The mighty Lions! They're 3-0. I didn't think they looked good yesterday, so I'm not as excited about them now as I was 48 hours ago. But seven straight regular season wins, a come-from-behind win (against the Vikings), a blow-out win (against the Chiefs), and a tight win on the road against a playoff contender (the Buccaneers). I'm pretty stoked.
But that helmet parody from a few years ago still cracks me up.
Today, just a few passages from my weekend reading:
Lonely is the Night
I didn't know this: Black women don't marry much, especially educated ones: "Seven out of ten black women are unmarried, and college-educated black women are twice as likely as their white female peers not to be married by their thirties. That is, they're no more likely to marry or stay married–black divorce rates are also twice as high as white–than white women with only a high school diploma. The picture is little better for black men, fewer than half of whom are husbands. (Affluent black men, in fact, become less likely to marry the more money they earn–the reverse of the trend for white men.) Moreover, neither Africa nor slavery is the culprit here: as late as the 1950s, nine in ten black women married." Link.
Evaluating Gold
Is gold over-priced? It's hard to say, but if you're only looking at its run-up over the past ten years, you're not looking at the iceberg that's under the water.
Dylan Grice of SocGen recently constructed a chart which shows official US gold reserves as a percentage of the US monetary base over the last 50 years. This was Bloomberg's “Chart of the Day” on September 15, and shows a "fair value" gold price of $10,000 per ounce.
Similarly, James Turk's Fear Index measures the value of the USA's official gold stock against the M3 money supply (which the Fed stopped publishing in early 2006). Thus, the Fear Index equals the US gold stock, times the market gold price, divided by M3; the higher the number that results from this equation, the greater the fear and uncertainty afflicting the global economy. . . .
The Fear Index [for this month] shows that we are someway off the point at which rational observers would consider gold to be overvalued.
Link.
Best Line of the Weekend
"The only problem with the journalist William L. Shirer is that he couldn't think." Link.
Joseph Bottum
