Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
With the backdrop of the Olympics and a comically botched election, this summer is bound to be what Ricardo Marques, a vice president from Budweiser, calls “maybe the most American summer ever.” So Budweiser is going to potentially ingenious, potentially absurd branding extremes. The company has kept the same can you already know, but…
BRUSSELS—A confidential document debated by eurozone finance ministers detailed for the first time what Greece’s creditors could do to ease the country’s debt load and how that burden would develop over the coming decades without new relief measures. The document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, served as the basis of Monday’s emergency…
Germany eased its objections to debt relief talks for Greece on Monday as eurozone finance ministers sought to narrow their significant differences with the International Monetary Fund over Athens’ €86bn bailout. With Greece facing €3.5bn in debt payments in July that it will be unable to meet without support, eurozone ministers said they were ready for…
From the Dutch tulip craze of 1637 to America’s dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, history is littered with speculative frenzies that ended badly for investors. But rarely has a mania escalated so rapidly, and spurred such fevered trading, as the great China commodities boom of 2016. Over the span of just two…
LendingClub. I confess that I don’t understand the LendingClub scandal. LendingClub sold $22 million worth of “near-prime loans” to one investor (Jefferies) “in contravention of the investor’s express instructions as to a non-credit and non-pricing element”; it noticed the problem “with the discovery of a change in the application dates for $3.0 million of the loans.”…
—Kevin Drum on Fri. April 8, 2016 2:40 PM PDT Paul Krugman doesn’t think much of Bernie Sanders. Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts. This hasn’t gone over well with many of his erstwhile fans: judging by my own behavior, sometimes i wonder whether @paulkrugman…
During a National Prayer Team conference call Tuesday, Heidi Cruz compared her husband Ted Cruz’s “long battle” to win the Republican nomination for president to ending slavery. Darron Cummings / AP Texas Tribune reporter Patrick Svitek uploaded audio of the call in which Heidi Cruz can be heard said, “It took 25 years to defeat slavery. That is…
When my five siblings and I discovered our father’s old, clunky VHS recorder as young kids in the early 90s, we were overjoyed. The camera was massive, and I would constantly groan about weight making my 8-year-old neck and shoulders sore. Despite the heftiness of the thing, we loved using it. Together we’d film…
A major wildfire near Fort McMurray in Canada has forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate the area and destroyed roughly a fifth of local homes. One of the affected houses belonged to a man by the name of James O’Reilly, who got a uniquely intimate perspective on his home’s demise thanks to a connected…
Google’s News section will now highlight the importance of local news sources. While Google News has more than 75,000 news sources, it hasn’t always done a good job of surfacing hyper-local blogs and sites about specific topics when a major story breaks. “When a local story is picked up by national publishers, it can be…