What We Read Today 20 April 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 included.

• In Many Cities, Rent Is Rising Out of Reach of Middle Class (Shaila Dewan, The New York Times) In 90 metro markets median rent is higher than 30% of median gross income, the maximum affordable level. In many markets median rents approach or exceed 40% of median gross income. In the year 2,000 many markets had median rents comfortably below 30% of median gross income.

• Fired Yahoo exec gets $58M for 15 months of work (AP, CNBC) Hat tip to Marvin Clark. Henrique de Castro recently left his position as COO (chief operating officer) of Yahoo, just 15 months after he was hired by CEO Marissa Mayer. Supposedly Mayer fired de Castro after he failed to build Yahoo’s ad growth revenue, his primary responsibility. The plan he was executing was Mayer’s. Yahoo’s board said that most of the $58 severance was related to the cost of “luring de Castro from his previous job at Google“. What a black eye for Mayer.

• Tighter Credit Steadies China’s New Home Price Increases (Lindsay Taylor, FX Empire) More news about how credit tightening is shutting down the Chinese real estate market.

• Flight 370 search: Probe of current area should be done in a week, official says (Ed Payne and Tom Watkins, CNN) Hat tip to Alun Hill. Continuing revelations about the missing Malaysian Airlines flight seem not to have rational explanations. One of the latest items is that the off-course flight climbed abruptly to near maximum flight altitude and remained at that height for 20 minutes before descending to lower altitude again.

Today there are 11 articles discussed ‘behind the wall’.

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