Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, on a future Black Swan :
“We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors — imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix,” he said. “In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.”
Following the previous post on the future of journalism, the big news in media today is the sale of Business Insider to Axel Springer.
If I have anything to say about BI is that I try to avoid it, especially because of their tabloid headlines that I find more on the line with adverts you can find on sensationalistic websites rather than relevant titles on trustworthy publications. Unfortunately this is a trend on the web to gain more traffic, even for the most trusted sources — I’m looking at you Bloomberg.
So maybe I unconsciously link BI’s headlines to adverts ?
There’s also the way they sometimes present the content, by “slicing” major news/reports into bullet points or stupid slideshows. I understand why they do so, but that’s not my kind of journalism. If I don’t want to take much time with news I open FastFT, NYT Now, The Economist Espresso or WSJ What’s News where articles, while short, are well written and contain much of what I need to know about the subjects.
If a long, investigative newspaper article meanders without purpose, Business Insider will mercilessly slice and dice the article and cut to what is most essential. If you don’t give your audience what they want, someone else will[.]
No, Business Insider isn’t my kind of town. If I’m looking for some male-alpha business writings I go straight to ZeroHedge.com.
For my part, I let the original title of the article, though I may shorten it. Where I differ from them — quiet a bit actually, as I’m not a reporter myself — is that I tend to avoid quoting the most sensationalist piece of an article. I prefer to convey a bit of mystery that may encourage you to read the whole article elsewhere.
The comparison is fair, Europe signed a blank cheque to an industry they rely on so heavily.
Though, I diverge from what is a rather alarming picture : VW will never be allowed to go down, at any cost for the German government.
The real issue may be that other car manufacturers are part of this scheme — among them the Daimler Group, which would add up quite a bit to the bill as it is another major German champion.
Second, led by Volkswagen, Europe’s car manufacturers lobbied hard for governments to promote the adoption of diesel engines as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Whereas diesel engines power fewer than 5 per cent of passenger cars in the US, where regulators uncovered the fraud, they constitute more than 50 per cent of the market in Europe thanks in large part to generous government incentives.
It was bad enough that Enron’s chief executive urged employees to buy the company’s stock. This, however, is the equivalent of the US government offering tax breaks at Enron’s behest to get half of US households to buy stock propped up by fraudulent accounting.
On consumer lending :
The most creditworthy customers, it turns out, are the least keen to splurge when extra credit is offered. For every dollar their credit limits increase, they boost their borrowing by $0.23. Even that is an exaggeration: by further digging through the data, the researchers establish that the borrowers with the best credit records are only shifting their borrowing from card to card to take advantage of improved terms—not borrowing any more in aggregate. At the other end of the scale, those with the muckiest credit histories borrow an extra $0.58 for every $1 hike in their credit limit.
But that is not the whole story. The researchers then take a bank’s perspective, and ask to whom it makes most sense to lend. Boosting credit limits draws in extra interest payments and charges, but there are costs too. If it is mainly the highest-risk borrowers who take advantage of higher limits, or if the higher limits encourage more reckless borrowing in general, then default rates will climb, eating away at profit margins.
Following VW’ scandal, here is Jean-Louis Gassée on a necessary transition :
Filling up the cars as described represents 1.3 terawatts pulsing through the grid to the electric filling stations. The Syracuse University page pegs the entire US electric supply at about 1 terawatt. Again, I’m not vouching for exact numbers, just the orders of magnitude. Now, add an uncomfortable twist to those numbers: Transmission loss in the electric grid is more than 7%; compare this to the less than .1% for the transportation and evaporation of gasoline.
The result is that we have more than just the science problem of replacing gasoline with electric energy storage. We also face an infrastructure challenge to, first, generate the electricity and, second, transport it to the filling stations at home or on roadsides. It will take a very long time, huge amounts of money, and interesting politics to solve these two problems. And, while I’m not a diehard GM fan, it should (but won’t) kill the “General Motors killed the electric car” myth.
