Curating the Internet: Business, economics, and leadership micro-summaries for August 10, 2019

Sears liquidating 26 Sears and Kmart stores; Infrastructure spending doesn't always pay off; Amazon opening a liquor store in San Francisco to act as a Prime Now delivery location; America's changing economics: numbers of low and middle income households are shrinking while upper-income households are increasing; A free online University blockchain course for Fall/2019

Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

pixabay license: source.

Sears to start liquidation sales at these 26 stores next week - Transform Holdco was formed in January to buy the remaining assets of bankrupt Sears Holdings Corp, and has now announced the sale of 5 Kmarts in 3 states + Peurto Rico, and Sears stores in 21 states. The company says this is being done in order to accelerate expansion of their "smaller store formats", Home & Life and Sears Hometown. The company says they will continue to evaluate options, and cannot rule out the liquidation of more Sears stores in the near future. Of note for my own community, I didn't see Pennsylvania or Delaware in the list.

Big Infrastructure May Not Always Produce Big Benefits - Governments and policy-makers often assume that, "If we build it, they will come." According to Harvard's William Kerr and Ramana Nanda, however, that's not always the case. In this interview, the two describe the findings of their recent paper, saying that infrastructure only advances the economy in areas where access to financing is already strong. They reached this conclusion by studying the development of India's Golden Quadrilateral highway network (GQ higway). If the article can be summarized in a single quote or two, it's this one, from Kerr, "if you were starting from no financial backing or no existing infrastructure, then upgrading or building the GQ highway did not encourage the development of new loans," with this follow-up, from Nanda, "You could think of two stories. One is about catching up. And the other is about divergence. Our results are more consistent with divergence than catching up."

Amazon is looking to open a brick-and-mortar liquor store in San Francisco - The company has applied for a liquor license for its 200 square foot store that would give it a place to legally ship alcohol purchases for Prime Now customers in San Francisco.

Watch America's Middle-Class Disappear Over Decades—as Americans Get Richer - Using inflation-adjusted dollars, and household income, the embedded video shows that over the course of time from 1970 through 2017, low income households in the US declined from 37% to 30%, middle income households declined from 54% to 41%, and high income households increased from 9% to 29%. According to these thresholds, the middle class is shrinking, but contrary to conventional wisdom, it's because they're become wealthier.

STEEM Join The University of Nicosia's FREE Blockchain MOOC - Enrolling Now for Fall 2019 - No idea where the University of Nicosia is, but according to @jeffjagoe, they are no enrolling for a free online blockchain class in Fall/2019. The course is titled, DFIN-511 - Introduction to Digital Currencies. If you're interested, you can enroll here. (A beneficiary setting of 10% has been applied to this post for @jeffjagoe.)

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