Happy Boxing Day! These are the links from the past few days. I will have more to say about individual stories sometime later today. I hope you are enjoying the holiday season.
Edward
P.S. – I don’t agree with the thrust of all of these articles, but they are all noteworthy.
Tea Party, Its Clout Diminished, Turns to Narrower Issues – NYTimes.com
“surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, federal spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House.”
Bruce Bartlett: A Conservative Case for the Welfare State – NYTimes.com
“American conservatives, being far more libertarian than their continental counterparts, reject the welfare state for both moral and efficiency reasons. It creates unhappiness, they believe, and inevitably becomes bloated, undermining incentives and economic growth.
One problem with this conservative view is its lack of an empirical foundation.”
Push for Cheaper Credit Hits Wall – WSJ.com
“Lenders profit on the gap, or spread, between their cost of obtaining money and the rate they charge when lending it out. Before the financial crisis, this spread averaged around 0.5 percentage point and widened to about 1 percentage point in the years after 2008. In October, after the Fed embarked on a new round of mortgage bond purchases, the spread leapt to 1.6 points and currently is hovering around 1.3 points.”
More U.S. Consumers Climb Out of Debt – WSJ.com
“U.S. households spent 10.6% of their after-tax income on debt payments in the third quarter of the year, the lowest level since 1983, according to recently released Federal Reserve data. Add in other required payments that aren’t classified as debt—such as rent and auto leases—and the figure rises to 15.7%, also near a 30-year low.”
Japan’s incoming PM keeps up pressure on BOJ to attack deflation | Reuters
“Incoming Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe kept up his calls on Tuesday for the Bank of Japan to drastically ease monetary policy by setting an inflation target of 2 percent, and repeated that he wants to tame the strong yen to help revive the economy.”
PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM – Bond “Vigilantes”? More Like Bond Scavengers….
“Bond traders don’t extract their pound of flesh from the US economy when the US government is a bad boy. Bond traders try to front-run Fed policy and economic expectations in an attempt to generate a profit. “
New Delhi Locked Down to Douse Rape Protests – WSJ.com
“The rape on Dec. 16 of the 23-year-old physiotherapy student, who has not been named, has sparked calls for stricter sentencing of rapists and better policing of Delhi’s streets. The rape occurred on a moving chartered bus that was illegally picking up public passengers. Six men, including the bus driver, have been charged for rape and kidnapping but their trial is yet to begin.
The six men are accused of gang-raping the woman for nearly an hour, police said. They also allegedly beat her and a male companion with metal rods as the bus continued to circle the city’s roads for hours, even crossing police checkpoints. The couple was later stripped of their clothing and thrown out of the bus near a highway on the periphery of Delhi, police said.”
Trump Tower Woes Signal Top of Toronto Condo Market – Bloomberg
“the real estate boom in a city with more skyscrapers under construction than any other in the world may be cooling as sales drop and prices climb. Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tightened mortgage lending rules in June and criticized “continuous building, without restriction” of condos. The central bank said last month that record consumer debt and the chance of a sudden housing correction are major risks to the economy.”
Abe puts heat on BOJ ahead of key meeting | The Japan Times Online
“If the policymakers don’t give in, “we will revise the Bank of Japan law and set (the inflation target) by signing an accord with the BOJ,” Abe said, using veiled language to disguise his threat to strip the central bank of its independence.”
Guess Who Still Believes in Invisible Vigilantes – NYTimes.com
“How many times do we have to show that this notion is wrong both in theory and empirically? America can’t run out of cash (except politically, if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling); it basically can’t experience an interest rate spike unless people see an increased chance of economic recovery and hence a rise in short-term rates. And the people who have been predicting an interest rate spike any day now for four years shouldn’t have any credibility at this point.”
BBC News – West Antarctic Ice Sheet warming twice earlier estimate
“A new analysis of temperature records indicates that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming nearly twice as fast as previously thought.”
Iowa Court: Bosses Can Fire ‘Irresistible’ Workers – ABC News
“A dentist acted legally when he fired an assistant that he found attractive simply because he and his wife viewed the woman as a threat to their marriage, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The court ruled 7-0 that bosses can fire employees they see as an “irresistible attraction,” even if the employees have not engaged in flirtatious behavior or otherwise done anything wrong. Such firings may be unfair, but they are not unlawful discrimination under the Iowa Civil Rights Act because they are motivated by feelings and emotions, not gender, Justice Edward Mansfield wrote.”
Google Designing ‘X Phone’ to Rival Apple, Samsung – WSJ.com
“Engineers at Motorola are hard at work on a sophisticated handset—known internally as the “X phone”—but the Google Inc. unit is running into some obstacles in its effort to provide more potent competition for Apple Inc., said people familiar with the matter.
Seven months after being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion, Motorola is designing its marquee handset with cutting-edge features to stand apart from existing phones when it is released next year, these people said.”
Lou Leonard: Losing the Top of the World: Breaking the Arctic Sea Ice One Record at a Time
“The disappearing sea ice not only has major implications for the Arctic ecosystem itself, but scientists now believe that these changes influence weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The strength and trajectory of the jet stream is affected by the temperature difference between the Arctic, north of the jet stream, and the areas south of it. The greater the temperature difference, the stronger the jet stream. As that difference decreases, thanks to a warming Arctic, the jet stream tends to weaken and to wobble, introducing more north-south waves into the usual east-west trajectory of the stream. A weaker and wobblier jet stream means that weather systems tend to linger, producing more extreme events like droughts, heat waves and floods. And a winter wobble can also produce unusually heavy snow storms in unusual places, such as Washington DC’s so-called “snowmageddon” in 2010.”
Michael E. Mann: FiveThirtyEight: The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change
“It’s not that Nate revealed himself to be a climate change denier; He accepts that human-caused climate change is real, and that it represents a challenge and potential threat. But he falls victim to a fallacy that has become all too common among those who view the issue through the prism of economics rather than science. Nate conflates problems of prediction in the realm of human behavior — where there are no fundamental governing ‘laws’ and any “predictions” are potentially laden with subjective and untestable assumptions — with problems such as climate change, which are governed by laws of physics, like the greenhouse effect, that are true whether or not you choose to believe them.”
Mexico: the ‘unwinnable’ war | beyondbrics
“Powell enumerated four conditions that must be satisfied in order to succeed in a military operation. One was deployment of overwhelming force, which the Mexican military lacks. Another was definable victory, which one never has in a war on drugs (a term first used by Richard Nixon in the late 1960’s). The third condition was an exit strategy at the outset, which Calderón lacks, because he can neither withdraw in defeat in his own country, nor withdraw and declare victory. Calderón still does enjoy the support of the public – Powell’s fourth condition – but he is beginning to lose it.”
Obama: I Would Be Considered Moderate Republican In 1980s – ABC News
” “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.””
How Democrats Became Liberal Republicans
“The dirty secret is that Obama simply isn’t very liberal, nor is the Democratic Party any more. Certainly, the center of the party today is far to the right of where it was before 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected with a mission to move the party toward the right. It was widely believed by Democratic insiders that the nation had moved to the right during the Reagan era and that the Democratic Party had to do so as well or risk permanent loss of the White House.”
“The Murdoch story – his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic – is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years, an ongoing tale without equal. Like Richard Nixon and his tapes, much attention has been focused on the necessity of finding the smoking gun to confirm what other evidence had already established beyond a doubt: that the elemental instruments of democracy, ie the presidency in Nixon’s case, and the privileges of free press in Murdoch’s, were grievously misused and abused for their own ends by those entrusted to use great power for the common good.”
Obama Approval at 56%, Highest Since October 2009
“President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has risen to 56%, by two percentage points his highest three-day reading since October 2009. Although the president’s job approval rating has been in the 50% range for much of the time since his re-election, the new high point this week coincides with the aftermath of the Dec. 14 mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn.”
Facebook Announces Another Change To Dislike: Letting Strangers Pay To Message You – The Consumerist
“Facebook is testing a service that lets marketers pay to have you receive their messages.”
U.S. Economy Grew 3.1% Last Quarter, More Than Forecast – Bloomberg
“The U.S. economy grew at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the third quarter, more than previously reported, reflecting the first gain in state and local government spending in three years, more consumer purchases and a smaller trade gap.
The revised gross domestic product reading exceeded the highest projection in a Bloomberg survey and compared with a previously estimated 2.7 percent gain, according to Commerce Department figures released today in Washington. The median estimate of economists called for a 2.8 percent advance.”
Manufacturing in Philadelphia Area Unexpectedly Expands – Bloomberg
“Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region unexpectedly expanded in December to an eight-month high, reflecting pickups in sales and orders that signal the industry is starting to stabilize.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s general economic index rose to 8.1, from minus 10.7 in November. Readings greater than zero signal expansion in the area covering eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. “