What We Read Today 12 May 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.

• Putin Demands $3.8B From Visa And MasterCard (Keith Griffith, Business Insider) In response to western sanctions, Russia has demanded huge “security deposits” for Mastercard and Visa. These are part of a new national payments network law enacted last week.

• The EU’s ties to Russia rule out any serious sanctions (Walter Kurtz, Sober Look) Europe has massive energy dependencies on Russia, $246 billions of exports to Russia and major banking relationships which could cause the European banking system to collapse it they were abruptly severed. Kurtz says sanctions are a non-starter.

• EUR/USD Continues to Erode on Draghi Comments (James Hyerczyk, FX Empire) Is the ECB (European Central Bank) president trying to talk down the euro? For detailed discussion see also GEI Investing Sunday article.

• Subway CEO: How I’d solve the minimum wage debate (Katie Little, CNBC) Hat tip to Marvin Clark. The CEO of the company with more minimum wage violations than any other says the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation.

• Climate Change Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report (Kate Sheppard, Huffington Post) Sheppard has written a plain vanilla supportive summary of the latest government report on climate change. Econintersect cautions that the situation is not quite as straightforward as Sheppard’s article and the report itself would represent. In GEI Opinion, climate expert and economist Sig Silber (who says that man-caused climate change is real) writes in What the U.S. National Climate Assessment Missed:

Unfortunately this report has many deficiencies.

Two of the most significant deficiencies are:

A. The authors are (purposely?) unclear as to whether they are talking about the impact of anthropogenic climate change or what the IPCC calls internal variability: that is natural cycles most of which are controlled by oceans.

B. The draft of the agriculture chapter of this report is dated January 2013 meaning it was written in 2012 and thus it is not based on the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fifth Assessment…i.e. the U.S. Government Report was out of date on the day the IPCC assessment was issued. The U.S. government report was based on out-of-date IPCC documents.

Today there are 10 articles discussed ‘behind the wall’.

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