Weekend Reading

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Good Sunday, and welcome to Weekend Reading. As always, here are some articles and papers worth reading. First, however, a look back at the week that just finished, and a look forward to the week ahead.

The major U.S. indices lost ground last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 1.8%, the S&P 500 lost 1.9% and the Nasdaq ended the week off 1.5%. The chief culprit? Increased inflation worries, as well as the yield on U.S. Treasuries hitting an increasingly attractive 5%. While things turned around somewhat on Friday as investors realized that they had overdone things more than a little, by then the damage had been done.

Looking forward to next week, it's hard not to image things climbing higher. Such a move would be partly a response to last week's selloff, but also as a result of increasing market sentiment that while consumers are mostly tapped out, businesses are more than picking up the slack with exports booming, the trade deficit shrinking, and things generally looked positive for export-facing companies. ...