Featured Article

U.S. Restaurants Are Struggling With Rising Labor Costs

Posted by ZeroHedge

on Friday, 17 January 2020 10:38

In the one year since New York City implemented a mandatory $15 minimum wage, businesses have been struggling with the increased labor costs, Fox News reported previously. “They’re cutting their staff. They’re cutting their hours. They’re shutting down,” said Queens Chamber of Commerce president, Thomas Grech – who reports seeing an uptick in small business closures over the past six to nine months. “It’s not just the rent.”

Bronx Chamber of Commerce president Lisa Sorin notes that the increase has hurt small businesses the most, while Manhattan employers and their customers can afford to pay more to compensate. “It’s almost like a whirlwind of keep up or get out,” she said.

This dynamic was reflected in a Gothamist survey, which revealed that NYC restaurants are ‘thriving’ amid the $15 minimum wage, but acknowledges “Nearly 50 percent of respondents to the Hospitality Alliance’s survey said they would have to eliminate jobs in 2019 to make do.” CLICK for complete article

The Real Investment Guide For The Next Decade

Posted by Lance Roberts

on Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:34

As we head into the next decade, this complete set of articles delves into the fallacies of always owning stocks for the long run (aka “buy and hold” and passive strategies). Given that market’s cycle over time, it is important to understand how markets, and investing actually work, the impact on your wealth, and what you can do about it.

This series of articles will cover the following key points:

  • “Buy and Hold,” and other passive strategies are fine, just not all of the time
  • Markets go through long periods where investors are losing money or simply getting back to even
  • The sequence of returns is far more important than the average of returns
  • “Time horizons” are vastly under-appreciated.
  • Portfolio duration, investor duration, and risk tolerance should be aligned.
  • The “value of compounding” only works when large losses are not incurred.
  • There are periods when risk-free Treasury bonds offer expected returns on par, or better than equities with significantly less risk.
  • Investor psychology plays an enormous role in investors’ returns
  • Solving the puzzle: Solutions to achieving long-term returns and the achievement of financial goals.
  • Spot what’s missing: A compendium of investing wisdom from the world’s greatest investors.

CLICK for articles

Visualizing How the Demographics of China and India are Diverging

Posted by Jeff Desjardins

on Thursday, 9 January 2020 10:23

Within popular discourse, especially in the West, the profiles of China and India have become inextricably linked.

Aside from their massive populations and geographical proximity in Asia, the two nations also have deep cultural histories and traditions, growing amounts of influence on the world stage, and burgeoning middle classes.

China and India combine to be home to one-third of the world’s megacities, and they even had identical real GDP growth rates of 6.1% in 2019, based on early estimates by the IMF.

But aside from the obvious differences in their political regimes, the two populous nations have also diverged in another way: demographics.

As seen in today’s animation, which comes from AnimateData and leverages data from the United Nations, the two countries are expected to have very different demographic compositions over time as their populations age…CLICK for complete article

Why Pirates Are Giving Up On Oil

Posted by Julianne Geiger

on Monday, 6 January 2020 10:07

Piracy in some of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints is on the rise–but now, pirates are resorting back to another method of income generation better suited to times of lower oil prices: taking human captives.

Sometimes, black market oil prices just aren’t lucrative enough. In the days of $100 oil, oil theft was a hot commodity. Today, pirates are supplementing their stolen oil income with ransomed sailors, creating a whole new set of problems for the oil industry to tackle.

Where Piracy is Hot, and Where It’s Not

Piracy is being dealt with fairly successfully in certain regions of the world. In others, efforts to shore up maritime security have failed. But the threat of pirates taking human captives is alive and well in all regions.

East Africa – Once a piracy hotspot, piracy off Somalia’s coast has fallen in recent years as the international community–including Iran–stepped up to tackle this pressing problem that disrupted the flow of goods, including oil, through the critical oil route. Somalia, too, has stepped up its ability to prosecute pirates. The East Africa area includes the Bab-el-Mandeb between Yemen and Djibouti, as well as the Gulf of Aden. Piracy incidents here hit a high of 54 in 2017, before falling back to just 9 in 2018, according to One Earth Future’s annual report The State of Maritime Piracy 2018….CLICK for complete article

Timelapse Maps: An Overview of Our Changing Planet

Posted by Nicholas LePan

on Monday, 6 January 2020 10:03

Humankind’s impact on the world is obvious, but our spatial patterns are sometimes difficult to recognize from the ground.

Publicly accessible, high-quality satellite imagery has been a game changer in terms of understanding the scope of forces such as urbanization and land use patterns.

Google Earth’s timelapsed satellite maps capture the drastic changes the planet’s surface has undergone over the past 34 years. Each timelapse comprises 35 cloud-free pictures, which have been made interactive by the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Three different satellites acquired 15 million images over the past three decades. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program. For the years 2015 to 2018, Google combined imagery from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2A. Sentinel is part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program….CLICK for complete article