My afternoon train reads:

• Economics may be dismal, but it is not a science (John Kay)
• Gold-hunting in a frugal age (The Economist)
• The myth of shareholder value (Gordon Pearson) see also Down With Shareholder Value (NYT)
• Why these business owners are hiring (CNN Money)
• Apple, strategists and the proprietary software problem (FT Alphaville)
• How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters, part 1. (Technology Review)
• Can’t Think of a Good Holiday Gift? Give a Bad One (Psychology Today)
• Have Scientists Found Two Different Higgs Bosons? (Scientific American) see also Double trouble (Babbage)
• The First Time Tech Ruined the Music Business (Echoes)
• Louis C.K.: The Proust Questionnaire (Vanity Fair)

What are you reading?

 

How the ‘fiscal cliff’ will affect your taxes

Source: Washington Post

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.

14 Responses to “10 Monday PM Reads”

1. AHodge says:

   December 17, 2012 at 5:32 pm

   john kays article suggests the soros conferences have made progress
   the latest diagnosing most modern macro as worth less than zero
   dynamic stochastic video game equivalents where outcomes are assumed….
   last time they could not agree on anything
   also shows john kay personally has clarified his thoughts on macro

   slow but observable progress in dismantling this fraud
2. ConscienceofaConservative says:

   December 17, 2012 at 5:34 pm

   More on Gretchen Tai’s great returns

   http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2012/12/trade-total-return-swaps-like-gretchen.html
3. Bob is still unemployed   says:

   December 17, 2012 at 5:44 pm

   To big to fail has turned into too big to be punished.

   Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

   …This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the “legitimate” banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank’s teller windows. Tony Montana’s henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional “American City Bank” in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain’s most storied financial institutions.

   Though this was not stated explicitly, the government’s rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a “systemically important institution” in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. [emphasis mine] The New York Times put it this way:

   Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.

   It doesn’t take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC’s Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn’t protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite….

   …the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement?
4. Jack Damn says:

   December 17, 2012 at 5:52 pm

   Charts…reading lots of charts. Bank stocks are flying…one of the sectors that is still hated by the bears (along with housing). Banks are awesome:

   Citi http://i.imgur.com/4xkxt.png Up +48% this year.

   Bank Of America http://i.imgur.com/Osfq6.png Up 98% this year.

   Stellar. Great companies.
5. willid3 says:

   December 17, 2012 at 6:15 pm

   more charts

   http://qz.com/36149/our-favorite-charts-of-2012/

   world’s center of gravity? hottest year ever? economic impacts of disasters? what are the Chinese worried about? rise and fall of the PC? the EU? loosing Italy? US debt from 1790 to 2011? bailout of the US by the government?
6. willid3 says:

   December 17, 2012 at 6:26 pm

   just when you thought it was easy being a scientist
   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/superstring-theory_n_2296195.html
7. VennData says:

   December 17, 2012 at 6:52 pm

   Boehner agrees to raise rates and put a halt, if temporary on the debt limit? And now this:

   Iran’s supreme leader joins Great Satan’s No. 1 social network
   Last summer Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened an Instagram account. Now he’s on Facebook.

   http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57559632-93/irans-supreme-leader-joins-great-satans-no-1-social-network/

   You can email him at AyaAK47@gmail.com
8. willid3 says:

   December 17, 2012 at 7:46 pm

   Swiss not so sure they will avoid being a tax haven.
   http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/14/us-swiss-banks-idUSBRE8BD0WM20121214?feedType=RSS&feedName=PersonalFinance
9. M says:

   December 17, 2012 at 8:17 pm

   @Bob

   I thought the Greenwald editorial in the Guardian hit just the right tone. The HSBC settlement is symptomatic of the institutionalization of tiered justice. It is corrosive.

   BR: sorry to post the link twice but I wanted to add some commentary.

   HSBC settlement => some actors are simply too important and too powerful to punish criminally

   That’s not merely a dark day for the rule of law. It’s a wholesale repudiation of it. The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of – above – the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades. Aside from the grotesque injustice, the signal it sends is as clear as it is destructive: you are free to commit whatever crimes you want without fear of prosecution. And obviously, if the US government would not prosecute these banks on the ground that they’re too big and important, it would – yet again, or rather still – never let them fail.
10. RW says:

    December 17, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    Well, we want to reduce the deficit, right? Right!

    Time to Charge for the True Cost of Gun Ownership

    Every cost of gun violence should be shifted back to those who choose to participate in the gun economy. Gun owners have displaced the massive cost of their hobby …to everybody else. It is time for this subsidy to end.

    Gun owners should pay taxes when a gun is sold, no matter where it is sold, then another for ongoing registration fees, and yet another for ammunition. Failure to pay the tax – or to show tax stamps that a weapon is up-to-date on tax payments – would result in the tax plus steep penalties.

    I would add mandatory insurance and training just as we do with automobiles but one time at a thing, eh.
11. catclub says:

    December 17, 2012 at 10:54 pm

    Part of the taxes that will go up as part of the fiscal cliff are the (presently) reduced payroll taxes.
    But because those are not Federal Income taxes, they just do not seem to matter in the chart.
    Even though they will be a substantial increase that falls most heavily on the middle and bottom
    of the income distribution.

    Are there any plans to keep them until employment improves some more?
12. JimRino says:

    December 18, 2012 at 9:15 am

    “Republican” Economics is not a Science.
    Krugman, among others, on the other hand, has been dead on.

    Who would have thought that when Economics is funded and controlled by Corporate America, they cannot and do not get the policy right! Shocking.
13. RW says:

    December 18, 2012 at 10:06 am

    What JimRino Said.

    I absolutely bless the day somewhere in 1999/2000 when I picked up a copy of Krugman’s book, Depression Economics instead of a magazine during a long airport layover. No specific investment advice but it nailed the macroeconomic environment so well that I literally made hundreds of thousands of dollars I would not have made otherwise and, even more to the point, avoided losing any of it this past decade.
14. AtlasRocked says:

    December 18, 2012 at 2:12 pm

    Shouldn’t this graph say “assuming your behavior does not change”, which is always the case with tax rate changes?

    We all know that part of the liberal government philosophy is to use taxation to steer behavior. But every estimate on tax rate changes assumes “no behavior change”.

    If you study tax effects, raising rates does NOT always increase revenue per citizen. It can do the opposite as citizens hide their income and work off the books. All my Long Island relatives do work off the books and hide their income with cash and barter transactions, the higher the rate, the more the motivation.