A beautiful Sunday is teed up here on the East Coast: Here are what I am reading before heading to the beach:
• The Top 1%: Executives, Doctors and Bankers (Economix)
• ‘Blind Faith’ In Bernanke Is Big Mistake, Kass Says (Marketbeat)
• WSJ asks: Are Entitlements Corrupting Us?
…..-Yes, American Character Is at Stake
…..-No, They’re Part of the Civic Compact
• The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Harvard Business Review)
• Grand Old Marxists (NY Books) see also Why Aren’t Conservatives Funny? (Washington Monthly)
• Who Inherits Your iTunes Library? (Smart Money)
• The Ten Most Dangerous Things Business Schools Teach MBAs (Forbes) see also A New Kind Of Social Science For The 21st Century (Edge)
• The Romney campaign says stimulus doesn’t work. Here are the studies they left out. (Washington Post)
• Playboy Interview: Richard Dawkins (Playboy)
• 12 GIFs That Prove Kobe Bryant Has Stolen Everything From Michael Jordan (BuzzFeed)
What are you reading?
No letup in global housing market downturn
click for ginormous global property chart
Source: Global Property Guide
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
I think everyone knows the answer to these:
“• WSJ asks: Are Entitlements Corrupting Us?
…..-Yes, American Character Is at Stake
…..-No, They’re Part of the Civic Compact”
When the board of directors gives the equivalent of entitlements to their CEO, is he now corrupt?
Methods of Policy Accommodation at the Interest-Rate Lower Bound by Michael Woodford
The paper everyone is talking about at Jackson Hole. A dense read but the shorter Woodford is that evidence shows the Fed can lift growth now by announcing it will tolerate higher inflation later. (ht Mark Thoma)
On the flip side of the coin, the Romney campaign may claim “stimulus doesn’t work” but Romney himself strongly disagrees.
Shorter Romney: Cutting spending on the military or on the medical-industrial complex destroys jobs.
Glad to see we’re all in agreement here [lol]
That’s a bit of a cheap shot at Kobe Bryant. There’s only so many moves one can make… and it comes down to using superior quickness, first step, athletic ability, etc., to keep the defender guessing, create space to get a shot off, etc. Further, it’s naive to think Michael Jordan wasn’t coached to maximize his talents, watched tape of other great shooting guards, etc.
Here is a link to Joe Weisenthal’s analysis and condensed version of the Woodford Paper, delivered at Jackson Hole, in the context of Bernanke’s QE:
http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-woodford-endorses-ngdp-targeting-2012-9
“…Following Bernanke’s speech at Jackson Hole, a paper was delivered at the conference by Michael Woodford, a Columbia economist who is considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on monetary policy and interest rates. The title of the paper was Accommodation at the Zero Lower Bound and clocking in at 97 pages, it provides an exhaustive overview of which monetary stimulus techniques really work when the Fed’s official interest rates have hit ~0%.
“…So this is the idea Woodford’s getting behind. Making a credible promise not to raise rates until a clear moment that will occur well after the recovery has really gathered steam.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-woodford-endorses-ngdp-targeting-2012-9#ixzz25K2fjBzE
Joe Weisenthal Article about the Woodford Paper:
Following Bernanke’s speech at Jackson Hole, a paper was delivered at the conference by Michael Woodford, a Columbia economist who is considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on monetary policy and interest rates.
The title of the paper was Accommodation at the Zero Lower Bound and clocking in at 97 pages, it provides an exhaustive overview of which monetary stimulus techniques really work when the Fed’s official interest rates have hit ~0%.
http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-woodford-endorses-ngdp-targeting-2012-9
Where’d the Billy Joel interview go? That was brilliant!!!
Wall Street’s war on the Cities…
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/31/wall-streets-war-on-the-cities/
Ode to fact checking
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/aug/27/new-south-journalism-fact-checking-feature/
New Republican plan? Same old same old..
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/romney-will-solve-crisis-exact-same-gop-plan-2008-2006-2004
Central banks, bringing a knife to a gunfight.. [PDF]
http://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2012/ah.pdf
Businessweek
In Japan, Retirees Go On Working
By Kanoko Matsuyama on August 30, 2012
When he retired three years ago, Hirofumi Mishima got right back to work. After aging out of a $77,000-a-year job as an industrial gas analyst, he spent six months trawling the vacancy boards at a Tokyo employment center. Fifteen days each month, Mishima, 69, rises at 4 a.m. for an eight-and-a-half-hour shift overseeing the supply of hydrogen gas to buses. His daily commute has risen from three hours to four even as his earnings have dropped by more than a third. “Keeping a regular job is the most stimulating thing for me,” he says. “Now, I work for my health. I’m very happy my job gives me mobility and helps me stay active.”
Though Japan’s retirement age stands at 60, more than 5.7 million Japanese have continued to work past 65, either because they can’t afford to stop working or they’re looking to get out of the house. The nation’s private companies can force employees to retire at 60 if they wish, so workers often accept slashed wages to stay on, sometimes in a reduced capacity as they start collecting public pension benefits. According to the Statistics Bureau of Japan, 1 in 5 seniors is employed, the highest proportion in the developed world. Facing heavy public debt, however, the world’s third-largest economy is looking to hike the retirement age and ease its pension load.
The population is graying worldwide, but Japan leads the trend with the world’s longest life expectancy, 83, and one of the lowest birthrates, 1.4 babies per woman–well below the replacement rate and too low to quickly reverse a 15-year slide in the size of the working population.
…
The bottom line: With the world’s longest life expectancy but one of its lowest birthrates, Japan is struggling to maintain its safety net.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/69168-in-japan-retirees-go-on-working
August 30, 2012
Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.
The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.
“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.
The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.
…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/business/majority-of-new-jobs-pay-low-wages-study-finds.html
Woodford basically just more trickle down blarney.
“Are Entitlements Corrupting Us?”
Wall Street does a much more thorough job of corrupting the whole Republic. So be gone WSJ!!
The Washington Post article (about the Romney campaign ignoring seven studies that showed the stimulus worked) overlooks one important fact: The GOP doesn’t care if 700 studies showed the stimulus worked– it was always going to claim it failed no matter what the evidence to the contrary.
The stock market is over valued by 12.5% if you believe this chart…
http://www.readtheticker.com/Pages/Blog1.aspx?65tf=694_there-is-something-wrong-with-this-picture-2012-09
We will know when we are moving out of our current morass when the categegory of math, sicentists, engineering have pulled even with medical and finance in the top 1%.