Edge and Odds

The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it’s the illusion of knowledge (Stephen Hawking)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so (Mark Twain)

Edge and Odds

Invest with smart knowledge and objective odds

BEARNOBULL’S WEEKENDER

Did you miss HOLD OR FOLD?
Norway to ‘completely ban petrol powered cars by 2025’ (…) About 24 per cent of the country’s cars already run on electricity, and it is a heavy producer of renewable energy with more than 99 per cent of electricity covered by hydropower. (…)
The Best U.S. CEOs, According to People Who Work For Them
How to live to 100 and be happy

A baby born in the west today will more likely than not live to be 105, write Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott of London Business School in their crucial new book, The 100-Year Life. That may sound like science fiction. In fact, it’s only cautiously optimistic. It’s what will happen if life expectancy continues to rise by two to three years a decade, its rate of the past two centuries. Some scientific optimists project steeper rises to come.

If turning 100 becomes normal, then the authors predict “a fundamental redesign of life”. This book shows what that might look like.

(…) The book calculates that if today’s children want to retire on liveable pensions, they will need to work until about age 80. That would be a return to the past: in 1880, nearly half of 80-year-old Americans did some kind of work.

But few people will be able to bear the exhaustion and tedium of a 55-year career in a single sector. Anyway, technological changes would make their education obsolete long before they reached 80. The new life-path will therefore have more than three stages. Many people today are already shuffling in that direction. (…)

Already the young are studying longer. The authors predict that more will do two degrees: first a general undergraduate course, which teaches thinking skills with lifelong value, and then a more specific vocational degree that teaches a specific sector’s current needs.(…)

Future careers will contain many transformations. Lives will have fourth, fifth, even sixth acts. (…) There will be time to achieve mastery in multiple domains. No longer will women be denied careers because they took five or 10 years out to raise kids. That will still leave them 50-plus working years. Older people, especially, will develop portfolio careers. The trick will be to keep finding work that robots cannot do.

And people will change their use of leisure. When you could expect a 40-year career followed by fat state or corporate pensions, you could spend your free time chilling and buying stuff. But the 100-year life requires more saving. You might also need to spend much of your non-working time reskilling or exercising to maintain your body and brain for those extra decades. (…)

Longer life can come as a shock, especially to those of us in midlife. We started work thinking we’d be done by about 60, and dead at 75. But now my generation can expect to retire at perhaps 75, and live to 90. (…)

In the 100-year life, age groups will mix much more than they do now. There will be more old people taking undergraduate degrees, or doing junior jobs as they descend rather than climb the corporate ladder. Many kids will grow close to their great-grandparents.

Most of this is to the good. Crucially, most of the years of life gained in recent decades have been healthy ones. But the book warns that the 100-year life could become the preserve of the well-off. Already the rich outlive the poor, and they will be better equipped to reskill and change careers. Poor people could face 60 years of dead-end jobs in the gig economy, followed by death at 80 without a pension. A life like that, say the authors, is “nasty, brutish and long”.

WHY A BUCK IS A BUCK

#3. Buck GoCompare.com

One dollar. Derived from 18th Century, pioneer-era America when buck (deer) skins were used as currency, a ‘buck’ is slang for one dollar, and has survived into the modern day, where it’s still one of the most common terms used to describe money in the USA. (BI)

THEY STILL ROCK

From The Economist:

NEW$ & VIEW$ (10 JUNE 2016): Q2 Bounce?

Q2 BOUNCE?

We just passed week 22 in the railroad year:

Total carloads for the week ending Jun. 4 were 224,258 carloads, down 16.6 percent compared with the same week in 2015, while U.S. weekly intermodal volume was 231,088 containers and trailers, down 17.9 percent compared to 2015.

Two of the 10 carload commodity groups posted an increase compared with the same week in 2015. They were grain, up 2.3 percent to 18,628 carloads; and miscellaneous carloads, up 0.5 percent to 9,008 carloads. Commodity groups that posted decreases compared with the same week in 2015 included petroleum and petroleum products, down 29.1 percent to 9,706 carloads; coal, down 23 percent to 68,008 carloads; and motor vehicles and parts, down 20.9 percent to 15,411 carloads.​

For the first 22 weeks of 2016, U.S. railroads reported cumulative volume of 5,274,449 carloads, down 13.7 percent from the same point last year; and 5,648,851 intermodal units, down 2.1 percent from last year. Total combined U.S. traffic for the first 22 weeks of 2016 was 10,923,300 carloads and intermodal units, a decrease of 8.1 percent compared to last year. (AAR)

This chart from the AAR excludes coal and grain which both have their own dynamic.

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U.S. Wholesale Inventories Post Firm Increase Inventories at the wholesale level increased 0.6% during April following a 0.2% March gain…

Inventories at the wholesale level increased 0.6% during April following a 0.2% March gain, revised from 0.1%. It was the largest increase since last June. (…) Wholesale sector sales increased 1.0% (-5.3% y/y) after a 0.6% March gain. (…) The inventory-to-sales ratio in the wholesale sector eased to 1.35, down from the expansion high of 1.37 reached three months earlier.

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Pointing up FedSpeak: Lost in Translation

(…) At the opposite end of the spectrum lie Federal Reserve speakers, most of whom appear to be suffering from an inability to contain themselves to the detriment of their audiences. So damaging is FedSpeak, so to speak, that it’s become the Fed’s greatest liability, chipping away at what little credibility monetary policymakers have left in reserve.

Perhaps what is most disturbing about today’s stretch of FedSpeak is how it parallels with the months preceding the Great Recession. Over the last few weeks, Fed officials appear to be mystified at the tea leaves staring back at them from the bottoms of their cups despite there being no question of ambiguity. (…)

Bond yields fall across the globe New lows for German and Japanese sovereign debt
Americans’ Total Wealth Hits Record, Fed Report Says The wealth of Americans reached a record in the first quarter, with rising home values offsetting stock-market wobbles at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve report released Thursday.

The wealth of Americans reached a record of $88.1 trillion in the first quarter, with rising home values offsetting stock-market wobbles at the start of the year.

The boost to wealth was driven by a $498 billion increase in residential real-estate values around the U.S., while the overall value of equities declined by $160 billion, according to a Federal Reserve report released on Thursday. (…)

One key difference between the increase in asset values today versus a decade ago is that Americans aren’t taking on as much debt. Total household liabilities rose by $17 billion in the first quarter and remained lower than their level during the financial crisis.