Category Archives: News

From Thomas Friedman. I love this.

More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T. on a full scholarship and will be leaving them in a few months. What to do?
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We don’t seem to realize: We’re in a hole and still digging. Our educational attainment levels are stagnating; our infrastructure is fraying. We don’t have enough smart incentives to foster both innovation and manufacturing; we’re not importing enough talent in an age when we have to compete for jobs with low-wage but high-skilled Indians and Chinese — and we’re still piling up debt. Responding to all this will require a whole new hybrid politics for where to cut, where to save, where to invest, where to tax and where to untax. Shaping that new politics is a revolutionary role I still hope President Obama will play.

Sobering politics these days in Ireland. I’m not sure our own government would be capable of passing a budget like this.

DUBLIN — Pressured by onerous debts and fears of financial contagion, the Irish government introduced one of the strictest budgets in the nation’s history Tuesday, raising taxes and slashing government and welfare spending to qualify for an 85 billion euro aid package from its European partners.
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“This is a bailout for the speculators and the financial markets of the world. The I.M.F., the E.U. commission and the E.C.B. were over here 2 weeks ago, not in any sense as friends of the Irish people, but as friends of the speculators in the financial markets, and their strategy is to turn working people of this country into serfs,” Joe Higgins, one of the Irish parliamentarians who walked out of bailout discussions in Brussels a couple weeks ago with E.U. Commissioner Ollie Rehn, shouted into a microphone as crowds cheered.

Nashville Business Journal had a story this morning about mortgage interest rates continuing to fall. The 15 year fixed average is barely higher than average annual inflation. It’s crazy.

If you are in the market for a home, now is the time. It doesn’t get any better for buyers than this.

Long-term mortgage rates fell to new lows this week, after the Federal Reserve’s announcement to step back into the Treasuries market.

A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.17 percent in the week ending Nov. 11, down from 4.24 percent last week. A 15-year fix averaged 3.57 percent, down from 3.63 percent last week. Both are the lowest rates since Freddie Mac (OTC BB: FMCC) began keeping track.

I enjoyed this article. I used to share projects with Deloitte’s office in Hyderabad, India. During busy season, I would work on gathering the relevant project components during the day, discuss the requirements on the phone that night, and when I came in the next morning, there in my inbox would sit the completed project. Pretty amazing, really.

One gentleman worked over 400 hours during January 2008 to meet my project deadlines. If there was one thing I learned about that culture. they don’t raise slouches.

This week’s award for not knowing what world you’re living in surely goes to the French high school and college students who blockaded their campuses, and snarled rail traffic, in a nationwide strike against the French government’s decision to raise its pension retirement age from 60 to 62…France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day — and so, too, are pension levels not sustained by a vibrant private sector.

Some economic predictions from a “strategic forecaster” named Pierce Snyder at an AICPA meeting in New Orleans. One can only hope that his prediction on government deleveraging (a nice way of saying debt retirement) is true. The others aren’t really a huge shock but interesting nonetheless.

Snyder listed seven economic inevitabilities for the next seven to eight years. Those are:

* The entry-level labor pool will shrink by 5%. Workers 16 to 24 years old will be in short supply with intense competition among employers to attract this more tech-savvy generation.
* The share of the work force held by individuals 55 and over will increase from 20% to 30%.
* Unemployment will remain above 7.5%.
* Fiscal and financial deleveraging will constrain government and consumer spending.
* Commerce will become essentially paperless and cashless.
* Health care will account for a quarter of all economic growth even as the health care industry consolidates.
* The construction industry will shrink and consolidate.