The Bowtie Economist's Daily Dose of 70-Word Wisdom


Political Pay

09/20/2013

The Friday File: To focus Congress on GDP growth, give members incentive pay. Pay them a base of $60,000 (median income) and incentive pay that rises with GDP. No bonus is paid until GDP growth hits 2%. Between 2%-3% they…

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Bold Bernanke

09/19/2013

In a surprising but gutsy move, the Fed will not start tapering this month. There are many reasons. The most compelling; the recent rise in interest rates needed to be checked as they harm the slow recovery, Congressional hijinks over…

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Chemical Calculations

09/18/2013

By entering into an agreement with Bashar Assad to destroy his chemical weapons, Obama is encouraging dictators to not only develop chemical weapons, but selectively use and trade them for respectability as needed. Moreover, by elevating the regime to that…

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Big Bucks

09/17/2013

In 2012, the top 10% (those with incomes above $114,000) collected 50.4% of all pre-tax income, the highest on record and up from 33% in 1977. Most of the gain was because the top 1%, those with incomes above $394,000,…

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Fed Head Fiasco

09/16/2013

The biggest loser in the current Fed Chairman Sweepstakes is the Fed. Simply considering Summers for the head Fed job politicizes a job that should be non-partisan. Arthur Burns, appointed by Nixon in 1970, was the last Chairman that was…

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Going, Going, Gone!

09/13/2013

The Friday File: After travelling for 36 years and 12 billion miles, NASA just confirmed that on August 25, 2012 (yes 2012), Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to depart the solar system. It’s so far from earth it…

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Oily Business

09/12/2013

Crude oil prices are up 6% since Syria took center stage on 8/21/13. They had already risen 15% in the prior four months due to rising demand and a 2.7 million barrels/day (bbl/d) reduction in supply in August. But traditionally,…

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Disability Disincentive

09/11/2013

One reason the labor force participation rate is so low is the explosive growth in those receiving Social Security Disability Insurance. Since 1980, the percentage of 20-64 year olds on SSDI grew from 2.3% to 4.7%. Half the rise is…

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Taper Tiger

09/10/2013

With a drop in the labor force participation rate to 63.2%, its lowest level since 8/78, the creation of only 169,000 net new jobs in August and revisions subtracting 74,000 new jobs in June and July, it’s now a toss-up…

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Lots of Labor

09/09/2013

The best news from the August employment report was that private payroll hours jumped 0.3%. While that seems small, had employers kept hours worked unchanged and hired more workers to do the added work, payrolls would have risen by 572,000…

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