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SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

The US Federal Reserve is “not out of ammunition,” former Fed chief Ben Bernanke writes in his first of two posts on the issue. Bernanke concedes that “there are signs that monetary policy in the United States and other industrial countries is reaching its limits” and a “balanced monetary-fiscal response would both be more effective and also reduce the need to use unconventional monetary tools.” Yet, one of the weapons still left in the Fed’s arsenal in response to a hypothetical economic slowdown: negative interest rates. “The idea of negative interest rates strikes many people as odd. Economists are less put off by it, perhaps because they are used to dealing with ‘real’ (or inflation-adjusted) interest rates, which are often negative.” A move to negative rates could face legal and operational considerations and, even after accounting for other effects on financial markets, there is a limit on how “negative” the rates can be driven — at least in theory. At some point, it would become profitable for banks and other institutions to just hold cash in vaults. That said, Bernanke closes his argument by saying that “anxiety about negative interest rates seen recently in the media and in markets seems to me to be overdone. Logically, when short-term rates have been cut to zero, modestly negative rates seem a natural continuation; there is no clear discontinuity in the economic and financial effects of, say, a 0.1 percent interest rate and a -0.1 percent rate… Overall, as a tool of monetary policy, negative interest rates appear to have both modest benefits and manageable costs.”

Why are Amish-owned business disproportionately successful? It is a paradox, but the failure rate of Amish startups in the first five year is less than 10%, versus the North American overall average of 65%. Scholar Don Kraybill attributes this to 12 main factors including, counterintuitively, the Amish community’s limited education: Amish finish school with eighth grade, “the two basic Amish career tracks are farming and small business, so that’s where the best and brightest end up, bringing their ingenuity and drive with them.” Kraybill also cites the superior work ethic, low overhead and payroll costs, and the ability to stand on the shoulder of the “Amish” branding, which, he says, “has strong positive associations: honesty, simplicity, old-fashioned virtue.”

What are Trump University final exams like? The New Yorker’s John Flowers thinks they are something like this: “Two plus two equals what?” With possible answers being ‘(a) Maybe four (b) Could be four. Could be. Lotta people saying it’s five’ or ‘(c) I’m not saying it’s five; I’m saying it could be—could be five. You see these establishment hacks, losers, like Mitt Romney? Real crank. They hate me. They take answers like “could be’ and say, ‘Oh, he says two plus two equals five.’ I never said that. I never—I said ‘could be.’ Could be six. We don’t know.”

Speaking of Trump, here’s a complete (and long) list of the tycoon’s business disasters, including the aforementioned Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, and Trump Steaks. The implied business model: slap his name on already existing businesses and inanimate objects and run them into the ground.

The prospect of “political irrelevance” looms for many Wall Street donors, writes Bloomberg, after Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio all dropped out of the US presidential race. Rubio was seen by many on Wall Street as the candidate most aligned with their own views, and Wall Street donors aren’t used to not being aligned with candidates. Who are they left with? None other than Donald Trump. However, “hedge fund and private equity managers are driven by one issue that is central to their economic well-being: the carried interest tax,” which Trump has vowed to do away with. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky … It’s like they’re paper pushers. They make a fortune, they pay no tax. … The hedge funds guys are getting away with murder,” said Trump on CBS back in August. And while backing Hillary Clinton is still on the table, “she has become increasingly critical of the financial industry during her protracted primary battle with Bernie Sanders.”

Voters in New Zealand appear to have decided the only thing worse than having the Union Jack on your flag is having a flag that looks like a bath towel, Reuters suggests, as they voted by a 56.6% margin in favour of retaining their current flag. Proponents of a change in NZ had suggested the national colors are nearly indistinguishable from those of Australia.

‘Why we should fear a cashless world’: In light of the opening of the UK’s first cashless cafe, the Guardian’s Dominic Frisby warns of the consequences of the current “unofficial war on cash,” which he says will drive inequality to unprecedented lengths. He does not condemn the upgrading of money for convenience, but he wants people to have the choice to do so. In western economies, suspicion of those who use cash is increasingly growing, deeming them criminals, tax evaders or terrorists. However, he reckons that converting into a cashless society will not remove these problems, as we see large corporate firms participating in tax avoidance schemes through legislative methods. Moreover, the transition would give more power to the already powerful, as banks and tech companies will oversee that change and governments will be able to trace your every transaction, making the war on cash a war on the poor. Cash empowers people, he says, and makes them less dependent on the corporate world.

In more local art, The Guardian put together a photo essay compiled of images from over a century in Egypt. It’s hard not to feel nostalgic, even though many of us hadn’t even been born yet, for a time when our internal image of Egypt was more than just Mortada Mansour screaming at us through our television screens. Also stunning are the chromographic images of Egypt in the 1800s and early 1900s that Sharkiya’s Ahmed Saad runs on his Twitter feed.

Interested in “private military contractors” — PMCs, or mercenaries, as some would call them? Still remember Blackwater and Eric Prince? You’ll definitely want to read “Eric Prince in the hot seat,” the latest from muckraking outfit The Intercept.

Watch crazy Siberian winds push a 40-ton Boeing 737 around on a runway in this video picked up by RT (run time: 1:01, with the note that the video is apparently fairly profane in Russian.)

There’s a new claimant to the “world’s most luxurious hotel” tag: Macau’s The 13 Hotel is set to become the world’s most expensive when it opens this summer. Each room in The 13 reportedly cost USD 7 mn to build and the project as a whole came at price tag of USD 1.4 bn. Business Insider’s Talia Avakian provides some pictures from the hotel and says its “swanky features include stained-glass bathrooms, Roman baths with retractable marble coverings, and complimentary transportation via Rolls-Royce Phantoms.”

Garry Shandling, 1949-2016. Comedian, writer and actor Garry Shandling passed away on Thursday after an unspecified medical emergency, according to Variety, despite not having any outstanding medical conditions. Shandling will hopefully be best remembered for the amazing Larry Sanders Show, where he mocked the big late night talk shows as the host of his own fictional late night program. It was a show on which nearly every comedian one can think of appeared at some point. Beyond the guest appearances, the Larry Sanders Show is highly under-credited for being influential on the mock-documentary style of comedies which would follow. (Watch Alec Baldwin on the Larry Sanders Show, running time: 1:36)

Ever wonder which nation is the polar opposite of Egypt? We think it’s Japan. Setting aside cultural traits around relative tolerance for disorder and the like, while we look to turn a population boom into a net plus, Japan’s funeral directors are getting ready to cope with “peak death” in a nation in which there are 300k more deaths than births each year, the Financial Times reports (paywall).

Whether you want a primer on how to breathe new life into an old family business or you’re simply still traumatized by Fortune magazine’s lionization of Jack Welch in the 1990s and early 2000s, you’ll want to read Bloomberg’s take on “How GE Exorcised the Ghost of Jack Welch to Become a 124-Year-Old Startup.”

WATCH THIS

There was an “uber” way before Uber and, if it had survived, the future of transportation would probably already be here: It was called Jitney, Uber’s co-founder Travis Kalanick says, and 100 years ago, it was doing the same number of rides per day as Uber is doing now. However, the service died because of lobbying from the “existing transportation monopoly” at the time resulted in crippling regulation. Kalanick does not want to see this happen again. To Kalanick, Uber changed from just being a tool that allows you to push a button to get a ride to a grand ambition and its goal now is getting more people into fewer cars to help “reclaim our cities.” (Run time 19:18)

The art of political power, with Robert Caro and William Hague: Author Robert Caro’s biography of US President Lyndon B. Johnson has been described as “the greatest insight into power ever written.” Last October, Caro was interviewed by the UK’s former foreign secretary and leader of the Conservative Party William Hague for the Intelligence Squared series. Caro’s depth of knowledge about the lives of a number of politicians and his careful research into how they acquired and held on to power makes this a must-watch for anyone interested in statecraft and the inside stories of some powerful individuals, some of whom are well-known, and some whom were able to escape scrutiny until Robert Caro came along. (Watch, running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes)

What are ceremonies, really? They’re often a rite of passage in religion. Essentially, they say “I am no longer this and I am now that,” (Run time 03:16) says communication expert Nancy Duarte. While we’ve grown accustomed to stories and speeches, ceremonies are a unique communication tool that often go unutilized, says Duarte. When Steve Jobs was came back to Apple, one of the challenges he faced was the transition to OS from Mac OS9, facing the skepticism of developers refusing to come on board. To drive his point home, Jobs pulled off one of his most interesting stunts (Run time 05:50) at the WWDC conference in 2002. A coffin rises from the stage, accompanied by organ music and smoke, and Jobs places an oversized Mac OS9 box into the coffin. He shuts the lid, places a rose on top, and eulogizes the death of Mac OS9.

READ THIS

“Downtown Cairo is getting a general makeover. Authorities are repainting building facades and have installed a triumphant new monument in Tahrir Square, watched over by multiple CCTV cameras. The city’s revolutionary graffiti art, however, doesn’t fit with the beautification plan,” writes Mia Jankowicz for The Guardian. While Tahrir’s heritage sites are being preserved, graffiti that sprung out of the 25 January events is torn down stone-by-stone, raising the question of what then constitutes heritage, Jankowicz writes. “The cleanup of downtown is about giving a sense of order in post-January 2011 Cairo,” says AUC sociologist Mona Abaza. “All of us are in denial. Tahrir is over, and the graffiti is part of it. We had four years of trauma – killings and euphoria – but humans need normalcy. And the normalcy is this order.”

LISTEN TO THIS

Globalization and interconnectedness are good for companies, particularly small- and medium-size enterprises, a McKinsey Global Institute found. McKinsey director Jacques Bughin and McKinsey Global Institute principal Susan Lund discuss the findings of the report with Simon London on the McKinsey podcast. “Emerging markets are involved in more than half of global trade transactions for the first time in history. All of this has added to global prosperity and value added,” Lund explains, noting that the openness to global flows raised world GDP by “at least” 10%. However, the “mix has dramatically changed,” Bughin says, “No surprise, global financial flows collapsed since the crisis… [but] global trade in goods is essentially flat, while global data flows have exploded.” (Run time 21:45)

The third party that came forward to help the FBI with a way to possibly unlock the phone without Apple’s involvement is “almost certainly a private security company that specializes in breaking into systems,” Journalist Fred Kaplan tells Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air. Kaplan talks about the the “secret history” of cyber defence in the US, which was created, in part, because President Reagan saw WarGames, a 1983 movie, and wondered if its plot could happen in real life. (Run time 43:13)

…That third party could be Israeli mobile forensic software firm Cellebrite, according to Reuters on Wednesday, citing Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Company officials declined to comment.

Burner phones, not encryption, kept Paris terrorists off the authorities’ radar: But the entire idea that busting open encryption can stop future attacks is arguably misguided, especially after French antiterrorism police investigations into the Paris attack have found that the terrorists relied on disposable phones, or burners, and not encryption, to evade detection, according to the New York Times last week. “Everywhere they went, the attackers left behind their throwaway phones… Most striking is what was not found on the phones: Not a single email or online chat from the attackers has surfaced so far,” suggesting that the attackers were able to stay off the radar of intelligence services by staying low-tech.

SOMEONE TO FOLLOW

Alternately cruel and hilarious, think of The Darwin Awards (@AwardsDarwin) as a globalized version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, but with snark and a whiff of classism.

SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

When adjusted for productivity, labor costs in manufacturing in China is only 4% cheaper than in the US, according to a new study, Bloomberg writes. “Although U.S. manufacturing is currently facing meaningful headwinds from a stronger [USD] and the collapse in investment in the shale energy sector, it remains the most competitive worldwide,” analysts Gregory Daco and Jeremy Leonard wrote in an Oxford Economics note. But there’s a catch. Productivity growth in the US economy as a whole has been small in recent years, pulled down by the healthcare sector, and the U.S. is still running a trade deficit with China, to say nothing of a potential USD rally being bad for exporters.

HEALTH

Eight glasses of water a day is bunkum. The dictate that you need to drink eight glasses of water a day was never backed by science (watch, run time: 1:43).

TECH

Knock us over with a feather, Twitter is not changing its character limit to a ridiculous 10,000, according to Engadget. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told The Today Show that the micro-blogging network would stick to its 140-character limit, presumably to remain a micro-blogging network instead of, well, anything but.

“Where Computers Defeat Humans, and Where They Can’t’’: Earlier this month, an artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo, managed to defeat champion Lee Se-dol four times out of five in the strategy game of Go, where luck plays no role. Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the New York Times underscore the importance of the victory because of the machine’s ability to overcome Polanyi’s Paradox which states that humans know more than they can tell. This particular victory showed that a machine can win strategies by figuring out how to win strategies on its own after seeing examples of successes and failure without relying on human knowledge, hence, not being limited by the paradox and humans’ self-ignorance. It’s that self-ignorance that doesn’t allow someone to understand, for example, why they’re so good at recognizing faces or driving in traffic. The notion that machines can do that is nothing new, but the authors warn that it is happening at a rapid pace, where AI can now apply this ability in speech recognition, credit card fraud detection and radiology and pathology. However, the authors conclude by saying a machine will never be able to figure out the challenges that these progressions would have on society. (Read)

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• A 2009 profile of new tourism minister Yehia Rashed (industry site bbt)
• If Climate Change Doesn’t Sink Alexandria, Egypt’s Official Incompetence Will (Takepart)
• Cookie Monster sets a timer on the iPhone 6s (Apple ad, Youtube)
• CCTV footage of the FlyDubai crash (YouTube)
• The Robots are Coming for Wall Street (New York Times)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

German artist Arndt Schlaudraff recreates brutalist buildings using Lego bricks. Schlaudraff said what is frustrating about his “creations” is that he s limited by the square shape of the blocks; “it is nearly impossible to rebuild houses with many curves or rolling edges. For example, a building from Zaha Hadid or Juergen Mayer H is very hard to realize with Lego bricks.” You can view some of Schlaudraff’s creations here.

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