Do a Google search. While we have strong enough material to build it, it would have to be much, much longer than a Earth elevator. Earth rotates once ever 24 hours, the Moon once every 28 days. IIRC it would reach beyond the first Lagrange point.

I don't think this is true. The bond pays in Australian Dollars, a nice stable currency. I believe the point of the bond is that it can be traded off the exchanges and be self settling, without the need for a transfer agent. .

It is adult material, in the sense of not only therms but in complexity of material. It does have the virtue of being mostly self contained - expect maybe for the first 8 issues. You don't need to know much in the way of comic lore to read it.

Gaiman's 1602 has a good take on the Marvel Universe. Also the illustrated Stardust is not technically a comic book but a very good hybrid.

I would second this. The comic books are not a genre, it is many genre. Superheros are common. Self published black & white biographies are good, for example, Maus, Ghost World, and Persepolis. Japaneses manga coves robot warriors to brewing sake to the swim team.

Squire Girl has good humor. Saga has great visuals. etc.

If the first does not grab you attention move on to the next. It is like going to a librarian and asking for a good book.

It encourages savings in financial instruments like bonds. Bonds get a little extra boast from deflation. Who holds bonds? Those people who are already wealth.

It discourages investing in equity. The hurdle rate for the Equity Risk Premium just jumps up by a little. Equities are better at weathering inflation than bonds.

So, deflation helps those who are already wealthy and encourages low risk low reward projects. It discourages the young hungry people from making big transformation projects. The general consensus is that low steady inflation is the best choice among the various options out there.

They did test it out first. It worked. So yes, they were stupid but not that stupid.

The Fed is a hybrid system, both public and private.

The Fed is owned by its member banks. They get to elect board members to the regional boards. Profits accrue the banks, kind of. The Fed doesn't pay a dividend so those profits never get monetized. So de facto profits go the Treasury.

However the Board of Governors is appointed by the president. This limits the amount of control the banks have over the institution. So what is ownership without access to profits or control?

A analogy would be the local co-op grocery store. The more you buy the more of the store you own. However this comes back as store rebates and the insiders still have control.

We are wandering a bit off topic, but... It is not a Middle Age thing. For most of history the best guess is that investments have returned around 1 to 2%. It may not even be a stagnation thing. Remember that returns are set by supply and demand. One could have a high growth rate and a high savings rate which would result in a low return on investments. A good example here would be the 19th century Europe. High wealth inequities probably pushed down investment returns here.

Maybe. The rate is determined by supply and demand. There is surplus savings sloshing around the market right now. Pension and banking regulations, surplus savings from Asia, demographic imbalances. etc.

Even if there is a great leap forward this may not solve the imbalance. Take self driving cars. We could see a huge fleet of personally owned cars replaced by a smaller fleet of self driving taxis. Car production could fall by 70% in 20 years. So less investments would be needed. Most of the technological advancement over the past 20 years has reduced the amount of capital needed. No magic bullet here.

In short, there is a fire sale of debt going on and Microsoft is selling. This has more to do with the debt market than with MSFT.

I will slightly disagree with this. I see Microsoft more of a "Value" company (steady profits) instead of a "Growth" company (skyrocketing sales). However the issuing of new debt says little. To oversimplify, debt is good. If equity is expected to yield 10% and debt is expected to yield 2% then one should issue debt and do a stock buy back. A little financial leverage, a little debt shield. All is good as long as the company can support the debt.

As a side note, the market is desperate for high quality debt. Regulations favor debt purchases over stock. Think pension funds. Since the 2008 financial crisis things have gotten worse. 40 years at 4.5%? One would have to be desperate to take on 40 years worth of inflation risk at such a miserly rate. Yet pension funds are pilling in.

Nope. The US engaged in "Financial Repression" during the 1950s. Financial repression is when inflation is higher than the yield on a 10 year government bond. IIRC, the 10 years were selling around 2% while inflation was at 4%. 2 take away from this. First, you don't need double digit inflation. Second, the US was able to pull this off in the 1950s because investors had lived through the Great Depression and were very risk adverse. Not sure if the US could pull this off again.

Well, we did see quite a few bankruptcies. We saw back catalogs being traded multiple times, each time at a lower price. Staff fired, fewer releases of new records by the majors, etc. So we saw real impacts, not just accounting tricks.

I can think of quite a few.

Their employees (singers, producers, writers) might demand higher salaries, such as getting a bigger cut of the revenue. Marketing expenses might be higher. If I recall, Apple charged a pretty penny to have albums pop up on iTunes front page. I have heard anecdotal evidence on both sides. I know that enough things have changed over the last 10 years and one can't make an easy comparison between the two time periods.

Mashiki, while that is true I don't think that is the case here. Yahoo misrepresented nothing. I am assuming Yahoo did not know about the data breach when they signed the deal.

That being said, most merger agreements have a materiality clause allowing termination of the merger is something significance comes up. It is a bit of a weasel clause and is rarely used but it almost always in the merger agreement. I am not sure I would call this data breach material in the financial sense but it does give Verizon leverage.

You can’t do it that way.

Franchise laws exist to balance the power of the large parent company and the small independent owner. If not, the parent company could bully the independent franchise. You can’t have weak puppet proxies. While I don’t think Tesla should be forced to franchise, in order for franchising to work you need decent franchising laws.

At this point I really want to find a film clip from Glengarry Glen Ross about steak knives.