Delhi: The Sleep Mafia
January 18th, 2016Via: New York Times:
When midnight approaches in Old Delhi and a thick, freezing fog settles over the city, the quilt-wallah Farukh Khan sits on his corner, watching the market for his services come to life.
They shuffle up one by one, men desperate for sleep. The bicycle rickshaw pullers, peeling one of his 20-rupee, or 30-cent, quilts off a pile, fold their bodies into strange angles on the four-foot seats of their vehicles. The day laborers curl their bodies on the frigid sidewalk, sometimes spooned against other men for warmth.
Those who cannot afford to pay Mr. Khan build fires, out of plastic if necessary, and crouch over them, waiting for the night to be over.
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The story of privatized sleep follows a familiar pattern in this city: After decades of uncontrolled growth, the city government’s inability to provide services like health care, water, transportation and security has given rise to thriving private industries, efficient enough to fulfill the needs of those who can pay.
But shelter, given Delhi’s extremes of heat and cold, is often a matter of survival. The police report collecting more than 3,000 unidentifiable bodies from the streets every year, typically men whose health broke down after years living outdoors. Winter presents especially brutal choices to homeless laborers, who have no place to protect blankets from thieves in the daytime hours. Some try to hide them in the tops of trees.
Big Banks Brace for Oil Loans to Implode
January 18th, 2016Via: CNN:
Big banks are cringing as crude oil is crumbling.
Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America’s energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil.
Now that the oil glut has caused prices to crash below $30 a barrel, turmoil is rippling through the energy industry and souring many of those loans. Dozens of oil companies have gone bankrupt and the ones that haven’t are feeling enough financial stress to slash spending and cut tens of thousands of jobs.
Three of America’s biggest banks warned last week that oil prices will continue to create headaches on Wall Street — especially if doomsday scenarios of $20 or even $10 oil play out.
Mistake? Refiner Bids -50 Cents Per Barrel for Low Grade Oil
January 18th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Oil is so plentiful and cheap in the U.S. that at least one buyer says it would pay almost nothing to take a certain type of low-quality crude.
Flint Hills Resources LLC, the refining arm of billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch’s industrial empire, said it offered to pay $1.50 a barrel Friday for North Dakota Sour, a high-sulfur grade of crude, according to a corrected list of prices posted on its website Monday. It had previously posted a price of -$0.50.
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“Telling producers that they have to pay you to take away their oil certainly gives the producers a whole bunch of incentive to shut in their wells,” Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston, said of the price that was posted as negative until Flint Hills revised it on Monday.
Jake Reint, a Flint Hills spokesman, said the price was fixed on the website after the firm incorrectly posted it as negative. The prices reported by Flint Hills Resources and rivals such as Plains All American Pipeline LP are used as benchmarks, setting reference prices for dozens of different crudes produced in the U.S.
Rise of the Robots Will Eliminate More Than 5 Million Jobs
January 18th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Over five million jobs will be lost by 2020 as a result of developments in genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics and other technological change, according to World Economic Forum research.
5 Countries Spew More Plastic Into the Oceans Than the Rest of the World Together
January 18th, 2016Via: GlobalPost:
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
“At this rate, we would expect nearly one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish in our oceans by 2025 — an unthinkable number with drastic economic and environmental consequences,” says Nicholas Mallos, director of Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris program.
62 People Now Own the Same Wealth as Half the World’s Population
January 17th, 2016Via: Independent:
Wealth inequality has grown to the stage where 62 of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest half of humanity combined, according to a new report.
The research, conducted by the charity Oxfam, found that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 million people – has fallen by 41 per cent, or a trillion US dollars, since 2010.
While this group has become poorer, the wealth of the richest 62 people on the planet has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion.
Obama Declares Emergency in Michigan Over Lead-Contaminated Water
January 17th, 2016Via: CBC:
U.S. President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration Saturday that clears the way for federal aid for Flint, Michigan, which is undergoing a drinking water crisis due to lead-contaminated water.
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The tap water in Flint, population 99,000, became contaminated after the city switched from the Detroit water system to the Flint River while a pipeline to Lake Huron is under construction. The decision to use the river was made while a Snyder-appointed emergency manager was running the city government due to its financial problems. The corrosive water from the Flint River lacked adequate treatment and caused lead to leach from old pipes in homes and schools.
Flint returned to the Detroit system in October after elevated lead levels were discovered in children, and could tap into the new pipeline by summer. But officials remain concerned that old pipes could continue to leach lead, to which exposure can cause behaviour problems and learning disabilities in children as well as kidney ailments in adults.
Obama Proposes $4 Billion Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Projects
January 17th, 2016In other news, self driving trucks will wipe out millions of jobs:
We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven’t seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns.
Via: Forbes:
Self-driving cars have a new supporter: President Obama.
After talking in his last State of the Union address this week about investing in the country’s transportation system, Obama and his Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced a 10-year, $4 billion plan to fund pilot projects that would accelerate the adoption of self-driving autonomous vehicles. Such programs, if funded in the fiscal year 2017 federal budget, will test connected vehicle systems in “designated corridors” around the country and work toward a multi-state regulatory framework that covers the industry.
“We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people,” Secretary Foxx said in a statement. “Today’s actions and those we will pursue in the coming months will provide the foundation and the path forward for manufacturers, state officials, and consumers to use new technologies and achieve their full safety potential.”
Foxx made the announcement from the Detroit Auto Show on Thursday alongside major automakers (including GM, Ford, Volvo, and Tesla) as well as Google. The news comes less than two weeks after GM invested $500 million in ride-sharing app Lyft to partner on automated vehicle technology. Ford has also reportedly been in talks on a partnership with Google, one of the leaders in self-driving car software.
Goldman Sachs to Pay $5 Billion in Mortgage Settlement
January 14th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Goldman Sachs said Thursday it will pay roughly $5 billion to settle federal and state probes of its role in the sale of shoddy mortgages in the years leading to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis.
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Goldman shares fell 9 cents to $161.30 in aftermarket trading.
“Here Comes the Biggest Stock Market Crash in a Generation”
January 14th, 2016I’m not posting this because I think it’s going to happen, or not happen. I definitely don’t know.
It does, however, contain a remarkable level of doom for such a mainstream source.
What he’s saying is obvious and logical, which makes me wonder how applicable it is to this market.
Via: Fortune:
You don’t have to listen very hard to hear the bears growling on Wall Street, London, or Paris, these days. Indeed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down another 300 points on Wednesday to just under 16,200.
With the U.S. stock market sagging, oil off to its worst start ever, and the China’s economy continuing to deteriorate, bearish analysts have a wealth of evidence to point to.
And they don’t come much more bearish that Albert Edwards, strategist at Société Générale. He’s not had much nice to say about the global economy in years, and recent events have only hardened his convictions that the global economy is headed for disaster, and will take the prices of equities down with it. How much? Edwards predicts the stock market could plunge as much as 75%. That would be worse than during the financial crisis, in which stocks from their peak to trough dropped a brutal 62%.
In a research note published Wednesday, Edwards argued that ever since the last financial crisis, the global economy has been dependent on the Federal Reserve’s massive bond buying program to prop up equity prices and stimulate growth in emerging markets. “A commodity bubble and the resultant U.S. shale investment boom were all consequences of the Fed’s QE,” Edwards writes. Now that the Fed has stopped buying bonds and has actually moved to raise rates, the artificial growth in asset prices that we’ve seen since the last financial crisis will come undone, according to Edwards. “The illusion of of prosperity is shattered as boom now turns to bust,” he writes.
