Noted for your morning ruminations or procrastination – take your pick

1. Finding a Tax Cut at the Pump – I would call lower oil prices “good deflation”—they’ll help reduce the costs of things that consumers are somewhat locked into paying for, like the gas for their cars or the heat in their homes.  But technology, particularly the “sharing economy,” can also help drive more traditional deflation, as it causes significant changes in behavior for consumers and capital expenditures for businesses.
2. Thinking About the New Greek Crisis – We are not talking about whether Greece will pay its debt. As I tried to explain the other day, the headline Greek debt number is more or less meaningless. The question is how much Greece will transfer to its creditors by running primary surpluses — and yes, at this point that’s the question, there’s no possibility that the creditors will transfer more resources to Greece.
3. Greek games and scenarios – The fact is, everyone knows that the total burden of Greek debt is too big to be serviced by the Greek GDP, and that if it isn’t written down, then Greece will always be reliant on an increasing stream of official financing to meet its roll-overs. Everyone also knows, although some of them might not be ready to admit it to themselves, that an indefinite commitment to financing the roll-over of an ever increasing debt burden is a fiscal transfer in all but name.
4. The euro: love it or leave it? – arguing that adopting the euro is effectively irreversible. Leaving would require lengthy preparations, which, given the anticipated devaluation, would trigger the mother of all financial crises. National households and firms would shift deposits to other Eurozone banks producing a system-wide bank run. Investors, trying to escape, would create a bond-market crisis. Here is what the train wreck would look like.
5. The Trick Olympic Athletes Use To Achieve Their Goals – It turns out that the athletes who picture themselves crossing the finish line first are more likely to do it.
6. Marissa Mayer’s New Reality – If the market thinks Yahoo is worth $0, even though it generated nearly a billion dollars in profit last year on $4.4 billion in net revenues, that means the market has very, very low expectations for the future of Yahoo. All Mayer has to do to get the company’s valuation growing again is exceed these low expectations.
7. China’s ‘Long-Awaited Day Of Reckoning’ Is Almost Here – China’s credit growth has been outpacing its nominal economic growth for six years. The puzzle has been the lack of credit problems, but there is actually a simpler explanation — the pervasive implicit state guarantee.
8. Who Doubts Yellen’s Policies? Summers for One – The Fed chair says history and theory suggest wages will pick up as the job market tightens, and prices will rise in line with the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers argues policy makers can’t count on this, while Richard Clarida of Columbia University in New York says it hasn’t happened in the last few economic expansions.
9. Shell Cuts $15 Billion of Spending as Profit Misses Expectations – In addition to the $15 billion of cuts in planned spending over three years, Shell warned there could be more to come should crude prices remain relatively low
10. Europe Stocks Drop as Oil Hurts Profit; U.S. Futures Gain – U.S. equity-index futures rose, signaling stocks will rebound from a two-day slide, and European shares pared losses. Greek bonds fell for a fourth day and currencies from Australia and South Korea weakened on speculation of more monetary easing.
11. We Just Got Three Reasons To Be Bullish About Europe – Probably most importantly, private lending is back! After two and a half years of contraction, loans to the private sector grew by 0.1% in December. The end of the European Central Bank’s stress test and the start of a quantitative easing programme should help to keep that figure in positive territory.
12. EU Official To Greece: ‘Respect The Rest Of Europe’ – Germany, seen in Greece as taking the hardest line over its massive debts, said European solidarity worked both ways and reminded Athens that other EU nations had helped bail out the crisis-hit country.
13. Hasenstab Sees $3 Billion Vanish in Ukraine as One Big Bet Sours – And the economy is in tatters. Government officials are predicting a 4.3 percent contraction this year following a 7.5 percent drop last year. The military conflict with separatists, which has claimed more than 5,000 lives since it began in April, has snarled business in much of the east of the country.