Financial Markets and Economy
OPEC's El-Badri Calls on Global Oil Producers to Help Curb Glut (Bloomberg)
The head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said he wants oil producers outside the group to assist in reducing the global oversupply, signaling once again that OPEC won’t make output cuts alone.
“It is vital the market addresses the issue of the stock overhang,” Secretary-General Abdalla El-Badri said Monday at a conference in London. “It should be viewed as something OPEC and non-OPEC tackle together.”
The oil price crash is completely changing the industry's landscape (Business Insider)
The crash in oil, which has seen the price of crude fall by more than 75% in the last 18 months, is fundamentally changing the landscape of the resources industry in the UK as big numbers of oil firms go into insolvency, or look to take advantage of rivals' weaknesses and increase their M&A activity.
A survey released by accountancy firm Moore Stephens this week showed that the number of UK-based oil and gas companies folding jumped by more than 55% in 2015, with 28 firms entering insolvency, compared to 18 over the course of 2014.
U.S. stock futures knocked lower by slide in oil prices (Market Watch)
Wall Street was set for a downbeat open on Monday, looking set to shave off part of last week’s gain as a drop in oil prices took a toll on the investing mood again.
Gold Is Back in Fashion After a $15 Trillion Global Selloff (Bloomberg)
The $15 trillion rout in global equity markets since May is reawakening the lure of gold for investors seeking safety.
Some of the smartest minds in finance are making a prediction about China that was once taboo (Business Insider)
It was once taboo to say that China could be a deflationary force, dragging the world into a slowdown as its own economy modernized.
Serious economists and investors pooh-poohed the idea, saying that China's economy just didn't have that kind of global impact. Just last weekend in a note to clients, Deutsche Bank's Torsten Slok said the idea was overblown.
Asian markets gain as energy sector makes strides (Market Watch)
Shares in Asia closed higher Monday, as earlier gains in the price of oil boosted the region’s energy sector.
Russian Economy Shrinks Most Since 2009 as Oil Prices Plunge (Bloomberg)
Russia’s economy contracted the most since 2009 last year as the price of oil, a key export, sank and sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine curbed access to international financing.
A New Mindset for a Shifting Global Economy (Bloomberg View)
As companies and investors painfully discovered in 2008, liquidity can be most elusive when you need it most.
Going forward, for both structural and operational reasons, there is every reason to believe that liquidity will become quite patchy when markets encounter the next major air pocket. The turmoil of recent weeks provided a vivid illustration that the global economy and financial markets are undergoing two transitions.
The National Cattlemen Say Markets Are Broken (Points and Figures)
Here is a letter from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to the CME. The reason I post it is not to indict CME. I post it because it is indicative of a lot of markets. The cattle market is significantly smaller than the E-mini market, or the Treasury market.
A Struggle to Quell Investor Fears Over Unsettled Emerging Markets (Market Watch)
Currency turmoil in China and fears of a global slowdown have led investors to abandon emerging markets in droves, rattling the large asset management firms that have long promoted such investments in their hunt for higher returns.
Toshiba Shares Slide to 35-Year Low on Possible Writedown: Chart (Bloomberg)
Toshiba Corp. shares fell to the lowest level in more than 35 years on Monday after the company said it is studying whether to take a writedown for its Westinghouse business. Toshiba fell 5.7 percent to 209.2 yen in Tokyo trading, the lowest level since September 1980. The Tokyo-based company, which plans to report earnings next week, said it is conducting impairment tests for Westinghouse and there are no results yet.
Get ready for more extreme days in the market (Business Insider)
The start to 2016 has been a wild ride for investors in the markets, and it might be a sign of what's to come.
According to Todd Hawthorne, the lead portfolio manager at Boston Partners, the swings and volatility in the stock market of the past few days are going to be the new normal for 2016.
German Business Sentiment Falls as Market Woes Cloud Outlook (Bloomberg)
German business confidence fell for a second month in January in a sign that companies in Europe’s largest economy are increasingly worried about slowing global growth.
What the Fed Will and Won't Do This Week (Bloomberg View)
When Federal Reserve officials started a rate-hiking cycle last month, they hoped their widely telegraphed policy action would neither derail the recovery nor overly destabilize financial markets.
As hard as it was for the officials to gauge exactly the extent of the financial markets' dependence on Fed support, they couldn’t have also anticipated that a series of uncharacteristic policy mistakes by China, along with another steep drop in oil prices, would throw off market sentiment.
The Key To Overcoming Frustration In Trading (Trader Feed)
Dale Carnegie was right; many times it's not our work that runs us down, but our emotional responses to the work. Fear and greed often get first billing in discussions of traders' emotions, but it's frustration that I encounter most commonly. Traders become frustrated when they feel they miss moves; they become frustrated with losses; they become frustrated if they make money and feel they should have made more. This is why changing the dynamics behind frustration is the single greatest psychological improvement traders can make.
Break These Financial Habits in 2016 (Morning Star)
We're two weeks into the new year and most of us have broken our resolutions, if we bothered to make them at all. Of the 45% of Americans who make resolutions, only about 8% of us achieve them in a given year, according to Statistic Brain.
Poland's S&P Cut Lures Bond Buyers Looking Past Political Angst (Bloomberg)
The bond selloff following Poland’s first-ever sovereign downgrade is hard for some investors to resist.
The stock market is terrible at predicting recessions (Business Insider)
This year, the financial world has been confronted with a lot of volatility and unanswered questions.
There has been the collapse in stock prices and calls for a bear market or a crash.
We've also been inundated with predictions that the US economy is nearing a recession.
Record Cash Shows Emerging-Market Firms Going Into Cocoon (Bloomberg)
Cash is king in developing nations these days.
Why it's crazy to expect Tesla to grow like a tech stock (Business Insider)
Since it's 2010 IPO, Tesla shares have gained over 1,000%. As it stock, it pretty much defined "going parabolic" — the trajectory has been like a rocket launched by CEO Elon Musk's other company, SpaceX.
This kind of price appreciation is based on one thing and one thing only: the conviction that Tesla will be worth much, much more in the future than it is now.
Top Emerging-Market Fund Sees Stock Opportunities Opening Up (Bloomberg)
It’s too early to turn bullish on emerging markets as a whole, but a key valuation measure has fallen low enough to warrant buying select stocks even in the most troubled markets, according to last year’s top money manager.
Only America can save the oil market (Business Insider)
Only America can save the oil market.
Between Wednesday and Friday oil prices rocketed nearly 25%.
But to put this rally into perspective, oil prices are down about 70% from their June 2014 peak.
Yellen Losing Dollar Bet as its Rise Slows Growth and Inflation (Bloomberg)
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues have so far found themselves wrong-footed by the stronger dollar after they raised interest rates last month for the first time since 2006.
Wal-Mart: It Came, It Conquered, Now It's Packing Up and Leaving (Bloomberg)
The Townn Country grocery in Oriental, North Carolina, a local fixture for 44 years, closed its doors in October after a Wal-Mart store opened for business.
Chinese Curb Tokyo Shopping Binges as Yuan Slides 10% Versus Yen (Bloomberg)
Chinese tourists tumbling off buses into the Laox duty-free store in Tokyos bustling Ginza district say the yuans drop against the yenmay make them think twice about splurging during their shopping tours.
Politics
Top Candidates Make Final Appeals to Voters in Iowa (Wall Street Journal)
Leading presidential contenders on Sunday made last-ditch appeals to voters a week before the Iowa caucuses, with the Republican and Democratic candidates stressing their growing momentum as evidence they resonate with voters.
More Republicans See Gain in Anti-Immigration Stance (Bloomberg View)
Three years ago, high-level Republicans declared that after losing the popular vote in five of the past six elections, the party needed to appeal more to Hispanics to win the presidency. Immigration was a threshold issue.
Hispanics are the fastest-growing slice of the electorate. The 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, took an anti-immigration stance and only got 27 percent of that vote. It hadn’t always been so.
Technology
This Robot Can Solve a Rubik's Cube in One Second (Gizmodo)
Given a long plane ride and enough booze, I can just about solve a Rubik’s cube. The most talented humans can manage it in about five seconds; for a homemade robot, it takes 1.019 seconds.
Hardware-wise, there’s not much complicated about the robot, built by two hobbyists: there’s webcams, a few stepper motors, and an interface that lets the robot turn the cube. The webcams feed back into a well-known algorithm, which determines the fewest number of moves to solve the cube in the fastest possible time.
Why Robots Mean Interest Rates Could Go Even Lower In The Future (Bloomberg)
If robots rise, interest rates will fall.
That was the assumption of delegates at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, as revolutions in automation and artificial intelligence reshape how economies work.
Health and Life Sciences
Irregular heartbeat 'riskier for women' (BBC)
Having an irregular heartbeat poses a greater health risk to women than men, a review of 30 studies, involving more than four million patients, suggests.
The women with atrial fibrillation (AF) were almost twice as likely to have fatal heart disease and strokes.
Life on the Home Planet
When the Water Turned Brown (NY Times)
Standing at a microphone in September holding up a baby bottle, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local pediatrician, said she was deeply worried about the water. The number of Flint children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had risen alarmingly since the city changed its water supply the previous year, her analysis showed.
Crossing the Mexican-American Border, Every Day (The Atlantic)
She leaves university around 5 p.m., just as the sun is falling behind the dark mountains to the south, and steers her white Honda Civic down the hill toward the border. It’s a short drive, maybe 10 minutes, past the fast-food restaurants and strip malls of El Paso and over the I-10, where Texans sit in traffic to head home to the suburbs, then alongside the two fences—electric and brown metal—that divide Texas from Mexico.
