"Smartest" college majors. Majors that tend to require the deepest thinking unsurprisingly tend attract the best students who score the best on standardized testing -- e.g., philosophy, economics, mathematics, physics, and engineering.____How ride-hailing apps are affecting taxi service in NYC:_____Earnings revisions ratio is sky high. This is a good thing, though stock valuations are unlikely, as a whole, to increase on a level to what we saw last year as higher borrowing costs exert an impact on the present value of cash flows._____Most crowded trades by year. 2017's most crowded trades included financials (in anticipation of higher rates), EM debt (like in 2016, due to poor yields in developed markets), and tech (stocks already expensive, so money plowing into companies believed to be the most innovative and disruptive):_____Federal deficit has historically followed the business cycle, but recent tax cuts in the US projects a divergence between the two:_____Evolution of how music is formatted. 1970s saw vinyl and 8-tracks with a mix of cassette tapes. 1985-1990 was the era of the cassette. By 1992, cassettes and CDs were equally popular. By 2011, download and streaming were just as popular as CDs. Streaming continues to gain popularity. Vinyl is actually making a slight comeback._____Wage inflation in various economies. Roughly equal in the US and EU, followed by Canada, and then Japan. In terms of tightening cycles, the US (which started tightening in December 2015, but more seriously over the past year) is ahead of Canada (started tightening cycle in mid-2017), which is ahead of the EU, which is ahead of Japan._____R&D efficiency is increasing nearly 1-to-1 when measured against the cost of a 1-day stay in the hospital. Every $1 rise in the cost of hospital stays is matched by about a $0.90 increase in R&D spending:_____Money velocity, as it's measured (GDP/money supply), has been decreasing to nearly a 70-year low. But money velocity is a misleading concept. First, how money is measured -- M2 in this case, but is also pertinent toward measurements such as M1 and MZM, for example -- is deceiving because these measures contain credit items that aren't actually money. Money is what you settle your payments with, whether they're cash transactions or transactions initially made through credit upon an agreement to be paid at a later date. Money velocity purports that you can obtain a higher GDP off the same monetary base if the money in an economy (supposedly) just circulates around faster. So if money velocity is decreasing this is interpreted by some to mean that money isn't being spent as quickly as it formerly was. But most spending in an economy comes from credit, not money. Increased money velocity is more accurately a greater expansion of private sector credit creation. Monetary velocity has been bogged down by the failure of savings being put back to work in the economy. Savings pushed through commercial banks are not matched with a consumption or investment outlet (i.e., the velocity of commercial bank held savings is zero). Commercial banks hold on their balance sheets a liability held by the public that is not being spent in the economy and therefore not having any impact on output. The current amount of savings held among US depository institutions is approximately $9.2 trillion. This is 2.3x the size it was ten years ago. The problem has been exacerbated by Fed policies such as paying interest on excess reserves, which turns a non-earning asset (excess reserves) into an earning asset and incentivizes them to hoard unused funds, which don't get lent out. It restrains credit creation and has a dampening impact on money velocity.This is why excess reserves, which were under $2 billion ten years ago, now sit at over $2.1 trillion, more than a 1,000x increase. This has the impact of diminishing real GDP by decreasing the supply of loan funds on the markets and is a detriment to stock valuations. It also has the effect of increasing the necessary amount of Federal Reserve credit required to produce each unit of increase in real output.