Tuesday Links

• Small Bank Stocks Shine: Shares of community-centered banks have produced large gains for investors
• Free speech on campus: Is the argument really about the purpose of college? Let’s focus on the unsupported proposition that “none is more central than the value of free expression of ideas.” What if the young people who are protesting don’t agree? Perhaps to them Yale is a high-priced vocational program. What they want is to get a degree and then a high-paying job. Why should they be subjected to upsetting points of view during this process of vocational training, any more than they would if they went to tractor-trailer driving school? And if the students are going to prepare for work, where exercising freedom of speech will typically cost them their jobs, doesn’t it make sense to set up an environment where ThoughtCrime is punished?
• Lending Startups Look at Borrowers’ Phone Usage to Assess Creditworthiness Smartphones can dramatically reduce the cost of lending, experts say, because the apps they run generate huge amounts of data—texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social-media posts, retail receipts, and so on—indicating thousands of subtle patterns of behavior that correlate with repayment or default.
• THE BRETHREN. A documentary about the world's northernmost monastery.
• Trump vs Giuliani The irony here is that they changed the primary rules so that more states would be winner-take-all and that someone who gets an early lead will be impossible to defeat. They assumed this would benefit their establishment candidate, but it’s going to backfire on them.
• Japan’s Return-on-Equity Revolution. In 2014 the Japanese government has introduced return on equity targets for companies. Also, proxy advisor Institutional Shareholder Services now recommends voting against corporate managements that have not achieved a 5% average ROE over the last five years.
• Tech Crunch Bubble Index. There's a seasonal component to this, but it's nice to see it's down year over year.