The Cynical Economist

From
Bloomberg Businessweek
By Vali Chandrasekaran

Need to prove something you already believe? Statistics are easy: All you need are two graphs and a leading question

Correlation may not imply causation, but it sure can help us insinuate it.

BIS Calls for Hyperinflationary Depression? -  Inflate! And everything will work out

Which Country Defaults Next? - Japan’s 2011 gross public debt as a percentage of GDP is estimated by the IMF at 234%. Compare this to down-but-not-yet-out Greece’s at 139% and Italy’s at 119%, and the United States’ at 99%. With those numbers, you may ask how Japan hums along while investors berate Europe for their lack of strict budget controls and U.S. politicians wrestle to cut the deficit.

Comparing Bureaucracy: No Wonder The Euro Zone Is In Crisis - Regulations and poor administration have held back Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain’s economies, illustrated here using Doing Business data.

Disaster Pay - File this one under “nice work if you can get it.” More than two dozen retired police officers who were rehired by the District, including the chief of the police agency that protects government buildings, have been improperly paid both a full pension and full salary for several years even though the D.C. Code prohibits that, according to city documents and interviews with officials.

Public Retirement Ages Come Under Greater Scrutiny - After nearly 40 years in public education, Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter. His departure from the workaday world is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.

Congress’s Phony Insider-Trading Reform - The denizens of Capitol Hill are remarkable investors. A new law meant to curb abuses would only make their shenanigans easier.

Obama’s Math Works Only in BizzaroEcon World - Obama’s math works only in a bizzaro economic world – a world where changes in prices have no, or never more than a de minimis, effect on people’s behavior.

U.N. Floats Global ‘Climate Court’ to Enforce Emissions Rules - 

United Nations climate envoys have proposed the creation of a global “climate court” that would be responsible for enforcing a sprawling set of rules requiring developed countries to cut emissions while compensating poorer countries in order to pay off a “historical climate debt.”

more here

But it seems, that what happened in Beijing on December 09, 2011 doesn’t bother the UN bureaucrats at all

Beijing air goes from ‘hazardous’ to off the charts, literally - 

A dense blanket of smog covered most cities in northeast China this past week, reaching record pollution levels and grounding hundreds of flights at Beijing’s international airport. Public outrage over the quality of the air in the Chinese capital is rising high while the government insists that the problem is down to inclement weather and nothing to be overly worried about.

Daytime photo at Beijing’s international airport. Photo posted by Kim Rathcke Jensen on Twitter

Salomón Simhon is a Colombian filmmaker working in Beijing. His flight from Beijing to Shanghai was delayed for almost 10 hours on account of pollution.

“When I arrived at the airport there was no visibility at all. You could not see a single thing more than 100 metres away. They started delaying our flights, but they would only tell us it was because of the weather. My flight was pushed back every hour and the only explanation we would get was the weather. In the meantime, the airport became incredibly crowded. Hundreds of people were sitting on top of their bags and on the floor.We were finally able to board our flight, but you still couldn’t even see the plane’s wing from inside. I only learnt that pollution was the cause of the delay when I reached Shanghai.”

more here

Statist Delusions - The bill for cradle-to-grave welfare has come due.

American Privilege Rots an Empire from Within - Well-paid corporate managers, lawyers and doctors are contributing to the demise of an entire economy

NY-NJ bridge policeman earns $221,000 - See the problem is not that only the corporate managers, lawyers and doctors are well paid,the public workers are sometimes even better compensated than them and are contributing to the demise of the entire economy as well

The Differences between Corporate Greed and Government Greed - The CEO of a corporation cannot force anyone to pay his salary, while public officials do just that. The greatest power a governmental body has is to seize wealth is through taxes — namely, property and income taxes.  Anyone who owns property or rents is paying property taxes.  And if these taxes are not paid, the government has the right (which it delegated to itself) to seize your house and sell it for back taxes. 

Most Americans Say $150,000 Annual Income Makes You Rich: Gallup - Americans say they would need to earn a median of $150,000 a year to consider themselves rich. However, 30% say less than $100,000 would be enough, including 18% who would consider themselves rich if they made less than $60,000 a year.

A Nightmare of a Dream Team - Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?

Is American Power in Decline? - The pessimism among intelligence analysts contrasts sharply with the relentlessly upbeat prognostications made by politicians, especially the field of Republican presidential candidates, who describe an America of perpetual sunshine and unchallenged leadership.

The Class Warfare We Need - That is exactly the  right graph to show, who we should be against – the crooks and liars of every class in our society…

Record 64% Rate Honesty, Ethics of Members of Congress Low - Americans Trust Congress Less Than Lobbyists, Telemarketers And Car Salespeople…

The Two Left Coasts - New York and California were once America’s economic growth engines, but their political leaders seem determined to keep them sputtering. Their Democratic Governors are now pushing big new tax increases in the name of soaking the rich and balancing their budgets, as if that same strategy hadn’t put them in their current fiscal straits.

Brown counting on the 1 percent to save California - Governor wants to raise rates on the highest earners, who already pay nearly half of all income taxes and whose incomes can fluctuate wildly.

E-mails questioned huge contract for firm with ties to Obama administration -  Siga’s return on investment, one e-mail said, was “an overwhelming 180 per cent.”

Americans leaving US in record numbers - While the United States of America was at one point (and largely still is) a magnet for foreigners in search of work, the statistics makes it clear that an opposite trend is quickly picking up steam.

Europe’s blithering idiots and their flim-flam treaty - The leaders of France and Germany have more or less bulldozed Britain out of the European Union for the sake of a treaty that offers absolutely no solution to the crisis at hand, or indeed any future crisis.

Eurozone banking system on the edge of collapse - The eurozone banking system is on the edge of collapse as major lenders begin to run out of the assets they need to keep vital funding lines open

Are the bankers to blame for our woes? - Occupy Wall Street says yes. But it takes two groups of willing parties to make a financial crisis. One group was Wall Street, and the other was borrowers and buyers.

Study On Swipe Fees: Consumers Paying More At Retailers, Not Less - The retailers are not passing the savings over to the consumer

Jon Corzine to tell House panel he doesn’t know where customers’ money went - Jon S. Corzine, the former U.S. senator and New Jersey governor who presided over the collapse of the commodities brokerage MF Global, says he cannot explain what happened to “many hundreds of millions of dollars” that the firm was holding for customers. 

Claim: Clinton Collected $50K Per Month From MF Global - Former president’s new firm Teneo Strategy was hired to boost Corzine.

A Tale Of Two Economies In The Headlines - Take a look at these headlines:

Wealth gap widening in U.S., globally, report says - The gap between the rich and the poor isn’t just widening in the United States - it has hit its highest level in more than 30 years in the world’s wealthiest countries.

Tax Rates, Inequality and the 1% - Those who obsess over income shares should welcome stock market crashes and deep recessions because such calamities invariably reduce ‘inequality.’

Federal Accounting May Understate Costs of Solyndra-style Programs - Simply put, the federal government ignores administrative costs and the risks of borrowers defaulting on their obligations.

Toilet paper restrictions imposed on schoolchildren in Spain in latest austerity cuts - Schoolchildren in Catalonia are the latest victims of austerity cuts with authorities instructing them to limit their use of lavatory paper in a bid to save money.

Anxious Greeks Emptying Their Bank Accounts - Many Greeks are draining their savings accounts because they are out of work, face rising taxes or are afraid the country will be forced to leave the euro zone. By withdrawing money, they are forcing banks to scale back their lending – and are inadvertently making the recession even worse.

Downward Wisconsin - We used to make things here in Wisconsin. 

T. Boone Pickens Wants Obama To Tell Him What His ‘Fair Share’ of Taxes Is

Police Step Up Security After Deutsche Bank Letter Bomb - The New York Police Department has increased security at Deutsche Bank‘s offices in Manhattan after a letter bomb was sent to the bank’s chief executive in Frankfurt, a police spokesman told DealBook on Wednesday.

Bloomberg News Responds to Bernanke Criticism of U.S. Bank-Rescue Coverage - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a letter to four senior lawmakers yesterday that recent news articles about the central bank’s emergency lending programs contained “egregious errors.”

Five Big Lies in Obama’s Economic Fairness Speech - One thing is certainly true about President Obama — no matter how many times people point out the falsehoods in his speeches, he just keeps making them. Case in point: his latest “economic fairness” address.