Written by Econintersect
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 (and sometimes longer ones) 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.
This feature is published Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the late afternoon New York time. Today the ‘What We Read Today’ column missed the cutoff for our FREE daily newsletter, normally the only way it is accessed. So it’s been published in a Special Edition for the convenience of subscribers. As a result, it is today available for all to read.
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Notice: Due to staff vacation scheduled, this will be the last ‘What We Read Today’ this month. The next column will be posted 01 August.
Topics today include 22 articles and 11 graphics:​
- Earth’s Core Has Been Leaking for 2.5 Billion Years and Geologists Don’t Know Why
- Earth’s core has been leaking for billions of years
- Trilayer graphene shows signs of superconductivity
- Signatures of tunable superconductivity in a trilayer graphene moire superlattice
- Celtic World ca. 400 BC
- Why Investing in Marijuana Stocks is a Dumb Idea
- This is the Most Important Chart You’ll See Today
- The 2019 Stock Market Has Been Very Narrow
- Record Outflows From Equity Mutual Funds
- Key numbers to know for Mueller’s testimony
- The Case of Al Franken
- Trump attacks the ‘Squad’ as ‘Racist group of troublemakers’
- Britain calls for European naval mission to counter Iran’s ‘piracy’
- EU countries agree to new migrant influx mechanism: Macron
- Scotland generating enough wind energy to power two Scotlands
- Financial Repression in Germany
- Greece’s newly-elected government wins confidence vote on economic policy
- Swiss National Bank in Hot Seat Facing a Global Wall of Easing
- Iran’s spy claims raise tensions another notch with Trump
- Hong Kong police criticized over failure to stop attacks on protesters
- Mystery surrounds ouster of Chinese researchers from Canadian laboratory
- Mexico says no to safe third-country asylum discussion with U.S.
- And More
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Articles about events, conflicts and disease around the world
U.S.
- Key numbers to know for Mueller’s testimony (The Hill) Former special counsel Robert Mueller will soon retake the national spotlight as he testifies publicly before Congress about his investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Mueller, who remained quiet throughout his investigation, will be grilled by members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees on Wednesday about the findings laid out in his lengthy report. This article contains a long list of statistcs about the report and the investigation that produced it.
- The Case of Al Franken (The New Yorker) This almost booklet-length article concludes with the lawyer Debra Katz, who has represented Christine Blasey Ford and other sexual-harassment victims and remains troubled by Franken’s case. Katz sees Franken as a cautionary tale for the #MeToo movement. She contends:
“The allegations levelled against Senator Franken did not warrant his forced expulsion from the Senate, particularly given the context in which most of the behavior occurred, which was in his capacity as a comedian. All offensive behavior should be addressed, but not all offensive behavior warrants the most severe sanction.” … “To treat all allegations the same is not only inappropriate. It feeds into a backlash narrative that men are vulnerable to even frivolous allegations by women.”
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- Trump attacks the ‘Squad’ as ‘Racist group of troublemakers’ (The Hill) President Trump on Monday stepped up his attacks on a group of four freshman Democratic lawmakers, calling the group of minority women a “Racist group of troublemakers.” Video from Trump defends racist tweet, slams “The Squad” (CBS Evening News).
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EU
- Britain calls for European naval mission to counter Iran’s ‘piracy’ (Reuters) Britain called on Monday for a European-led naval mission to ensure safe shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, days after Iran seized a British-flagged tanker in what London described as an act of “state piracy” in the strategic waterway.
- EU countries agree to new migrant influx mechanism: Macron (Reuters) Fourteen member countries of the European Union have agreed to a new “solidarity mechanism” proposed by Germany and France to allocate migrants across the bloc, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday.
UK
- Scotland generating enough wind energy to power two Scotlands (Independent) Wind turbines in Scotland generated almost twice the entire country’s domestic power requirements In the first six months of the year. But there is a downside: It took only 2,300 employees to generate all that power and there is concern that more jobs are needed.
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Germany
- Financial Repression in Germany (Twitter)
Greece
- Greece’s newly-elected government wins confidence vote on economic policy (Reuters) Greece’s newly-elected conservative government won a confidence vote late on Monday on its economic policy, which includes tax cuts and measures to speed up investments.
Switzerland
- Swiss National Bank in Hot Seat Facing a Global Wall of Easing (Bloomberg) Swiss National Bank President Thomas Jordan is facing a new wall of pressure that could force him to push the world’s lowest central bank interest rate even lower. The franc is already at the strongest in two years, and likely to move higher as the European Central Bank outlines plans for loosening. A dramatic shift toward parity could even prompt surprise action by Jordan before the next scheduled meeting in September. That’s something he’s not been afraid to do before, notably in 2015 with the shock decision to scrap the cap on the franc.
Iran
- Iran’s spy claims raise tensions another notch with Trump (The Hill) challenges with Iran mounted on Monday after Tehran claimed to detain more than a dozen citizens it alleged are CIA spies. Regional experts said Monday that it’s hard to gauge the credibility of Iran’s announcement. Regardless, they added, Iran’s flexing of its security apparatus represents the latest in a back-and-forth of escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, coming on the heels of Iran’s seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker. And while Trump has intermittently expressed a desire to talk with Iran, on Monday, he indicated his window is narrowing.
China
- Hong Kong police criticized over failure to stop attacks on protesters (Reuters) Hong Kong police faced criticism on Monday for an apparent failure to protect anti-government protesters and passersby from attack by what opposition politicians suspected were gang members at a train station over the weekend.
Canada
- Mystery surrounds ouster of Chinese researchers from Canadian laboratory (Science) Canadian researchers are reacting with puzzlement to the news that a “policy breach” has caused the nation’s only high-containment disease laboratory to bar a prominent Chinese Canadian virologist, her biologist husband, and a number of students from the facility. On 5 July, officials at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, Canada, escorted Xiangguo Qiu, biologist Keding Cheng, and an unknown number of her students from the lab and revoked their access rights, according to Canadian media reports. The Public Health Agency of Canada, which operates the lab, confirmed it had referred an “administrative matter” matter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but said it would not provide additional details because of privacy concerns. A number of observers have speculated that case involves concerns about the improper transfer of intellectual property to China. (All of the researchers involved are believed to be Asian.) But Frank Plummer, a former scientific director of NML who left in 2015, says the lab isn’t an obvious target for academic or industrial espionage:
“There is nothing highly secret there, and all the work gets published in the open literature. I don’t know what anyone would hope to gain by spying.”
Mexico
- Mexico says no to safe third-country asylum discussion with U.S. (Reuters) Mexico will not agree to further discussion of safe third country status for asylum seekers, the foreign minister said, adding it was not clear what the Trump administration’s stance was on the issue despite a deadline reached on Monday.
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Other Scientific, Health, Political, Economics, and Business Items of Note – plus Miscellanea
- Earth’s Core Has Been Leaking for 2.5 Billion Years and Geologists Don’t Know Why (LiveScience) A new study that found the innermost part of the planet leaks some of its contents into mantle plumes, some of which eventually reach Earth’s surface. See also Earth’s core has been leaking for billions of years (The Conversation), and Geochemical Perspective Letters. Volcanic activity is the planet’s main cooling mechanism. Certain volcanism, such as that which is still forming volcanic islands of Hawaii and Iceland, might be linked to the core by mantle plumes that transfer heat from the core to Earth’s surface. These findings suggest some core material does transfer into the base of these mantle plumes, and the core has been leaking this material for the past 2.5 billion years.
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- Trilayer graphene shows signs of superconductivity (Science) Last year, physicists reported that, when chilled to 1.7 degC above absolute zero ( – 273 degC), sheets of carbon atoms two layers thick can conduct electricity without resistance, allowing electrons to whiz through the material without losing any energy. The double sheets of carbons, known as bilayer graphene, have captivated researchers because their structural simplicity offered a platform to explore the complex physics of superconductivity, which is also exhibited in copper-oxide materials at much higher temperatures. (See Signatures of tunable superconductivity in a trilayer graphene moire superlattice (Nature) for research details.)
Now, researchers have discovered signs of superconductivity in easy-to-make three-layer sheets of graphene, renewing hope that layered graphene will soon help researchers understand how superconductivity occurs in copper-oxides. That could lead to higher temperature superconductors – or even room temperature ones – which could produce massive energy savings in electrical grids and devices.
- Celtic World ca. 400 BC (Historum.com) South of the designated Celtic regions were Mediterranian people (Greco-Roman) and north were mostly Germanic people, although north of the Danube in modern-day Romania there were Dacians who spoke Daco-Thracian languages (neither Celtic nor Germanic – nor Slavic either). See Daco-Thracian (Wikipedia).
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- Why Investing in Marijuana Stocks is a Dumb Idea (Vitaliy Katsenelson,Advisor Perspectives) VK has contributed to GEI. Marijuana is a weed, a commodity, and there are no barriers to market entry for growers. So you don’t want to own growers. There are also low barriers to entry for medical or recreational products, so stay away as well, Distributors? Retailers? Impossible to pick winners there, as well.
- This is the Most Important Chart You’ll See Today (Gains, Pains & Capital) Breadth is starting to breakdown. Breadth is on the verge of breaking a bearish rising wedge formation.
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- The 2019 Stock Market Has Been Very Narrow (Twitter) Broadly shared advances tend to be the most healthy (lasting). Only four stocks have led this market, not a good sign.
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- Record Outflows From Equity Mutual Funds (Bespoke) Last week the Investment Company Institute (ICI) released weekly mutual fund flows for the week ending July 10th. Every single category of equity fund flows had outflows this week, which is relatively rare; of the 654 weeks with data since 2007, only 70 have seen that kind of consistency across all equity categories … and four of those have been in the past four weeks! Total equity fund outflows were $46bn last week, versus $6.8bn for the week before and $85.4bn over the past three months. On a cumulative basis, $1.2 trillion has left equity mutual funds since January of 2007.
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