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


Dread in Madrid

07/12/2012

A month ago Europe bailed out Spanish banks but left Spain on the hook for the full $125 billion loan. Since there was immediate concern Spain might default on the debt, and that the new debt was senior to all…

Read More

Big Taxes, No Money

07/11/2012

Tax rates on dividends will rise from 15% up to 43.4% on 1/1/13 if the Bush tax cuts aren’t extended. Due to behavioral changes, it won’t raise much in taxes. Firms will immediately use money planned for dividends for share…

Read More

I See Land!

07/10/2012

The US has a total land area 2.3 billion acres. In ’07, the major land uses were forestland at 671 million acres (30%), grassland pasture and rangeland at 614 million acres (27%), cropland at 408 million acres (18%), parks and…

Read More

GDP = C+I+G+(X-M)

07/09/2012

Q1 ’12 GDP was composed of personal consumption expenditures (C) totaling $11.0 trillion, private investment (I) of $2.0 trillion, government spending (G) of $3.0 trillion and net exports (E) of -$0.6 trillion. In Q2, G will be slightly lower, with…

Read More

Doing the Mumbo Jumbo

07/06/2012

The Friday File: Bureaucrats write regulatory orders that are generally incomprehensible because they try to obscure the fact that they’re forbidding you from doing what you want. Occasionally, a top regulator will force his/her agency to write in plain English.…

Read More

Monetary Medicine

07/05/2012

Things can’t possibly be good when yesterday, in less than an hour, the ECB, The Bank of China, and The Bank of England all offered monetary medicine to the weakening global economy. Problem is, easier monetary policy won’t help much.…

Read More

Happy 236th Birthday!

07/03/2012

This 4th of July, there’s a 33% chance your hot dog or pork sausage comes from IA, with the runner up states being NC and MN. There’s a 17% chance your burger comes from TX with NE and KS being…

Read More

Immigrant Demographics

07/02/2012

Since ‘09, Asian immigrants have outnumbered Latin American. In ‘10 430,000 Asians came to the US (36% of all new immigrants), compared to 370,000 Hispanics (31%). Since ’00, 14% of Asian immigrants have been undocumented compared to 45% of Hispanics.…

Read More

Understanding the Scam

06/30/2012

The Friday File: Internet scammers must minimize false positives (targets that are attacked yet yield nothing) and false negatives (viable targets that are not attacked). It’s because scamming costs time and money and misidentifying false positives is very costly. To…

Read More

Oh Canada!

06/28/2012

To cool down an overheated housing market, the Canadian government, in a move called for by some big banks, is reducing the maximum mortgage length to 25 years from 30 (no balloons), decreasing the maximum one can borrow against a…

Read More

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives