Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
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…
On Monday Claire L. Evans and Jona Bechtolt, the artistic and romantic partners who make up the electro band Yacht, claimed that a sex tape they had made had been stolen and leaked. Across several social media posts—mostly on Facebook—they announced that to take control of the situation, they were going to sell the video…
I got my start writing for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin. What is interesting about that statement is that the appropriate follow-up question is “Which student newspaper?” For many years Wisconsin was unique in being the only university with two daily newspapers, both with five-digit print circulations. The older paper, The Daily…