Barry Ritholtz

Yay, its the weekend! Here are the longer form reads I’ve saved up all week:

• Is Life a Ponzi Scheme? (Boston Review)
• The Great Story: In the run-up to the Great Recession, accountability journalism saw the story that access journalism missed (Columbia Journalism Review)
• Thinking Outside the (Big) Box (NY Times)
• Your USB cable, the spy: Inside the NSA’s catalog of surveillance magic (Ars Technica)
• The Agony of Frank Luntz (The Atlantic)
• The uncomfortable truth about Brad Stone’s Amazon book (Fortune)
• The Real Story of Linda Taylor, America’s Original Welfare Queen (Slate)
• How Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg learned to focus on the bottom line (WSJ)
• We need to talk about TED (The Guardian)
• This Is Why Einstein’s Brain Was Better Than Yours (io9)

Okay, strap in for yet another tirade on why you should (for the most part) pay very little attention to the monthly nonfarm payroll data, also known as the Employment Situation. Its hype-to-usefulness ratio is abysmal.

Longtime readers know this is a peeve of mine (see the list of prior articles below). For newer readers, here is the reasoning behind my disdain.

Good morning. Here's my Friday on-the-Acela-to-D.C. reading:

• Barron’s Roundtable: 2013 Performance & Updated 2002-13 Rankings (PunditTracker), see also The Most Expensive “Free” Advice -- 2014 Update (A Dash of Insight)
• What if the Future Is Better Than We Think? (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Wells Fargo’s pressure-cooker sales culture comes at a cost (LA Times), see also Wall Street Predicts $50 Billion Bill to Settle U.S. Mortgage Suits (DealBook)
• Greenspan, the Keynesian (FT Alphaville)
• Skagen Says Ignore Wall Street, Bet on Emerging Markets (Bloomberg), see also Chart o’ the Day: A Technical Case for European Stocks (Reformed Broker)
• What took you eejits so long? Finra to Crack Down on Brokers With High Number of Complaints (WSJ)
• The invincible JP Morgan (Felix Salmon), see also Why ‘Too Big to Fail’ Is a Bigger Problem Than Ever (Fiscal Times)
• How the World Gets Its Caffeine Fix (Priceonomics)
• Drinking from the Twitter firehose: I love the stream, but I need more filters and bridges (Gigaom), see also San Francisco’s New Gold Rush: How Techies Are Transforming The City (WSJ)
• A Look Back At How The Content Industry Almost Killed Blockbuster And Netflix (And The VCR) (TechCrunch)

It's finally starting to warm up, with temperatures a balmy 22 degrees. Here’s what I am reading this morning:

• Investors Are Chastened. That’s A Good Thing. (ProPublica), see also What’s That You’re Calling a Bubble? (Harvard Business Review)
• Support at Fed for Slow Stimulus Cuts (NY Times)
• The U.S. has a $7.25 minimum wage. Australia’s is $16.88 (WaPo), see also Income Growth Has Stalled for Most Americans (MoJo)
• Wells Fargo’s pressure-cooker sales culture comes at a cost (LA Times)
• Why business schools charge so much and pay their teachers so little (Quartz)
• The best and worst media errors and corrections in 2013 (Poynter)
• The Rise of Viral Farms (Priceonomics)
• Heroes of blogging (Noahpinion)
• How the NSA Threatens National Security (The Atlantic)
• Jerry Seinfeld here. Ask me anything. (Reddit)

Of all of the various government housing programs run by various federal agencies -- Federal Housing Administration, Federal Housing Finance Agency, Housing and Urban Development and, of course, Fannie Mae -- HARP is the most effective and efficient one out there. Odds are you have never even heard of the Home Affordable Refinance Program.

And that is a shame, because it is doing what it was designed to do: Help qualified homeowners refinance underwater homes and avoid foreclosure.

Here’s my hoping-we-hit-double-digit-temperatures-today morning reading:

• Talk of a market bubble is the real bubble (CNN)
  
• 10 ‘brain bugs’ can kill Wall Street’s roaring bull (MarketWatch) see also Stocks Worry Investors Sick as Losses Spur More Hospital Visits (Bloomberg)
  
• The Biggest Myths in Economics (Pragmatic Capitalism)
  
• Can Apple’s Angela Ahrendts Spark A Retail Revolution? (Fast Company) see also App Store Sales Top $10 Billion in 2013 (Apple)
  
• How Divided is the Fed? (Tim Duy’s Fed Watch)
  
• ObamaCare Is Slowing Health Inflation (WSJ)
  
• Think America has the world’s best health care system? You won’t after seeing this chart. (WonkBlog) see also What happened to US life expectancy? (The Incidental Economist)
  
• What are common activities people do wrong every day but don’t know it? (Quora)
  
• 101 Astronomical Events for 2014 (Universe Today)
  
• The Insatiable Demand for Billy Joel (Priceonomics)
  

What are you reading?

It has been quite the ride for gold: from under $500 an ounce a decade ago, to above $1,900 in 2011, gold gained more than 400 percent. Since its peak of ~$1,921.15 on Sept. 6, 2011, however, the shine is off the yellow metal. Gold plummeted 38 percent, recently breaking below $1,200. Yesterday’s close is within 5 percent of the lows, at $1,241.

If a 20 percent drop is described as a bear market, and a 30 percent fall is called a crash -- what do we call gold’s almost 40 percent plummet?

At the start of each quarter, my inbox is brightened with The Big Book of Charts – or as it is formally known, JP Morgan’s interactive "Guide to the Markets." You can download the full PDF here.

It contains about 70 pages of equity, fixed income, economic and asset class charts that are delightful to look at, and thought-provoking as well.

My train delayed, man it's cold outside morning reading:

• Never Mind the Predictions: What Did We Learn? (NY Times)
• Of brains and balls: Nassim Taleb’s macro bets (Noahpinion), see also Nassim Taleb used to be my hero. But today, he’s just plain wrong. (The Week)
• Buybacks, Great Rotation, and Melt-Up (Dr. Ed’s Blog)
• 7 predictions for 2014, 5 of them probably true (MarketWatch), see also Bull Market Has Years Left for Shaoul on S&P 500 Values (Bloomberg)
• The Strange and Interesting History of the GLD ETF (TBP)
• Manage Your Biases (Adam H. Grimes), see also Every Seven Years (The Research Puzzle)
• NYT spreads AEI’s Big Lie of the Crisis (Columbia Journalism Review)
• How global warming can make cold snaps even worse (Quartz)
• Bruce Springsteen "High Hopes" album review (Rolling Stone)
• Colin Kaepernick May Be the Toughest (or Craziest) Quarterback Ever (WSJ)

If you missed it over the weekend, Sunday’s New York Times had an amazing interactive graphic on where poverty is in the U.S.

Over the past 50 years, the poverty rate in the nation has fallen from 19 percent to 15 percent in essentially two generations. There is some disagreement among economists if that accurately states the full extent of poverty, especially when it comes to children. Some economists have argued that a more accurate accounting “suggests the poverty rate has dropped to 16 percent today, from 26 percent in the late 1960s”.