Salient to Investors: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports the share of Americans 65 and older with mortgage debt rose to 30% in 2011 with a median debt adjusted for inflation of $79,000, from 22% in 2001 with a median debt of $43,400. The increase in mortgage debt makes these households more susceptible
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs said: There is little evidence of the “pent-up wage deflation” that Yellen cites as a possible reason behind the slow increase in earnings and says the opposite was true, with the areas having below-average wage growth during the recession now showing above-average
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mary Daly and Bart Hobijn at FRB San Francisco said during and after the 2007 recession employers left wages higher than they normally would be after a severe downturn so may not now have to offer increases to attract workers as the job market improves. They said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The majority of top-ranked women in S&P 500 companies are not in the operational jobs that lead to CEO – 55% are finance, legal or HR chiefs. 94% of S&P 500 CEOs held top operations positions immediately before appointment. Women lack role models and tend to start
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia said: Euro-area austerity policies have been a dismal failure as growth grinds to a halt. Monetary policy cannot substitute for fiscal union – construction of a European banking union is too slow. Mutualization of euro-area debt – rejected by Germany and others – would
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Living costs in China are deterring couples from having more than one child as less than 3 percent of the 11 million couples applied for permission by the end of May. The UN said China’s fertility rate of 1.66 versus the 2.1 needed to sustain population levels
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: There are 4.7 million job openings in the US, the most in more than a decade versus 9.7 million people looking for work. Annual wage increases, around 2%, would be rising much faster if there were a shortage of qualified workers. Peter Cappelli at Wharton School says: The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Philip Vermeulen at ECB and Gabriel Zucman at London School of Economics said the wealth of the super-affluent is undercounted because of tax shelters and non-responses to questionnaires. Zucman said the top 0.1% of Americans with at least $20 million in net wealth owned 23.5% of all US
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A two-decade surge in growth in Africa has raised the prospect of the “African lions” emulating the “Asian tiger” economies in the 21st century. Africa’s has vast untapped resources, a young population and an expanding middle-class. It also has rampant poverty and inequality, a rise in Islamist
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies said millennials – born from 1979 to 1996 – began saving for retirement at a median age of 22, versus 27 for Generation X and 35 for baby boomers. 71% of millennials offered 401(k) or similar plans contributed a median 8%
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