Apple earnings, profits, and cash embarrass Microsoft — RoughlyDrafted Magazine:
"While Microsoft executives like to talk about Apple as an insignificant company with less than 5% of the worldwide market share of all PCs and servers sold, the company now has more cash than Microsoft and earns more than half of its profits and over three fourths Microsoft’s revenues."
(Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine.)
Minimum Wage Impacts on Employment: A Look at Indiana, Illinois, and Surrounding Midwestern States:
"These patterns in job growth between 2003 and 2005 indicate that Illinois' increasing minimum wage rates did not reduce overall employment growth for private employers and preliminary statistical analyses confirm this lack of an impact"
(Via Indiana University.)
Once again we see how ideology is soft-think. This is has been proven over and over, yet we see no public discussion on this at the pragmatic level. Just ideological back and forth. "Fairness" vs. "Jobs." Whatever. Try "reality."
AP INVESTIGATION: Palin pipeline terms curbed bids - Yahoo! News:
"Gov. Sarah Palin's signature accomplishment — a contract to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48 — emerged from a flawed bidding process that narrowed the field to a company with ties to her administration"
(Via Yahoo! News.)
The closer you look, the less mavericky she gets. Palin is more politician than maverick.
What Will Wall Street Look Like in the Fall of 2009? -- New York Magazine:
"And while any president will be an improvement over the current one, there is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further: Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression.
Wall Street usually favors Republicans when it comes to managing the economy, but this time around the financial community is skeptical. John McCain has done everything he can to avoid talking about the economy, lest he be tarred with the brush of George Bush’s ineptitude. And when McCain has attempted to step into the fray, he’s been far from reassuring. First, he insisted that the fundamentals of the economy were sound; then he turned around and told us it was the end of the economic world as we know it, and suspended his campaign to scramble back to Washington and save the day on the bailout bill—only to have little visible effect. For all his talk of being a maverick, McCain looks an awful lot like President Bush on the credit crisis: He doesn’t seem to understand Wall Street or Main Street, he is dogmatically anti-regulation, and his economic team is a joke. "
(Via New York Magazine.)
Boo yah!!!
YouTube - John 'Deer in Headlights' McCain Stunned - Here's Your Fine, Joe The Plumber : $0:
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(Via YouTube.)
Somebody forgot to do his homework.Op-Ed Columnist - Gordon Does Good - NYTimes.com:
"As I said, we still don’t know whether these moves will work. But policy is, finally, being driven by a clear view of what needs to be done. Which raises the question, why did that clear view have to come from London rather than Washington?"
(Via NY Times op-Ed.)
Ideology is soft-think.
The Price of Disgust - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog:
"But most people do not think like economists. When offered 10 percent or 20 percent or even 30 percent of the total, they are disgusted by the inequity — and willing to pay the price for that disgust by rejecting the offer."
(Via Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog.)
Talk about "bounded rationality!"
Economists on the Bailout - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog:
"The only thing that seems to be moving faster than the financial crisis is the policy debate. The latest development is a statement that summarizes what I think of as the emerging consensus from academic economists; it expresses concern about various aspects of both the Paulson plan in particular, and the policy process in general."
(Via Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog.)
Slow down. Take a breath everybody.
FactCheck.org: Who Caused the Economic Crisis?:
"So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of 'layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role.' Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
- The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
- Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
- Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
- Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
- The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
- Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
- Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
- Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
- The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
- An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
- Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up."
(Via FactCheck.org.)
Competing Tax Plans: Two Perspectives - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog:
(Via Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog.)
I love freakonomics. Looking at the complete set of graphs breaks down each candidates' tax plans. It clearly lays out the candidates' priorities.
Obama has come of the points I would include, equity stakes, tax cuts to middle class spenders. But I would also:
What would you do?
