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Why War With Iran Is Likely
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2012 Comment (8)James Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards.
War with Iran hangs over global markets like the sword of Damocles. Markets are already fragile as a result of body blows suffered in 2007 to 2009 from the housing bubble, the Madoff fraud, the Lehman and AIG collapses, and the severity of the depression. Uncertainty reigns because of doubts about the sustainability of the recovery without continual doses of more zero-cost money from the Federal Reserve. The last thing capital markets need is an exogenous shock in the form of war in a critical part of the world, but that is exactly what is coming.
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Why the Federal Budget Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2012 Comment (3)Antony Davies is an affiliated senior scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University.
House Republicans are expected to release a budget today that includes more than $1 trillion in discretionary spending—the part of the budget that includes everything except mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt.
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Obama's Energy, Tax, Monetary Policies Are Crippling the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2012 Comment (3)Joseph Mason is the Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Politicians and talking heads dedicate countless hours to theorizing about the measures we can take to "fix" the economy. While this issue is infinitely complex, the pillars of generating economic growth can be broken down quite simply.
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What Government Can Actually Do About Gas Prices
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2012 Comment (6)David Shulman is a retired Wall Street executive who is now a senior economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. He is also affiliated with Baruch College (CUNY) and the University of Wisconsin.
With the national average price for regular grade gasoline hitting $3.83 a gallon last week and well on the road to over $4.00 a gallon, the public and politicians of all stripes are screaming to do something. However, the grim reality is that government policy can't do all that much in the short run. Of course oil can be released from the strategic petroleum reserve, a step that would offer minimal short term relief. However, with tensions rising over Iran's nuclear ambitions, it hardly seems sensible to unilaterally disarm ourselves in the face of a threatened supply shock.
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How Apple Gets Away With Things Other Companies Couldn't
Tweet Share on Facebook March 16, 2012 Comment (8)Paul Argenti is a professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, was arrested earlier this week on obstruction of justice charges along with her husband, a former chum of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, and four others. This event marks the beginning of the end of a very long, hard fall for the once mighty Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. Ostensibly, Brooks got nailed for doing something we all do many times a day: eliminating E-mail messages. Yes, what NewsCorp did—hacking into private voicemails to retrieve damaging information for salacious news stories—was deplorable, but does the punishment fit the crime?
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Congress Should Enable 'Crowdfunding'
Tweet Share on Facebook March 15, 2012 Comment (1)David Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council.
To start or expand a business, you need to raise money—and it can be harder to raise the money than to actually build a business. Banks now balk at lending to small businesses; their balance sheets remain in tatters from the mortgage meltdown. Entrepreneurs, unable to borrow what they need from banks, tap their credit cards, and then they must search elsewhere for the capital they need.
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Job Growth Report is Good, But Not Good Enough
Tweet Share on Facebook March 15, 2012 Comment (2)Chad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Last Friday's jobs report showed that the economy is moving in the right direction, with employers adding an average of 245,000 jobs a month over the past three months. That's good compared with what we've seen over most of the recovery so far, but it's well short of what we would expect to see in a truly robust recovery. Critically, we still have a long way to go to restore the labor market to good health after the devastating effects of the Great Recession.
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The Real Cost of the 2008 Bailouts
Tweet Share on Facebook March 14, 2012 CommentHester Peirce is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Today marks the four-year anniversary of the Bear Stearns collapse that opened the door to a series of taxpayer bailouts of AIG, Fannie, Freddie, many banks, and the auto companies. These bailouts imposed tremendous direct and indirect costs on our society and set a poor precedent on how to deal with future crises.
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Why Mobile Data Plan 'Throttling' Is Actually a Good Thing
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2012 Comment (1)Robert Hahn is director of economics at Oxford's Smith School, chief economist at the Legatum Institute, and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica and the editor of its quarterly economic policy journal, The Milken Institute Review. They co-founded Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on economic regulation.
It's official: The era of salad bar style mobile data plans is almost over. AT&T has joined Verizon and T-Mobile in slowing download speeds for its remaining customers with unlimited data plans, once they reach set (albeit generous) limits. Among the national mobile carriers, only Sprint, which is struggling to compete with its larger rivals, is still playing the salad bar game—and Sprint, too, may yet think better of it.
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Labor Force Participation Skewing Unemployment Numbers
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2012 CommentHeidi Shierholz is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute and a regular contributor to its blog, Working Economics.
Between January 2008 and January 2012, the labor force participation rate dropped by 2.5 percentage points (from 66.2 percent to 63.7 percent). Here's the thing about that decline in the labor force participation rate: it has kept the unemployment rate lower than it otherwise would have been, since most of the decline was due to people dropping out of (or not entering) the labor force because of weak job prospects. However, when job prospects pick up substantially and these sidelined workers start entering or re-entering the labor market as job seekers, that will keep the unemployed rate from coming down as fast as it otherwise would have.
