Here are 8 fascinating things I read this week.
Savings
Americans haven't spent this little on gas in more than a decade:
The average U.S. household is expected to spend about $550 less on gasoline in 2015 compared with 2014, as annual motor fuel expenditures are on track to fall to their lowest level in 11 years.
Perspective
Google (GOOG 0.74%) is now bigger than the entire Russian stock market:
Source: Holger Zschaepitz.
Drought
California is finally getting rain, but it's still short a few trillion gallons:
A series of rainstorms -- one of which was powerful and destructive for residents statewide -- helped deposit needed moisture to California, but it's going to take 11 trillion gallons of water in storage to recover from the drought, NASA scientists said this week.
Safety improvements
Worldwide auto fatalities have plunged in the last 40 years:
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Transport Forum.
Lifelong lessons
Author and Forbes columnist Rick Ferri made an awesome investing lesson for his daughter:
My daughter had saved up a couple thousand dollars, and we had invested in the total market fund. And it went down. She started panicking and wanted to sell. I said, "I'll make a deal with you. I will guarantee all of your losses ten years from now if you split all of your gains with me 50/50." And she thought about it, and she said, "No, I'm good." I got her to think long-term, and she's never forgotten that. I think that was a good lesson.
Solid growth
China used more concrete in the last three years than America did in the 20th century:
Risk management
Michael Lewis has a new rule of finance:
No person under the age of 35 will be allowed to work on Wall Street. Upon leaving school, young people, no matter how persuasively dimwitted, will be required to earn their living in the so-called real economy. Any job will do: fracker, street performer, chief of marketing for a medical marijuana dispensary. If and when Americans turn 35, and still wish to work in finance, they will carry with them memories of ordinary market forces, and perhaps be grateful to our society for having created an industry that is not subjected to them. At the very least, they will know that some huge number of people -- their former fellow street performers, say -- will be seriously pissed off at them if they do risky things on Wall Street to undermine the real economy. No one wants a bunch of pissed-off street performers coming after them.
Raises
Lower-income wages are growing faster than those of richer people:
Lower-wage workers saw bigger pay gains over the past year than the highest earners, reversing the trend from earlier stages of the recovery, according to economists at RBS Securities and Goldman Sachs Group (GS) While the improvement is nascent and minimal, the plunge in fuel prices is magnifying the effects. ... Total income for those making less than $12.50 an hour climbed 3.8 percent in the year through October based on a three-month average adjusted for inflation, according to a Nov. 13 report by Goldman Sachs economists. The gain, which takes into account hourly wages, the length of the workweek and employment, exceeded that by any other group and compared with a 2.5 percent increase for those making $45 an hour or more.
Have a good weekend.
For more:
- The 3 biggest predictions about the economy that never came true
- What the Great Depression did that this recession won't
- The most important numbers of the next half century
