t’s the math: In fiscal 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and civil service and military retirement cost $1.7 trillion, about half the budget.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or urlRobert Samuelson: A dishonest budget debate - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
-
As a share of national income, defense spending ($670 billion in 2012) is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.
-
States’ Medicaid costs will increase with the number of aged and disabled, which represent two-thirds of Medicaid spending. All this will force higher taxes or reduce traditional state and local spending on schools, police, roads and parks.
- ...5 more annotations...
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Files/Filer/Articles%202012/Project%20Syndicate%2016.02.2012.pdf - 0 views
Hot Money Blues - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country.
-
It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.
-
To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,
- ...2 more annotations...
immigration.jpg (1250×617) - 0 views
Efforts to Revive the Economy Lead to Worries of a Bubble - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
The Federal Reserve is well into its third round of “quantitative easing,” in which it buys longer-term assets to bring down long-term lending rates.
-
In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
-
In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
- ...6 more annotations...
chart-of-coal-consumptionxlsx.jpg (1584×1224) - 0 views
Europe's Galileo GPS Plan Limps to Crossroads - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Galileo — first proposed in 1994, more than 20 years after America started its own system, and initially promoted as a big potential moneymaker — “can’t give a direct return on investment, but politically it is very important for Europe to have its own autonomous system,” said Mr. Magliozzi of Telespazio.
-
It is also designed to be far more precise than the American version.
-
Galileo has been financed almost entirely by the European Union since 2007. It is the first and so far only major infrastructure project managed by the European Commission.
- ...6 more annotations...
Banks' Fire Drill for Greece Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
In New York and London, banks have set up dedicated crisis teams, and rehearsed elaborate responses.
-
Citigroup has $84 billion in loans, bonds and other types of exposure to troubled European countries, plus France. The bank’s filings indicate that all but $8 billion of that exposure is offset with collateral it has collected and hedges on the portfolio.
-
Some banks are testing their systems to deal with the possibility of new currencies and preparing guidance for clients on how to operate in such an environment.
- ...6 more annotations...
Talking Troubled Turkey - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Talking Troubled Turkey
-
probably because most countries placed restrictions on cross-border capital flows, so that international borrowing and lending were limited.
-
a bigger version of the same story unfolded in Asia: Huge money inflows followed by a sudden stop and economic implosion.
- ...2 more annotations...
The Quality of Jobs: The New Normal and the Old Normal - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Despite 42 consecutive months of gains in private-sector employment, the unemployment rate is still at 7.3 percent; in December 2007 it was only 4.6 percent. The current unemployment rate is higher now than in 2007 across all age, education, occupation, gender and ethnic groups.
-
That’s despite the fact that about four million workers have left the labor force, driving the labor force participation rate to a historic low
-
Although the share of the long-term unemployed has fallen from its peak of 45 percent in 2011 to 38 percent today, it is still far above its 2001-7 average. And about eight million people are working part-time for “economic reasons,”
- ...9 more annotations...
The Greek Austerity Myth by Daniel Gros - Project Syndicate - 0 views
-
The Greek Austerity Myth
-
Greece actually spends less on debt service than Italy or Ireland, both of which have much lower (gross) debt-to-GDP ratios. With payments on Greece's official foreign debt amounting to only 1.5% of GDP, debt service is not the country's problem.
-
The new Greek government's argument that this is an unreasonable target fails to withstand scrutiny. After all, when faced with excessively high debt, other European countries – including Belgium (from 1995), Ireland (from 1991), and Norway (from 1999) – maintained similar surpluses for at least ten years each, typically in the aftermath of a financial crisis.
- ...4 more annotations...
Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings - Bloomberg - 0 views
-
Citi Cuts Costa Rica Growth Forecast After Firings
-
Hours later, BofA said it would be exiting operations in Costa Rica, Guadalajara, Mexico and Taguig, Philippines, without saying how many jobs would be lost. Costa Rica’s foreign investment agency said the BofA move would result in 1,500 layoffs.
-
“This is a strong call to the country to keeps tabs on things like the rising cost of electricity, telecommunications, wages and social guarantees.”
- ...4 more annotations...
Dani Rodrik shows why Sub-Saharan Africa's impressive economic performance is not sustainable. - Project Syndicate - 0 views
-
Africa’s Structural Transformation Challenge
-
As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”
-
Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.
- ...4 more annotations...
gm-crops-online-C-2.jpg (1400×800) - 0 views
Arctic Shipping Soars, Led by Russia and Lured by Energy - 0 views
-
Although the Arctic provides a shorter route around the world than the traditional course through warmer waters, it is not necessarily cheaper.
-
The ships were expensive to build and operate,
-
The first commercial Chinese vessel and first container ship to transit the NSR, the Yong Sheng, commissioned by state-owned Cosco shipping, arrived in Rotterdam on September 10 laden with steel and industrial machinery. Its 33-day journey from the Chinese port of Dailan was nine days and 2,800 nautical miles shorter than the conventional voyage through the Suez Canal
- ...6 more annotations...
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20▼ items per page