August, 2017

• 13 August

  Kenyan opp claims 100 killed in vote clashes

  

  Bloomberg Kenya’s main opposition said state security forces killed more than 100 people in clashes related to last week’s disputed elections. The authorities said they had no knowledge of any deaths and that the country remains largely peaceful. Displaying a handful of spent cartridges at a briefing on Saturday in the capital, Nairobi, Senator Johnstone Muthama of the National Super ...

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• 13 August

  Argentina pits Macri reforms against Fernandez comeback

  Bloomberg Argentine voters will give President Mauricio Macri a good indication of the risks to his reform program in primaries on Sunday as ex-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner returns from the political shadows to the mainstage. Argentines are voting to select candidates to stand in legislative elections of October 22. Candidates from all parties are on the same ballot in ...

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• 13 August

  The GOP’s Southern Gothic page-turner

  

  Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the US Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party. In 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—the ...

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• 13 August

  Bond bubbles mostly tend to deflate very slowly, not burst

  

  Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is worried about a bond bubble. “By any measure, real long-term interest rates are much too low and therefore unsustainable,” Greenspan said in a recent interview. “When they move higher they are likely to move reasonably fast. We are experiencing a bubble, not in stock prices but in bond prices. This is not discounted ...

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• 13 August

  How to trade those terrible analyst earnings estimates

  The prevailing view of earnings estimates is, to be blunt, dim. Many investors believe that companies and analysts conspire to keep estimates low to produce a “surprise” that drives the stock price higher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is widespread. The 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average met or beat the so-called consensus earnings estimate an average ...

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• 13 August

  Donald Trump’s big crisis is in Venezuela

  There’s a nice Annette Idler item at the Monkey Cage on what’s at stake in Venezuela that answered some questions I’ve been thinking about as a non-specialist. Call me naive or a foolish optimist, but I suspect that the most likely end to the North Korea “crisis” is that it will fizzle out. Yes, Donald Trump is capable of irrational ...

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• 13 August

  Yes, Silicon Valley’s basic income vision is wrong

  

  With figures ranging from 33-year old Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to 90-year-old Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith endorsing a universal basic income, the idea may soon enter the US political mainstream. But Americans are being sold on a dangerous version of the UBI, designed as a resource rent rather than a product of social consensus. Smith recently penned ...

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• 13 August

  Google can’t bring itself to tolerate diversity

  

  Google is scrambling to distance itself from one of its engineers, who has gained infamy for publishing a 10-page criticism of the company’s “authoritarian” approach to achieving gender diversity. If the goal was to confirm the author’s thesis, Team Google is doing a great job. Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the anonymous memo sets out a well-intentioned goal: Find non-discriminatory ...

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• 13 August

  World’s financial system still has too much risk

  

  Intervening 10 years ago to contain the damage from the banking system’s excessive risk-taking in mortgage-backed securities, the European Central Bank initiated what has proven to be an exceptional and prolonged involvement in markets by central banks. Much has changed since then, yet too much remains the same. The risk of unsettling financial instability, while lower, has morphed and migrated ...

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• 13 August

  Middle East bourses most exposed to foreign funds lag

  

  DUBAI / Reuters Stock markets in the Middle East that are most exposed to foreign funds were the chief losers on Sunday, taking their cue from international bourses, where the mood was soured last week by growing tensions between the United States and North Korea. The worst performer in the region was Egypt’s blue-chip index, which dropped 1.4 percent as ...

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