Salient to Investors: Robert Frank at Cornell University writes: For his cameo appearance in the movie “Analyze This”, Warner Brothers ended up paying Tony Bennett $200,000 instead of the $15,000 they first offered because they did not make their offer at the outset when they would have had much more leverage. computer with bad credit Republicans
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Austerity policies are self-defeating because they cripple growth and reduce tax revenues. Cutting government spending causes output to fall, tax revenues to fall, and benefit spending to rise, ending almost invariably in slower growth or recession, and high budget deficits. The proper reaction to a negative external shock is to loosen fiscal policy,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Peter Bofinger at University of Wuerzburg said: Germany would be the biggest loser in a euro breakup. Germany’s national obsession with austerity stems from a misreading of Germany’s recent history. Germans rarely acknowledge how they have benefited from the euro with lower exchange rates and record-low interest rates – the benefit of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Bradley Belt and Jared Bernstein at Milken Institute, William Gale at Brookings, Phillip Swagel at Milken Institute and University of Maryland say: Avoiding the fiscal cliff may be beyond the strained US political system – even kicking the can down the road requires one side to give ground on a core belief. Let all tax cuts
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mary Brinton at Harvard said Japan suffers from a play-it-safe mentality which focuses more on potential downsides rather than on opportunities. Brinton and Toshio Yamagishi at Tamagawa University say the breakdown of the lifetime employment system may be the main anxiety that leads people to play it safe – there’s still a prejudice against hiring
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum says: the effect of raising tax rates on labor supply is small since most don’t have the option to work less. the cut in marginal rates is minimal compared with earlier cuts from 70 percent to 50 percent to 28 percent in 2001 and 2003, which were followed by a decade of mediocre
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joshua Shapiro at Maria Fiorini Ramirez the US economy will grow 1.5 percent in 2013. monetary policy is having a limited near-term impact on growth the $1 trillion U.S. fiscal deficit is an important drag on future expansion. adjustments that affect the economy are all very long-term and are
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jan Hatzius at Goldman Sachs said the private sector surpluses is the mirror image of public sector deficits. Hatzius says the economic crisis will end in 2013, followed by US growth over 3%. After 2013, the US economy will benefit significantly from a relevering private sector (lower savings) with the worst of the fiscal drag coming to
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nassim Taleb writes: (Excerpted from “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”) Imagining future technologies is unpredictable and won’t be the ones that make it. The futuristic projections made throughout the past 150 years by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, George Orwell and other scientists and futurists are not tools
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Housing doesn’t change the trajectory of the economy because it has contributed only 2.5% of US GDP after before the recession. Before the recession housing peaked around 6% and the average is in between. Watch the video at http://www.bloomberg.com/video/does-the-housing-sector-really-help-grow-gdp-NnDP7KDpRC60tTIrJlj7_w.html
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