A $186 Million Rothko Pits Russian Tycoon Against Art Merchant - Bloomberg Business

A $186 Million Rothko Pits Russian Tycoon Against Art Merchant - Bloomberg Business



Of the record €51 billion in art sold last year, 52 percent of the transactions were private deals, says Clare McAndrew, founder of research and consulting firm Art Economics.

How Stripe Plans to Topple Payment Giants | Inc.com

How Stripe Plans to Topple Payment Giants | Inc.com



Stripe currently supports payments in 138 currencies. And with newly inked deals to process payments for Apple Pay and Alibaba's Alipay, as well as a feature that allows merchants to accept bitcoins for payments, Stripe has positioned itself to become a global payments phenomenon.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21648641-slowing-economy-commands-headlines-real-story-reform-quiet-revolution?fsrc=nlw|hig|16-04-2015|EU

Thanks to a boom in services, China generated over 13m new urban jobs last year, a record that makes slower growth tolerable. Given China’s far bigger economy, expected growth of 7% this year would boost the global economy by more than 14% growth did in 2007.


Li Keqiang pledged that he would cut red tape and make life easier for private companies. It is easy to be cynical, yet there has been a boom in the registration of private firms: 3.6m were created last year, almost double 2012’s total.

Why Putin's Next War Will Be at Home - Bloomberg Business

Why Putin's Next War Will Be at Home - Bloomberg Business



While Putin’s Russia is not a democracy, its leadership remains obsessed with feedback. Policies are shaped by frequent opinion polls and focus-group surveys. This helps explain some of the seemingly reckless and self-defeating moves made by the Kremlin, most of which miraculously result in high approval ratings and greater consolidation behind the regime.

Jedi Policy: Global Credit Markets Feel the Force | Institutional Investor

Jedi Policy: Global Credit Markets Feel the Force | Institutional Investor

How To Extract Value From Exponentials - Deloitte CIO - WSJ

How To Extract Value From Exponentials - Deloitte CIO - WSJ

3D printing, for example, is part of the larger exponential robotics. Robots, in turn, are being endowed with artificial intelligence (AI), which will likely move them far beyond stocking shelves to running driverless cars and even performing surgery. By 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT)will connect more than 50 billion devices to the Internet.² IoT devices and trillions of sensors will connect to machines with sophisticated artificial intelligence. Finally, infinite computing power will combine with AI to transform the field of synthetic biology to create everything from new foods to new vaccines.

Vision breeds confidence, which breeds conviction. Both are crucial to surmounting the obstacles of introducing the new. In an age of daunting uncertainty, being the first to disrupt the status quo should be a top agenda item for business leaders. If you don’t disrupt yourself, a competitor surely will.

World Economy Doing Worse in Practice Than Theory Suggests - Bloomberg Business

World Economy Doing Worse in Practice Than Theory Suggests - Bloomberg Business



Lower borrowing costs are probably being stymied by the need to reduce debts, a continued reluctance by banks to lend and tighter financial regulations.

Seven Reasons Cheap Oil Can't Stop Solar Power Anymore - Bloomberg Business

Seven Reasons Cheap Oil Can't Stop Solar Power Anymore - Bloomberg Business



The chart above shows the price of energy from different sources since the late 1940s. The extreme outlier is solar, which only recently entered the marketplace, at a very high price. Prices are falling so fast that solar will soon undercut even the cheapest fossil fuels, coal and natural gas. In the few places oil and solar compete directly, oil doesn’t stand a chance.  

Gates, Pritzkers Take on Musk in $5 Billion Race for New Battery - Bloomberg Business

Gates, Pritzkers Take on Musk in $5 Billion Race for New Battery - Bloomberg Business

Creative Self-Disruption by Mohamed A. El-Erian - Project Syndicate

Creative Self-Disruption by Mohamed A. El-Erian - Project Syndicate

...Central to these companies’ success has been their understanding of a fundamental trend affecting nearly all industries: individual empowerment through the Internet, app technology, digitalization, and social media. ...

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/consumer-sharing-economy-adaptation-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2015-04#P8dVgCCqAXdRLmpy.99

Wagner, G. and Weitzman, M.L.: Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet. (eBook and Hardcover)

Wagner, G. and Weitzman, M.L.: Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet. (eBook and Hardcover)

In Climate Shock, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater. A rogue nation might shoot particles into the Earth's atmosphere, geoengineering cooler temperatures. Zeroing in on the unknown extreme risks that may yet dwarf all else, the authors look at how economic forces that make sensible climate policies difficult to enact, make radical would-be fixes like geoengineering all the more probable. What we know about climate change is alarming enough. What we don't know about the extreme risks could be far more dangerous. Wagner and Weitzman help readers understand that we need to think about climate change in the same way that we think about insurance--as a risk management problem, only here on a global scale.

Demonstrating that climate change can and should be dealt with--and what could happen if we don't do so--Climate Shock tackles the defining environmental and public policy issue of our time.

China Embraces Desalination to Ease Water Shortages - Bloomberg Business

China Embraces Desalination to Ease Water Shortages - Bloomberg Business



... an Diego was at the halfway point in the construction of a $1 billion desalination plant, slated to begin converting Pacific seawater into 50 million gallons of potable water daily by 2016. It will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere.

The amount of power consumed by these plants concerns environmentalists. Washington-based World Resources Institute, a think tank devoted to the environment, warns that the high power demands of desalination will encourage more coal-burning and urban smog in China’s northern cities.

Coal-powered desalination isn’t the only option. The Perth Seawater Reverse Osmosis Plant, which opened in 2007 in Western Australia, draws energy from the state’s Emu Downs Wind Farm. And in January 2015, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned technology company Taqnia and Spanish energy company Abengoa announced construction of the world’s first solar-powered desalination plant, near Khafji.

Game of Thrones: Can HBO Now Win at Netflix's Streaming Game? - Bloomberg Business

Game of Thrones: Can HBO Now Win at Netflix's Streaming Game? - Bloomberg Business

Streaming is particularly hard for live events. Experts point out that the Internet just wasn’t built as a way to provide real-time television to millions of people. HBO’s challenge isn't quite as severe as live sports. A new episode of Game of Thrones will prompt a large proportion of users to sign on and request that one piece of content in unison. But HBO has the advantage of knowing exactly when that will happen. Unlike live events, HBO Now doesn’t have to pull a video feed in real time from, say, a television truck parked outside an arena. The company can prepare the content itself, allowing the bloody exploits of Westeros to arrive onto its servers several days before an episode premiers.

HBO has tried to make its task easier by limiting the scope of this launch. HBO Now is available only on Apple devices, reducing the number of people pinging its servers on Sunday night. That relationship with Apple also means there will be less variety in the types of devices used by viewers, removing another layer of complexity. “That’s a very common strategy,” says Don Bowman, chief technical officer of network management firm Sandvine. 

Portucel breaks ground on pellet plant in South Carolina | Biomassmagazine.com

Portucel breaks ground on pellet plant in South Carolina | Biomassmagazine.com

The euro-zone revival: Don’t get europhoric | The Economist

The euro-zone revival: Don’t get europhoric | The Economist



 So feeble has the recovery been that euro-zone GDP in late 2014 was still 2% below its previous pre-crisis peak in early 2008. By contrast, America’s output is higher by almost 9%.

Bigotry Is Expensive - Bloomberg View

Bigotry Is Expensive - Bloomberg View



 In “The Allocation of Talent and Economic Growth,” economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago Booth Business School and Charles Jones and Peter Klenow of Stanford estimate that one fifth of total growth in U.S. output per worker between 1960 and 2008 was due to a decline in discrimination. From their abstract:

News Corp.'s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures - Bloomberg Business

News Corp.'s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures - Bloomberg Business

Secular Stagnation for Free by Ricardo Hausmann - Project Syndicate

Secular Stagnation for Free by Ricardo Hausmann - Project Syndicate

After all, our lives have been made dramatically more productive thanks to Google, Wikipedia, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Waze, Yelp, Hipmunk, Pandora, and many other companies. But all deliver their services for free, which means that the benefits they provide are not counted in GDP.

As Edward Glaeser has argued, it is hard to believe that the median family in the United States, which supposedly is worse off than in 1970, would be willing to give up its cell phones, Internet access, and new health technologies in order to return to that halcyon era. Thus, the GDP numbers must be excluding much progress.

The fact that so much innovation is given away for free does not only create a measurement problem for economists; it is also a real problem for those trying to find investment opportunities. In the good old days of the post-World War II boom, if you wanted an air conditioner, a car, or a newspaper, you had to buy one, making it possible for producers to earn money by providing them.

Information-intensive products – typical of today’s technologically advanced economies – are different. Because the cost of providing an extra copy is almost nil, it is hard to charge for them.

Broadcast radio and television were the first to confront this problem, because they could not prevent those with a receiver from getting the signal. They had to develop an advertising-based model, making it possible for others to pay for the benefits received by the consumer.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-stagnation-free-products-by-ricardo-hausmann-2015-03#3vKKbFQeFmd6SJue.99

Showdown at the UAW Corral - Bloomberg View

Showdown at the UAW Corral - Bloomberg View



GM and Ford still have some of the highest hourly average wages in the U.S. industry, at $58 and $57 respectively, about $10 per hour more than nonunion workers at Honda and Toyota and about $20 per hour more than workers at Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

1. Williams notes that top-tier workers have not had a raise in a decade. However, his analysis chooses not to include profit-sharing bonuses that have averaged $39,250 per worker at GM and $43,200 per worker at Ford over four years.