Econintersect:  Below we are reposting what we had ‘behind the wall’ 08 February in our premium content section of the daily feature “What We Read Today”.  Every week Econintersect posts more than 150 articles which are available at no charge.  In order to continue this high level of service we must find additional sources of revenue to support the level of staffing necessary.  Every week there will be an additional 70-80 articles published elsewhere that we will list, abstract and summarize in varying extent ‘behind the wall’.

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And now, as promised, this is what you missed one week ago today:

What We Read Today 08 February 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number accepted.

• Florida Professors Experimented With a Little Naked Short Selling (Matt Levine, Bloomberg) This is either a 60 second scan or a one hour deep study. Efforts in between are likely to be inefficient.

• Coming to a Post Office Near You: Loans You Can Trust? (Elizabeth Warren, Huffington Post) In 2012 $89 billion was sucked out of poverty level households by private vampires. See also next article.

• The Post Office Should Just Become a Bank (David Dayen, The New Republic) The 10% of poverty level income (on average) is spent on financial services such as payday loans and exorbitant credit card fees. An new report by the U.S. Inspector General suggests that could be reduced by 90% by establishing a the Post Office as a bank. See also preceding article.

• 5 Tax Rules for Investors (Allan S. Roth, Financial Planning)

• India to Build World’s Largest Solar Power Plant (Sanjay Kumar, Nature, Scientific American) With a nominal capacity of 4,000 megawatts, comparable to that of four full-size nuclear reactors, the ‘ultra mega’ project will be more than ten times larger than any other solar project built so far, and it will spread over 77 square kilometers of land – greater than the island of Manhattan. This will triple the solar capacity in India.

• The Prophet of No Profit (Matthew Yglesias, Slate) Is Jeff Bezoz the anti-capitalist?

• Share of labor force projected to rise for people age 55 and over and fall for younger age groups (The Editor’s Desk, Bureau of Labor Statistics) By 2022 25% of the labor force will be 55 and older. The age group 16-24 will fall to 10% of the labor force, down from17% 30 years earlier.

• January Employment ‘Little Changed’ – Rut-Roh (Steve Minter, The Global Manufacturer, Industry Week) Hat tip to Chad Moutray. This article points out that U.S. manufacturing employment had good momentum in the second half of 2013 and that continued with 21,000 more manufacturing jobs in January. For all of 2013 manufacturing employment grew by 195,000.

• What’s the Game Changer for Gold? (Frank Holmes, U.S. Global Investors)

• Mental Masturbation is Alive and Well in Versailles on the Potomac (Franklin C. Spinney, Counterpunch) Hat tip to Roger Erickson. Includes in full a 1989 article from The Washington Post by the same author.

… your Social Security and Medicare are poised to be sacrificed on the altar of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex in the name of fiscal prudence.

• Knockout Punch for the Stock Market (Robert Isbitts, Sungarden Investment Research) Dow near 9,000 in 2014?

• Why volcanoes are the energy source of the future (Cristopher Mims, Quartz)

• Price Adjustments (Eric Shaefer, Advisor Perspectives dshort.com) Inflation is on a clear trend – down, i.e. disinflation.