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A roundup of what The Globe and Mail's market strategist Scott Barlow is reading this morning on the World Wide Web.

A Bloomberg report comparing the uber-wealthy of China and the United States also contains an undeniable warning about the importance of China's property markets. Christina Lawson writes: "Real estate accounted for 70 percent of all household wealth in China. (The bottom quarter of households, tellingly, control just 1 percent of China's wealth.) The outsize reliance on real estate as an investment vehicle for both individuals and enterprises is troubling, given widespread concerns about a property bubble."

"China's 1 per cent vs. America's 1 per cent" – Bloomberg

No one, no matter how wealthy or connected, is safe from Chinese President Xi Jinping's corruption crackdown. The Wall Street Journal detailed the arrest of former national security chief Zhou Yongkang, an event that would not surprise University of Peking finance professor Michael Pettis.

In a recent paper, Mr. Pettis predicted a corruption crackdown as an important policy designed to remove political opposition to economic restructuring. He writes,

"In nearly every case — land reform, hukou reform, environmental repair, interest rate liberalization, governance reform in the process of allocating capital, market pricing and elimination of subsidies, privatization, etc — these reforms effectively transfer wealth from the state and the elites to the household sector and to small and medium enterprises. By doing so, they eliminate frictions that constrain productive behavior, but of course this comes at the cost of elite rent-seeking behavior."

"Fall of Zhou Yongkang lights up China's internet" – WSJ, China Realtime blog

"The four stages of Chinese growth" – Financial Sense

It seems straightforward at first – a rise in minimum wage will help young workers. But Stephen Gordon, an economics professor at Laval University argues that the reverse is true. Mr. Gordon says that rising minimum wages reduce the number of available jobs and in aggregate, make things worse for 15 to 24 year olds looking for employment.

Mr. Gordon writes, "the 15-24 employment rate in 2013 was 4.6 percentage points below what it was in 2008, and between one-third and four-fifths of this gap – equivalent to between 70,000 and 164,000 jobs – would have been closed if the rate of growth in the minimum wages had been limited to the rate of growth in the Consumer Price Index."

"How big has the effect of increases in the minimum wage been on youth employment?" – Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

For most economists, the decline in North American bond yields is the biggest market surprise of 2014. In Canada, lower yields have helped sustain a red hot housing market through falling mortgage rates, making the domestic housing market more or less the Platonic form of a "pain trade."

As the Globe's Tara Perkins writes, economists expect mortgage rates to creep higher for the remainder of the year, potentially blunting the real estate market. This thesis, however, is very much dependent on an accelerating U.S. economy which has so far, like every year since 2010, failed to materialize.

"Five-year mortgages holding firm, but just wait" – ROB Housing blog

Self-driving cars is a concept that many, including myself, find so fantastical that it's hard to envision them actually on the road. The BBC, however, reports that driverless cars will be tested on U.K. public roads next year.

Previously, my assumption was that trucking companies would be at the forefront of driverless vehicles. The cost savings of not having to pay drivers makes them more motivated to adopt the technology (after some really vehement labour action, no doubt).

"U.K. to allow driverless cars on roads in January" – BBC

Tweet of the Day is from Washington Post books editor @RonCharles: "getting harder and harder to ignore suspicion that there are more people writing books than reading them"

Diversion: L.A. Dodgers play by play legend Vin Scully is a force of nature, announcing yesterday that he would return next year for his 66th season behind the microphone. When his career began, the Dodgers played in Brooklyn, postage stamps cost three cents and Harry Truman was president. – ABC News

Follow Scott Barlow on Twitter @SBarlow_ROB

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