12/01/2020
Today Rainer Zitelmann, Examiner It is often said that the only way to become rich today is by inheriting a fortune. But this ignores the fact that eight of the world's ten richest people are rich because they built their own businesses, not through inheritance. |
Tankersley, Smialek & Rappeport, NYT In the White House and elsewhere, the president-elect's selections are heavy on labor economists and champions of organized labor. |
Stephen Eide, New York Post President Trump's approach to homelessness was mostly unsuccessful. He had decent instincts but no clear vision, and anyway, most of the crucial policy levers... |
John Tamny, RealClearMarkets Multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent $100 million in Florida to swing the state to Joe Biden in the recently-concluded 2020 presidential election. He failed. Please consider Bloomberg’s miss relative to reporting in The New Yorker from late 2018. A sophisticated magazine largely catering to those politically and culturally on the left, its readers were treated to straight-faced analysis suggesting that during the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was captured by “Russian agents who wanted to sow political chaos and help Trump win.” Supposedly the “Internet... |
David Faris, 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. |
George Gilder, American Institute for Economic Research In all the annals of Covid, Taiwan remains an outlier. Out of a population of 24 million, and an extraordinary population density of 1,739 per square mile, it registered only 573 “cases.” At just one test per 100,000 of population, it did the lowest rate of testing in the industrial world, restricting tests to those with symptoms. It imposed the lowest “stringency” of government policy (as measured by one of the world’s most limited lockdowns, far less severe even than Sweden’s, with scant closing of schools, restriction of travel, or banning of gatherings... |
Sally Hubbard, CNN As Covid-19 continues to spread, millions of Americans are losing their jobs, thousands of restaurants have closed for good and one in three small businesses surveyed by the nonprofit Small Business Majority said they won't survive beyond the next three months without additional funding. Yet the nation's most dominant corporations seem to be weathering the pandemic just fine. |
Rodney Brooks, U.S. News & World Report IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE the logic. If you wait until you are 70 to take your Social Security benefit, you will receive monthly payments that are 32% higher than the benefits you would have received at age 66, which is the retirement age for many Americans. Retirees who wait to claim can get hundreds of dollars more each month than those who take benefits early. |
Andrew Wilford, RCM The fact that the European Union is struggling to plug budget holes is hardly unique — many American states and localities are dealing with the same problems. What is unique, however, is the EU’s plan to raise a substantial amount of the money it needs to make the budget math worth through fining American tech companies. The EU recently reached a deal to increase its budget by €15 billion in order to respond to the pandemic. AsPolitico reports, the “biggest chunk” of this €15 billion increase will come from competition fines on large tech... |
David Goldman, Asia Times Germany will allow Huawei to build out part of its 5G network, the business daily Handelsblatt reported last week after viewing a new draft law that the Angela Merkel government will submit to the Bundestag next month. Japan and South Korea politely but firmly refused to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant from their networks in October. Among the world's major economies, only the US, UK, India and Taiwan plan to block Huawei 5G equipment. Huawei now has the inside track in the race to develop "Fourth Industrial Revolution" applications that exploit 5G capabilities, including... |
David Walker, The Hill Our leaders must enact reforms to tackle the federal deficit. |
Michael Cannivet, Forbes Normally, it is not wise to chase a stock after a monster rally. There's even a name for this sort of misbehavior: 'heat-chasing'. Yet, the mother of all heat chasing trades is about to take place when Tesla formally joins the S&P 500 on December 21st. |
Joshua Gottlieb & Avi Zenilman, University of Chicago |
Cooper Howard, Charles Schwab We expect the municipal bond market to return to a sense of normalcy in 2021. |
Jeff Troutner, Equius Partners |
Various, Structured Finance Association |
Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, Charles Schwab Is your holiday budget tighter this year? That doesn't mean your gifts can't be just as meaningfulâ?"maybe even more so, says Carrie-Schwab Pomerantz. |
Brian Wesbury & Robert Stein, First Trust Advisors |
Richard Moody, Regions Bank |
Charles Gasparino, New York Post Janet Yellen has a great résumé to be our next Treasury secretary. What isn't so good is her record at doing what is the most important part of any economist's job: Helping average Americans live better and more prosperous lives. |
Matt Egan, CNN The night before Janet Yellen stepped down as Federal Reserve chair in February 2018, she shocked Wall Street by delivering a crushing blow to America's most messed-up bank. |
Yeganeh Torbati & Aaron Gregg, Washington Post The money, meant for businesses critical to national security, remains largely unspent almost eight months after Congress approved it. |
Market Minder, Fisher Investments We see little evidence the Treasury's winding down the Fed's emergency lending facilities will stymie the economic recovery or this bull market. |
Gonzalo Schwarz & Ben Wilterdink, Washington Examiner As President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris prepare their agenda, dealing with the pandemic and working to rebound the economy are certain to be key priorities. However, the Democratic Party still has a tough battle ahead in Georgia to flip control of the Senate, and it lost many seats in the House when most projections predicted that it was going to increase its majority. |
Kara Swisher, New York Times In the pursuit of surveillance as a service, Jeff Bezos is intent on recording even our moods. How much personal data is too much to give to Amazon? |
Jeffrey Tucker, AIER Scrub and spray everything with chemicals, bathe in Purell, mask up, stand no nearer to anyone else than six feet, stay away from crowds, douse yourself with alcohol, wash your hands and face raw, protect yourself from germs at all costs. |
Matt Egan, CNN Janet Yellen checks all the boxes in President-elect Joe Biden's quest to find a Treasury secretary who won't spook Wall Street, alienate progressives or forget about Main Street's plight. |
Christy Bieber, Motley Fool Social Security benefits are an important source of retirement income, but they can't be your sole source. That's because they aren't designed to replace enough of your pre-retirement income to maintain your standard of living. |
Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch U.S. stocks rise in three out of every four years, especially the first year of a presidential term. |
Chuck DeVore, The Examiner The Fraser Institute is out with its new yearly assessment of Economic Freedom in North America. Fraser, based in British Columbia, Canada, ranks both nations and states internationally and in North America for their economic freedom, measuring factors such as tax rates, government spending, and labor laws. |
Michael Gibson, City Journal A new book argues that Silicon Valley was built on sand. |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Robert J. Shiller, Project Syndicate Many have been puzzled that the world's stock markets haven't collapsed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn it has wrought. But with interest rates low and likely to stay there, equities will continue to look attractive, particularly when compared to bonds. |
David Hay, Evergreen - Gavekal An interview with Niall Ferguson |
Rusty Guinn, Epsilon Theory It’s outlook season. |
Joakim Book, American Institute for Economic Research Everything that's wrong with the left's conception of value. |
Coleman Hughes, City Journal A bestselling book offers a prescription for race relations that casts whites as sinners and blacks as children. |
Eric Boehm, Reason In a year that will be remembered for a deadly pandemic that shut down parts of the economy and cost millions of people their jobs, here's one silver lining. |
Nick Maggiulli, Of Dollars & Data On not meeting your financial goals, relative wealth, and happiness. |
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