Salient to Investors: Pope Francis said: Free market economics had created a tyranny – a cult of money – in which people were valued only by their ability to consume. Life had become worse for people in both rich and poor countries. Poverty was becoming more and more evident. Read
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Employee Benefit Research Institute said: 48 percent of people who were aged 61 to 70 and in the bottom half of the income distribution withdrew substantially from their IRAs annually during 2002-10, along with 29 percent of people in the top quarter of incomes who were
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Institute of Economic Affairs found that retirement for both men and women results in a small boost to health immediately, followed by a drastic decline in health in the medium and long-term, so people should work for longer for health as well as economic reasons. Edward
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Iceland is 15th in the world in legal gun ownership – 90,000 in a country with just over 300,000 people – yet violent crime is virtually non-existent, with a homicide rate between 1999-2009 never above 1.8 per 100,000 in any year versus between 5.0 and 5.8 in the US,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The OECD said: The gap between rich and poor widened more in the 3 years to 2010 than in the previous 12 years. The richest 10% of society in the 33 OECD countries received 9.5 times that of the poorest in terms of income, versus 9 times in 2007.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Colin Mayer at Harvard writes: British capitalism is the textbook description of how to organize capital markets and corporate sectors. Yet the performance of the British economy has been mediocre, with much of the population dissatisfied with economic and social conditions, large-scale manufacturing that has been decimated, decades of underinvestment
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives writes: The two 20th century recessions and major market sell-offs devastated the retirement readiness of a many people nearing retirement age. The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) for age 25-64 cohorts peaked for men in May 1954 at 95.9%, for women in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: 5 of the 10 best-paid CFOs in 2012 worked in tech. The average effective tax rate for S&P 500 companies in 2012 was 41 percent versus less than 30 percent for the 9 tech companies with CFOs who ranked among the 25 highest-paid last year. The US
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The wealth effect from rising house prices may no longer be as effective in spurring the US economy as homeowners increasingly pay down mortgage principal and shorten maturities. Freddie Mac said cash-in refinancings outnumbered cash-outs by more than 2-to-1 in Q4 2012. Amir Sufi at the University of Chicago said the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: A recent Pew survey found that only 51 percent of Americans think it’s essential to act on immigration reform this year, versus 70 percent who demand a deficit reduction deal this year, despite the wealth of data that shows that immigration reform will lead
READ MORE... →