Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Max Weber singled out China and Japan as cultures particularly prone to poverty and stagnation, but were the world’s fastest-growing two large economies over the past five decades. Another powerhouse, India, was once seen as having a culture totally incompatible with economic success. China was stagnant for centuries. What changed was their
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Outsourcing jobs to ensure a company’s survival is acceptable and is how you run a business. America needs and already has a tax and regulatory structure that creates strong incentives for private businesses to flourish. The great shift in the U.S. economy over the past
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kishore Mahbubani of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy said the era of the West changing governments is over, Western power has peaked and will decline. The more the West isolates Iran , the more Iran becomes a geopolitical gift to China, which will accept it. China can get
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said 49 percent of Americans polled said economic conditions were good or excellent in the city they lived in, 37 percent said the same about their state, 25 percent about the US, 18 percent about Europe, 13 percent about the world economy. Housing is finally is recovering and will have big ramifications for
READ MORE... →Predictions: Bill Gross said: It will take economies and financial markets decades to normalize after the debt crisis, keeping U.S. securities the safest bet for investors. This is an authentic debt crisis and can only be ultimately cured by default or printing more money to inflate it away. A debt crisis can’t be cured with more debt
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A record 7.3 million workers 65 or older are competing for jobs. Joblessness among 16 to 24-year-olds was 16.1 percent in May, versus 8.2 percent rate for the nation. Payrolls in May grew at the slowest pace in a year and joblessness has topped 8 percent for 40 consecutive
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Boston College Center for Retirement Research said pensions in Illinois, New Jersey, Indiana and Kentucky may have less than 30 percent of assets needed for promised benefits Pension fund shortfalls are estimated to be $900 billion to more than $4 trillion, depending on assumptions made. Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jim O’Neill at Goldman Sachs Asset Management said over the past decade or so, inflation targeting, has not been sufficient, as great as it’s been for the U.K. O’Neill would add monitoring aspects of credit behavior and bank lending, and install a financial-conditions indicator as a warning sign. Read the full article
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Henry Paulson at the University of Chicago said Europe will drag on but eventually stabilize and avoid catastrophe. Europeans are committed to monetary union, but isn’t sustainable without some political union. Paulson said government policies is more to blame than banks because it encourages people to save too little and borrow too much. The root causes
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Fed’s structure has its origins in efforts to find a balance of power between politicians in Washington, representing farmers and small businesses, and Wall Street financiers. Professor Allan Meltzer said the Fed’s image problem has been there for 100 years – Congress reduced the role bankers play on
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