Transparency International maintains a league table of corruption. It’s the the sort of league table one doesn’t want one’s home country to be at the top of. To be fair, there are many countries which are less transparent than the …
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This article runs through a number of explanations of how 30MM US American men can live without being in the formal workforce. There is nothing very extraordinary about the ways: basically, the black economy is probably bigger than you think, and quite a few people …
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Various reflation skeptics, such as Lacy Hunt, Harley Bassman, Jeff Snider have been saying that inflation is going to crater. As I blogged a while ago, the increasing inequality in the US and elsewhere has caused the propensity to spend to plummet. In my …
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When I was a kid, Dominick Harrod would have a slot on the six o’clock BBC news explaining the latest twists of the economy. He dutifully reported the latest trade figures, always pointing out how important “invisibles” were to offsetting some of …
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Harvey Bassman has written a nice short tutorial on how mortgage REITs work. You can read it here (pdf). He focusses on the non-linear response of the value of the security to interest rates. These things are pretty high risk, but if you think that short …
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This argues that all the woes of the world come from our failure to sort out housing policy. It fits neatly in with this article in last week’s Spectator magazine which argues that doing anything which might unsettle asset prices, particularly house prices, is politically …
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This is a pretty amazing chart, which I’ve stolen from This week’s Callum Thomas’ Chartstorm
Basically, earnings per share have kept going up by around 6% annually, relentlessly, since 1935.
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