03/15/2021
Today Jason Barr, City Journal It always comes back. |
Neil Irwin, New York Times A reporter who has tracked decades of gloomy trends sees things lining up for roaring growth. |
Andrew Wilford, RealClearMarkets In a relief bill (conservatively) estimated to cost taxpayers $1.9 trillion, what's a hundred billion or so between friends? That's presumably the reasoning behind the decision to tuck a massive, no-strings-attached bailout for mismanaged pension funds into a bill ostensibly about coronavirus relief. Included in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is $86 billion for federal grants to cover the costs of insolvent multiemployer pension plans. In total, these funds are intended to bail out the roughly 130 multiemployer pension plans, covering 1.3 million American workers, that are in critical... |
Charles Gasparino, New York Post "Everyone is now excited about infrastructure," a Democratic Party operative with ties to Wall Street declared late last week following passage of President Biden's vacuous, $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. |
Reuven Brenner, RCM Massive analyses over millennia about "money" have created such noise that most societies fail to separate the compounding noises from what this human invention is about. A simple example illustrates money's crucial role. Say there are 1,000 rights to goods and services to be transferred now and in the future, be it domestically or across borders. In the absence of an agreed upon monetary yardstick there would be 499,500 possible relative prices to be haggled about, as each commodity and service would be priced in relation to every other when entering into a contractual agreement. With one... |
Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times The pandemic told us a lot about American society but left many questions unanswered |
George Gilder, American Institute for Economic Research The New Yorker has a conundrum. That's a puzzle, an enigma, even a borborigmus, or stomach rumble. Writing from the heart of the darkness of liberal sentiment about Covid-19, the New Yorker has persisted in the comfortable assurance that President Trump did it. And the mandatory cures? They are obvious: masks, lockdowns, money, quarantines, windmills, and Democrats. |
John Tamny, Forbes An attempt to understand why some might prefer that the indefensible remain. One possibility is that a lack of competition is comfort for those who would prefer not to compete. |
Harold Furchtgott-Roth & Kirk Arner, RealClearMarkets Last year, TikTok became the first major social media platform to completely ban multi-level marketing, or "MLM," content on its platform. TikTok did this quietly and with little fanfare, via a regular periodic update to its "Community Guidelines." The company's blog post announcing this update made no mention of MLMs or related business models. Yet under the monikers "[i]llegal activities and regulated goods" and "[f]rauds and scams," TikTok now explicitly bans "[c]ontent that depicts or promotes Ponzi, multi-level marketing, or pyramid schemes." Items banned below and above MLMs in... |
Ryan Ellis, Washington Examiner If there's a visible fault line in America between the way the coastal elite think compared to other people, it has to be the carbon tax. Lionized by the former and never heard of by the latter, support for a carbon tax is a golden key letting you into the executive washroom. |
Market Minder, Fisher Investments Don't presume massive savings will lead to surging spending. |
Bonnie Kristian, The Week Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the day's breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons. |
Liz Ann Sonders, Charles Schwab Examining performance trends over the past year reveals a nuanced relationship. |
Liz Ann Sonders, Charles Schwab Sentiment has been a problem; higher yields was the catalyst for a bit of a reset. |
Collin Martin, Charles Schwab With interest rates rising, "zombie companies" may have to refinance debt at higher rates. |
Richard Moody, Regions Bank |
Brian Wesbury & Robert Stein, First Trust Advisors |
Hayden Adams, Charles Schwab Was your tax refund smaller than in previous years? Did you owe more than usual? Here's why. |
Rob Arnott, Lillian Wu, Brad Cornell @RA_Insights The siren song of a "big market"â?"opened through innovation or disruption, such as the newly beloved electric vehicles marketâ?"lures investors to enthusiastically push up prices of all firms in the industry as if each will be a major winner. The reality is that as competitors in an evolving industry, some will fail. Pricing each company's stock without regard to this fact is the "big market delusion." |
Joseph Minarik, Hill This nation and its elected leaders must tackle the deficit. |
Sukhayl Niyazov, City Journal It fails as a revenue generator and as a tool to deliver fairness. |
Andrew Keshner, MarketWatch President Joe Biden said he?ll sign the bill on Friday |
Kim Iskyan, American Consequences Is the new world of blockchain digital collectibles another bubble or no different than the baseball card collections of yesteryear? |
Jeffrey Tucker, Am. Inst. for Econ Research The first time I saw The Lego Movie (2014) I interpreted it as a soaring hymn to creative entrepreneurship and the terrible results of planning. |
Leticia Miranda, NBCNews As mounting climate-related power failures hammer the country's electrical grid, a growing number of homeowners are building their own power system. |
David Hay, Evergreen Gavekal You are about to make the most consequential financial decision of your life. |
Matt Day, Yahoo Finance As many businesses struggled to survive the pandemic, Amazon.com Inc. was quietly building a national grocery chain. |
Courtenay Brown, Axios The historic backup at America's ports — critical entry points for sneakers or Peloton bikes — is having a boomerang effect on companies and shoppers. |
Eric Posner, Project Syndicate With growing momentum behind efforts to reform and strengthen US antitrust enforcement, a decades-long trend toward increasing market concentration may soon be confronted head-on. But enforcement alone will not cure what ails the US economy â?" especially not when US consumers themselves are smitten with the monopolists. |
Christian Britschgi, Reason.com Grocery store company Kroger has announced that it will be closing three stores in Los Angeles as a result of the county's new hazard pay law. |
Christine Benz, Morningstar We compare different strategies for generating cash flows, from pure total return to income-centric approaches to annuities. |
Christian Britschgi, Reason A Reason reporter went to Paso Robles, California, where many businesses defied state orders to close. He enjoyed it. He also got COVID. |
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