by Linda Beale Duffie on speculative trading (Part one of a series) In today’s Wall St. Journal, Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford’s business school, argues “In Defense of Financial Speculation” (Wall St. J., Feb. 24, 2010, at A15). (Rdan here…AB posting is Feb. 26) According to Duffie, speculators are beneficial. Here’s his argument. […]
by Rebecca Wilder Today, North America saw the Q4 2009 GDP figures for Malaysia and Germany. In my view, the two releases accurately depict the developed vs. developing picture of economic recoveries: one is causing the other. Malaysia’s real GDP, population 29,992,577 in 2008 according to the World Bank, grew 4.5% compared to the same […]
by Linda Beale Swiss banking secrecy in the news again as Germany seeks data The Swiss are fighting hard to maintain their edge in providing tax evasion services for the euro zone and the US. In spite of the modest changes to the US-Swiss tax convention, we can expect difficulty in acquiring information from Swiss […]
by Rebecca Wilder Beginning of the year economic blues in the US? I think so. Just looking over Spencer’s CPI post; here is an excerpt (the first paragraph): The CPI report was encouraging. The total CPI rose 0.2% and the year over year increase is only 2.6%. Although real average hourly earnings fell, real weekly […]
by Linda Beale How much do the wealthiest Americans make, and how much do they pay in taxes? Bloomberg.com’s Ryan Donmoyer has a brief story out on recent IRS statistics of income. See Top Earners Averaged $345 million in 2007, IRS says (Feb. 17, 2010). Here are the figures cited in Donmoyer’s report (based on […]
by Brenda Rossercross posted from Econospeak with permission of author. Global Trade Imbalances as a Statistical Artifact: Today, the latest spin that purports to describe the still unfolding global economic crisis is that of ‘global trade imbalance’, with particular attention being focused on the US and China. The US, we are told, has a huge […]
by cactus A Graphical Look at the National Debt in the Bail-out Era Apologies for the lighter than normal posting, but things have been very hectic around here. Aside from some health issues facing my wife and work being particularly interesting right now, I’m reviewing a lot of stuff that is coming back fast and […]
by run75441 Breaking The Healthcare Cost Curve Quite a bit of the commentary has been written on the question of how-to-rein-in rising healthcare costs and to slow costs to less than the rate of inflation. Massachusetts has been able to provide healthcare to its citizens but still struggles with keeping healthcare insurance costs low and […]