington Post)
Airlines made a lower percentage of net income from ticket fares in 2014 than ever before, according to a report released earlier this week by the Department of Transportation. In contrast, airlines recorded over $6 billion in profits from baggage fees and cancellation and change fees — continuing a major income stream that started in 2008.
Infographic: Canada's households now owe a record $1.8-trillion (The Globe and Mail)
Canada’s borrowing binge
In 1990, Canadians owed 85 cents for every dollar of annual disposable income.
Today that number has grown to a record $1.63.
Meanwhile, Canadians are saving just 3.6% of their incomes today – a drop from 12% in 1990.
Long USD Is Hedge Funds’ Strongest Conviction Trade (Value Walk)
Even though Hedge Funds have backed off their long USD position somewhat in the last month, presumably because of the same disappointing US economic data that has caused the dollar to soften, it remains their highest conviction trade according to Societe Generale’s latest Hedge Fund Watch. Their net short position on the VIX has also gotten larger, signaling that hedge funds expect Q1 data to delay the Fed rate hike (since a surprise hike this summer would cause volatility to jump, at least temporarily).
China Stock Picker Beating 90% of Peers Says Rout Isn’t Over Yet (Bloomberg)
The worst isn’t over for Chinese stocks after the biggest three-day rout since June 2013, according to HSBC Global Asset Management.
How much the average member of the 1% makes in every state (Business Insider)
What does it take to join America's most exclusive club, the top 1% of earners?
A January report from the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN)looked at income inequality in the US broken down by state. One of its calculations was the average annual income of Americans who rank among the 1% in each state, based on IRS data from 2012.
Politics
The Betrayal of Brazil (Bloomberg)
In mid-2013, Brazilian federal police investigator Erika Mialik Marena noticed something strange.
Alberto Youssef, suspected of running an illicit black-market bank for the rich, had paid 250,000 reais (about $125,000 at the time) for a Land Rover. The black Evoque SUV ended up as a gift for Paulo Roberto Costa, formerly a division manager at Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras. “We were investigating a money-laundering case, and Petrobras wasn’t our target at all,” says Marena. “Paulo was just another client of his. So we started to ask, ‘Why is he getting an expensive car from a money launderer? Who is that guy?’”
Seven Voting Anomalies That the U.K. Electoral System Produced (Bloomberg)
The U.K.’s seat-by-seat, winner-takes-all electoral system always throws up a few results that are out of kilter with voting, favoring as it does the big established Conservative and Labour parties over smaller opponents
Tsipras Asks for Courage as EU Plays Down Chances of Deal (Bloomberg)
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Friday there are no more technical reasons to withhold aid from Greece. The country’s creditors are not convinced.
Hours after the Greek leader told lawmakers in Athens that the euro area needed only political courage to unlock more financial aid, a European Union official in Brussels told reporters there’s still technical work to be done before Europe’s most-indebted state will get any more money.
Democrats Relish Hillary Clinton’s Embrace of Cultural Issues (NY Times)
Hillary Rodham Clinton’s call this week for more expansive action on immigration was the latest in a series of policy statements likely to appeal to her party’s liberal base. But her comments also reflect a growing feeling among Democrats that the political balance on cultural issues has shifted in their favor since her last campaign.
Technology
Ericsson Sues Apple in Europe Over Phone Patent Royalties (Bloomberg)
Ericsson AB said it sued Apple Inc. in three countries as it ratcheted up a global licensing battle between the companies.
NASA made an incredible 10-engine electric plane that takes off like a helicopter (Business Insider)
NASA has been grabbing headlines recently with their potentially game-changing emDrive propulsion system. The emDrive has generated a lot of discussion, and a lot of controversy too.
But NASA has a lot more going on than futuristic space travel designs, and one recent test flight showed that the minds at NASA are still working on innovative designs for flight systems that operate in Earth's atmosphere.
Life on the Home Planet
These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes. (Mother Jones)
Early last month, veteran polar explorers and scientists Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo set out on skis from Resolute Bay, a remote outpost in the patchwork of islands between Canada and Greenland. Their destination was Bathurst Island, a treacherous 70-mile trek to the northwest across the frozen sea, where they planned to document thinning Arctic sea ice just a few months after NASA reported that the winter ice cover was the lowest on record.
15 European Opera Houses to Offer Free Online Streaming (NY Times)
A free showing of Verdi’s “La Traviata” will be streamed live from Madrid’s Teatro Real on Friday, inaugurating a new program backed by the European Union in which some of Europe’s top houses will stream performances free to make opera more accessible.
Stephen Curry Shoots Better When Chewing His Mouthguard (Wall Street Journal)
Stephen Curry is such an irresistible basketball player that he can even make a free throw exciting.
Curry, the NBA’s recently anointed Most Valuable Player, had the league’s highest free-throw percentage this season. But it’s not his accuracy that’s so captivating. What makes Curry’s free throws such impressive feats is that he’s somehow able to shoot them while dangling his mouthguard out of his mouth like a victory cigar.
Health & Life Sciences
Master orchestrator of the genome is discovered, stem cell scientists report (Science News)
New research shows how a single growth factor receptor protein programs the entire genome. The study provides evidence that it all begins with a single "master" growth factor receptor that regulates the entire genome.
Light in sight: A step towards a potential therapy for acquired blindness (Science Daily)
Hereditary blindness caused by a progressive degeneration of the light-sensing cells in the eye, the photoreceptors, affects millions of people worldwide. Although the light-sensing cells are lost, cells in deeper layers of the retina, which normally cannot sense light, remain intact.
Separating Fact from Fiction: The “Magic” of Epigenetics? (Science Based Medicine)
Every few years, it seems, a new concept emerges as the favorite go-to means of marketing unproven and highly implausible approaches to health care. Explanations of the proposed healing properties of homeopathic remedies incorporating quantum mechanics immediately comes to mind as an example of this phenomenon. Or how proponents of the most absurd treatments will just add “Nano” to anything and claim scientific miracles of healing.
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