Canadian taxes, S&P’s warning that it might downgrade U.S. debt and Zillow’s proposed public offering were the my principal topics on Weekday on KUOW today. Earlier in the hour, Weekday host Steve Scher and Vancouver Sun political correspondent Vaughn Palmer had discussed why Canadians pay much higher prices for everday [continue reading . . . ]
Anyone who thinks health-care costs can be brought under control ought to be required to read British physician Theodore Dalrymple’s* piece in the Wall Street Journal issue dated April 16. Here’s an excerpt: The British system is now capable of absorbing infinite amounts of money with minimal benefit to the [continue reading . . . ]
Richard W. Stevenson writes in Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review section that the debate in Washington over spending, debt, deficits and entitlements amounts to the most fundamental reassessment of the size and role of government since Ronald Reagan and perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt. The battle ahead “is the [continue reading . . . ]
An old joke about banking: Borrow $1,000, the bank owns you; borrow $1 million, you own the bank. There’s more than a grain of truth to that joke. People worry that China owns the U.S. because it holds trillions of our government debt. Not so much. China has accumulated roughly [continue reading . . . ]
I wish I had a Ford dealership in the Palouse area of Eastern Washington and Idaho the next few months. Wheat prices have roughly doubled the past few months. Land prices are going up. Growers inevitably feel flush. Note these graphs from the Financial Times, April 13, 2011, Page 22 [continue reading . . . ]
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times introduced me years ago to the idea that the white-shoes banks (think Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Swiss) play by different rules than you and me. They privatize gain (taking enormous bonuses when times are good) and socialize loss ( by [continue reading . . . ]
Don’t miss Mohamed El-Erian’s latest column in the Financial Times. I’ve posted a brief excerpt in the Food for Thought section.
I’m nuts about newspapers. Always have been. I still crave the real thing, newsprint. Of the four newspapers that I read every day, I find the Financial Times by far the most interesting. It is full of commentary — on markets, especially on politics and economics. I never fail to [continue reading . . . ]
Health care in general and Medicare and the Rx drug benefit in particular constitute the asteroid that threatens our financial extinction. Social Security was technically in surplus — taking in more in taxes than its outgo in benefits — until the recent economic unpleasantness. Social Security might attain surpluses again if [continue reading . . . ]
from Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff in the Financial Times, April 5, p. 13 Even if today’s government bonds seem pristine by the standards of pre-revolutionary France, future scholars will see our tax systems as Byzantine labyrinths funnelling money to powerful interests, creating staggering inefficiencies. They will surely be incredulous to [continue reading . . . ]
China’s one-child policy portends a shrinking work force, yet China will grow old before it grows rich. Here’s the relevant material from today’s New York Times: China’s rise has depended partly on a huge spurt in the number of workers as a percentage of the population. This surge has created a cheap, [continue reading . . . ]