Data Dive

As F. Scott Fitzgerald was famously kind-of quoted, “The rich are different than you and me.”

Morgan Stanley reported strong third-quarter earnings today, up 12 percent to $8.91 billion in quarterly revenue, while rival Goldman Sachs yesterday reported an increase of 25 percent to $8.39 billion.

As this Reuters interactive shows, the share price for both investment banks healthily beat the S&P 500, with Morgan Stanley’s earnings per share coming in at $0.84 and Goldman’s boasting an EPS of $4.69.

If there’s any bad news—and bad is a relative term here—it’s for bankers at the two financial titans, as both credit restraint in compensation (aka, flat bonuses) for helping earnings growth. Reuters’ Lauren Tara LaCapra reports that similar changes to bonuses are taking place across Wall Street. Still, Goldman estimated its average compensation per employee at $320,000 or the first nine months of the year.

Somehow I don’t think Joe Sixpack—or F. Scott Fitzgerald, for that matter–are shedding any tears.

You know something’s hit a mainstream nerve when the Onion gets in on the act. 

On Wednesday, “America’s Finest News Source” ran a satirical article under the headline “Facebook Offers To Freeze Female Employee’s Newborn Children.” For the uninitiated, NBC News started a spirited debate on Tuesday when it reported that in January, Apple will join Facebook in paying for female employees to freeze their eggs.

The issue for some is the motivation behind the perk, and whether it is merely a guise to get women to spend their prime childbearing years in the office instead of making more holistic decisions regarding their work-life balance. As Emma Barnett writes in the Telegraph, “professional women have already got enough on our plate without our ‘benevolent bosses’ suddenly playing God.”

But as this Reuters graphic shows, this is hardly the first instance of technology firms using extra healthcare benefits to attract workers. A survey of 103 high tech companies showed that for a dozen deluxe benefits, tech outfits out-offer the national baseline for all industries.

Ultimately, freezing eggs is a woman’s personal decision, but in the tech sector particularly, gender inequity—and frightening threats like #Gamergate–are no laughing matter. That’s what makes the Onion’s frozen babies headline so biting.

Last night The New York Times released an astounding report detailing the U.S. military’s discovery and subsequent cover-up of secret caches of chemical weapons in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. 

Almost immediately, partisans on the right took to the Web to vindicate President Bush’s justification for the 2003 invasion, and just as quickly, those on the left rebutted the assertion.

The National Review Online’s Patrick Brennan splits the middle, pointing out, “The existence of these weapons doesn’t affect the debate over the war’s justification either way” as it doesn’t prove that Saddam Hussein was resuming production of weapons of mass destruction, while it does show that he was not complying with the mandate to destroy existing weapons and allow UN inspections.

There can be little debate that Iraq has been in a near-constant state of catastrophe since the invasion. As this Reuters graphic shows, more than 140,000 civilians have been killed since March, 2003, with the recent carnage wrought by the Islamic State driving levels to their highest since the peak of sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007.

At this point, the reality for millions of Iraqis recalls a grim interpretation of the Van Morrison lyric: “It ain’t why, it just is.”

Ukraine is getting the cold shoulder from Russia on two fronts, and that could be bad news for Europe.  As if the military conflict between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces weren’t enough, tensions over unpaid gas bills remain high. Russian energy giant Gazprom cut off supplies of gas to Ukraine in June after Kiev failed to pay $3.1 billion in gas debt, but this is more than just a Ukrainian problem. The European Council on Foreign Relations succinctly frames the issue:

“The impending crisis illustrates Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and the near-monopoly Ukraine has on the transit of gas to Europe. This means when Russia limits or cuts off Ukrainian gas, it becomes a European problem because Ukraine then siphons off Russian gas destined for European customers.”

As this Reuters graphic shows, Ukraine’s gas reserves are just over half full, and a half-dozen other countries are reliant on Russian gas exports for at least 50 percent of their consumption. While Norway’s Statoil recently struck a deal to sell Ukraine gas, a Statoil spokesman called the deal “a short-term and relatively low-volume agreement.” Russia is also trying to resolve the dispute by offering Ukraine a more flexible payment schedule for overdue natural-gas supplies. Talks between Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Prodan and EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger are scheduled to resume in Berlin on Oct. 21, and an agreement can’t come quickly enough. As Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller astutely pointed out: “The winter will be cold.”

Some silver clouds have gray linings.

On the surface, the most recent U.S. jobs report brought good news, with the unemployment rate falling to a six-year low of 5.9 percent.

But the news isn’t all rosy. The number of Americans on the outside of the labor force looking in hit 13,346,000 in September, a high since the December, 2007, start of the Great Recession. The graph of those not in the labor force is disturbingly parallel to the trend of recovery in non-farm payrolls.

Further, the number of underemployed, while steadily improving, remains frustratingly high, with 7 million people working part-time out of necessity, and the number of unemployed, marginally attached and part time workers at 11.8 percent.

The news is even more bleak for black and Hispanic workers, who are suffering unemployment rates of 11 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.

For workers on the margins, little wonder this recovery hasn’t felt much like a recovery.

Really, this isn’t funny. This week funnymen Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both lampooned the American media’s frenzied coverage of Ebola in the U.S., but in West Africa it is still a catastrophe in the making–with a very real chance that estimates of seven-figure death tolls will become reality.

The world community’s reaction to the outbreak has been late and lax—never underestimate a congressperson’s ability to play politics in an election year—but the urgency of the situation is finally dawning on world leaders who are now scrambling to bolster the effort.

As of yesterday, $740 million in assistance had been contributed—just under a quarter-billion dollars short of the $987.8 million goal outlined in the World Health Organizations’s Ebola response roadmap.

This Reuters graphic outlines the sources of aid, the responding agencies through which relief is flowing, and the end recipients of the donations.

At this point, the only question seems to be just how grim the outcome will be. Better late than never, I suppose.

What? Zuck worry?

Mark Zuckerberg, apparently channeling the Alfred E. Neuman school of business management, told reporters in New Delhi, India, on Thursday that Facebook does not plan to monetize mobile messaging service WhatsApp any time soon.

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp closed on Monday at a monstrous final price tag of $22 billion—up from $19 billion when the deal was struck—after EU regulators granted approval last Friday.

What gives the social networking giant the luxury of putting a $22 billion purchase on the back burner?

As this Reuters graphic shows, Facebook’s stock price has more than doubled since it’s tumultuous $38 IPO on May 18, 2012. Over the same period, the NASDAQ composite is up an impressive 60 percent, but the same surge in stock price that has pushed Zuckerberg’s net worth to over $34 billion also gives Facebook a valuation of almost $200 billion—plenty of financial cushion, and plenty of time to let its non-core properties grow.

Clearly, $200 billion can buy down a lot of anxiety.

Turmoil is rarely good for the bottom line. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are joining Washington’s anti-Islamic State air strikes within the borders of neighboring OPEC member Iraq. Fellow OPEC partner Nigeria just barely dodged an Ebola scare, while founding member Iran remains under sanctions aimed to curb its nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile, Russia, which last year produced an estimated 10.4 million barrels of crude oil a day, doesn’t look set to extricate itself from Ukraine any time soon.

Much of the oil-producing world is in turmoil, yet OPEC prices have fallen almost 20 percent since June. The reasons for this are complex, but include significant increases in the U.S. production of shale oil—also known as “tight oil”—over the past few years, which have eroded the American demand for imported oil.

As these Reuters graphics show, the price of Brent crude oil—the Middle East standard—just dipped beneath $100 per barrel for the first time in four years, and more than half of OPEC’s 12 member nations are in the red against their price per barrel breakeven point, with only Kuwait and Qatar healthily in the black.

This puts many of OPEC’s members in a tight spot. While some analysts view their next meeting, in November, as a chance to curb production with the goal of pushing prices higher, others see the cartel on shaky ground, with lead dog Saudi Arabia ready to wage a price war against its longtime partners.

We’ll see how things shake out. As author James Holland said, “The Middle East is a region where oil is thicker than blood.”

The U.S. Supreme Court did a whole lot by doing nothing yesterday. In declining to hear petitions challenging three federal appellate courts’ decisions regarding gay marriage, the Court granted tacit approval for gay couples to wed in five more states: Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin.

The reaction from same-sex marriage supporters was swift and jubilant, with many couples in those states exchanging vows immediately.

As this Reuters map shows, 24 states and the District of Columbia—better than 52 percent of the U.S. population—now freely allow marriage among same-sex couples.

And since the rulings of the 4th, 7th and 10th Circuit Courts stand, all of the states in those jurisdictions are bound by those decisions, which means that legal gay marriage is only a matter of time and procedure in Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.

For the time being, gay marriage bans in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky and Texas remain in effect pending appellate court decisions, but as many Court watchers have pointed out, the implications of yesterday’s inaction sent a pretty strong message to the lower courts.

If only Congress could accomplish so much by doing so little.

This morning in Stockholm, Anglo-American John O’Keefe and Norwegian couple May‐Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in discovering the cells that comprise the brain’s inner GPS, making it possible for us to orient ourselves in space.

In 1971 O’Keefe discovered “place cells” which became active whenever a rat was in the same place in a room. The Mosers’ 2005 discovery of “grid cells” that complimented O’Keefe’s work helped us understand how humans know where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

As this Reuters graphic shows, the Mosers become the 12th and 13th Norwegians to receive a Nobel, while the dual-citizen O’Keefe’s win marks the 100th time a Nobel has been awarded to a Briton, and the 255th time for an American—more than the next three countries combined.

The Nobel’s GPS, it seems, may be predisposed to find its way to the U.S.