Sunday, June 26, 2016

Economic Outlooks: There Was a Stranger in My Own House



There is no god like one's stomach; we must sacrifice to it every day.
~Kingsley Oje, Benin City, Nigeria via MA
 
*The economics of Broadway Gabbie is in New York
 via Godfather Steve

Speaking of risk taking Gabbie, note this Global Risk Report 2016

How Yes Minister Predicted BREXIT

EU referendum: Boris Johnson and Michael Gove prepare ‘dream team’ to lead a Brexit government Telegraph 

D I V O R C E – Sarkozy Calls for New Treaty, Reiterates “Turkey Has No Place in EU” Michael Shedlock 

Trivia over Lidka's Polish Tatar: Earl"s Square in London belonged to Polish people before antipodeans took it over.

How Sasha's Godfather predicted that Poland would win last night's soccer Euro 2016 game against the Arabic Swiss team. Poland has beaten Switzerland 5-4 in a penalty shoot-out to reach the European Championship quarter-finals for the first time following a riveting last-16 clash that ended 1-1 after extra time.   Kubo aka Jakub Blaszczykowski gave Poland a 39th-minute lead before Xherdan Shaqiri equalised with a spectacular bicycle kick in the 82nd to send the match into a dramatic climax Polsko aka Poland Beats Switzerland

Amazon Video’s traffic is spiking, which means internet video is now dominated by three big companies Quartz

‘There Was a Stranger in My Own House’: Is the Sharing Economy Safe for Women? Vice

Via LLRX.com – New Economy Resources 2016 – This guide by Marcus Zillman aggregates significant actionable sources for researchers focused on the “new economy,” including current and historical government data, analytics and alerts from Open Source providers, the private sector, and the legislative and regulatory sectors.

William W. Olney How much does English proficiency help you in economics?, and it seems it helps a good deal:
This article investigates whether the global spread of the English language provides an inherent advantage to native English speakers. This question is studied within the context of the economics profession, where the impact of being a native English speaker on future publishing success is examined. English speakers may have an advantage because they are writing in their native language, the quality of writing is a crucial determinant of publishing success, and all the top economics journals are published in English. Using a ranking of the world’s top 2.5% of economists, this article confirms that native English speakers are ranked 100 spots higher (better) than similar non-native English speakers. A variety of extensions examine and dispel many other potential explanations.

Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.
With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food. Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Over the past two centuries, the average person has been enriched by as much as 9,900 percent. This resulted from ideas, not the accumulation of capital....Das Kapital  

Why Startups Are Struggling. “Even amid the venture capital boom of the past few years, entrepreneurs are finding it harder to build big, enduring companies. What does this mean for the future of innovation?”

"Uber and Strippers Have Something in Common": Law professor Noah Feldman has this essay online at Bloomberg View

Britain is in the midst of a working-class revolt Guardian 

The OECD Economic Outlook is the OECD’s twice-yearly analysis of the major economic trends and prospects for the next two years

Burke, Jeremy and Hung, Angela and Clift, Jack and Garber, Steven and Yoong, Joanne, Impacts of Conflicts of Interest in the Financial Services Industry (February 4, 2015). RAND Working Paper Series WR- 1076. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2794246

Basic Income: A Sellout of the American Dream MIT Technology Review

NSW Budget 2016: Winners and losers

 NSW works on delivering data driven government ...


Financial crime is on the rise in Australia, with the country's senior money-laundering officials saying they've witnessed a dramatic increase in fraudulent transactions. Deputy chief executive of the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, Gavin McCairns, said the volume of data it received every day was growing "exponentially".
Financial crime 'on the rise': AUSTRAC

Governments now require greater scrutiny and assessment of public sector programs to determine whether these programs are ‘working’. August 16-17 Evaluation for the Public Sector

“Facts are often biased against Donald Trump and should be used sparingly in reporting, if at all. ...Fact-checking is at best gauche and at worst treasonous. What is fact? Donald Trump speaks truth, which is bigger than fact.” — Alexandra Petri, humor columnist for the Washington Post 

Kim Brooks (Dalhousie), The High Cost of Transferring the Dream:
This paper is part of a larger project where I use the facts in tax decisions to reveal something about who we are. It looks through a small window into the lives of the people who find themselves caught between our collective and their individual expenditure aspirations. More specifically, it explores the circumstances in which individuals find that their outstanding tax debts pose a threat to their ability to maintain ownership of their home

Brexit earthquake has happened, and the rubble will take years to clear” Guardian

 Only in Silicon Valley could Elizabeth Holmes lose $4.5 billion she never had to begin with Quartz. I still remember the hagiography on Holmes from The New Yorker. Weren’t they supposed to have a fact-checking department?

  Real Estate® is a trends and forecast publication now in its 37th edition, and is one of the most highly regarded and widely read forecast reports in the real estate industry. Emerging Trends in Real Estate ® 2016, undertaken jointly by PwC and the Urban Land Institute ...  

“Even though stories about services like Uber and Airbnb have put the “sharing economy” in the news, just 27% of Americans have ever heard of the term before, according to Pew Research Center’s recent survey of the new digital economy. Moreover, even those who have heard of the term have widely divergent views about what the sharing economy actually is. In our survey, we asked respondents who had heard of the sharing economy to tell us – in their own words – how they would describe the term. After reviewing and classifying nearly 1,300 responses to this question, we uncovered several distinct themes about what people think of when they hear the term sharing economy. Ultimately, the responses made clear that while the term “sharing economy” might mean something specific to those who follow the subject or are deeply embedded in the technology industry, the public as a whole has a very tenuous grasp of what the sharing economy stands for…”

Over the last few years, all but a handful of the most elite law schools have had to engage in some combination of reducing class size, cutting admission standards, and cutting effective tuition (sticker minus discounts). Valpo has done all three...Following up on yesterday's post, NY Times: As Law Grads Seethe With 'Atavistic Rage' At Their Financial Plight, Many Law Schools Confront Stark Choice: Continue To Admit Marginal Students, Or Shut Down:
*Reactions To Yesterday's NY Times Article On The Human Cost Of The Law School Crisis

“This analysis of 47 cases of jihadist-inspired violence carried out in Western countries between January 1, 2012, and the June 12, 2016, Orlando attack sheds light on the evolving terrorist threat. The data shows that the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State have coincided with an increase in the number of attacks, with more than half of all violent incidents taking place in France and the United States. 

Turnbull sucked into bribery scandal Macrobusiness. New Zealand, Canada, Australia… What is it with the Five Eyes, these days?


Data For Good: How big data is saving lives
ADMA, 2016. Interesting video about the data being collected about people’s behaviour and how in the future this could be used to change cultures on a large scale. 
Ed Kane, Professor of Finance at Boston College, believes it’s vital to discuss moral questions, in plain English, without abstractions. Following his own advice, he is blunt in characterizing some of the behavior in the banking industry in recent years: “Theft is a forced taking of other people’s resources,” he says. ‘That’s what’s going on here.” Kane urges a deep inquiry into our culture to understand why bankers so commonly get away with crimes in the United States. Can Philosophy Stop Bankers From Stealing?

US States Take Matters Into Their Own Hands On 'Amazon' Tax


Americans and the new digital economy: 8 key findings: “Digital technology has ushered in a slew of new shared, collaborative and on-demand online services ranging from virtual marketplaces to home sharing. These services have potentially far-reaching implications for consumers and regulators and for the future of work in this country. To examine the scope and impact of these new services, Pew Research Center conducted its first survey devoted to the broader issues of the new digital economy. Here are eight findings from the report…”

Avocados and Other (Delicious) Tax Shelters 
Nice_AvocadosLast night, I flew back from the (wonderful!) AMT conference. After a three-hour storm delay, I landed at Chicago O’Hare and, walking to get my bag, I checked Twitter. A tweet from Voice of San Diego (VoSD) (which seems largely to be a geographically-focused ProPublica) highlighted a convergence between two of my favorite things: taxes and avocados.
I grew up in and around San Diego, and I grew up eating avocados (both in guacamole and BLATform),[fn1] but I’ll confess that I’d never much thought about why there were so many avocados grown in San Diego; I probably always assumed that they were native to Mexico, and that San Diego had a similar climate to Mexico, so they were a natural fit.
I was wrong. Avocados were introduced to L.A. from Nicaragua in 1856; Mexican varieties started coming to California in the 1880s, and the commercial industry began in about 1910. Today, at least 85 percent of U.S. avocado production comes from California, and San Diego County produces about 40 percent of California’s avocados.
It’s unimaginable to me, but avocados weren’t always as popular and prevalent as they are today; in fact, according to the VoSD story (which you really need to read), the production of avocados exploded in the 1970s, with California production jumping from 18,000 acres to 50,000 acres.
Why? VoSD points straight at the tax law, writing that
The roots of the boom may be traced to the late-1960s and early-1970s, when Congress tried to clean up the nation’s tax code, which then allowed scores of America’s wealthiest families to avoid paying any income taxes at all. As part its tax reform effort, Congress closed a loophole that allowed people to avoid taxes by investing in citrus and almonds orchards.
Essentially, then, people who had been sheltering their income by investing in citrus and almond orchards shifted their money to avocados (among other things) Avocados and other delicious tax shelters

How to include solutions in your interviews on social issues

Via BBC – Tom Chatfield 5 June 2016 – “You may be familiar with the statistic that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last few years. It’s true. One of the first mentions of this particular formulation I can find dates back to May 2013, but the trend remains remarkably constant. Indeed, every two years for about the last three decades the amount of data in the world has increased by about 10 times – a rate that puts even Moore’s law of doubling processor power to shame…Here’s the problem with much of the big data currently being gathered and analysed. The moment you start looking backwards to seek the longer view, you have far too much of the recent stuff and far too little of the old. Short-sightedness is built into the structure, in the form of an overwhelming tendency to over-estimate short-term trends at the expense of history…”


It’s Time To Bury “Economic Anxiety” Once And For All as a Campaign IssueMother Jones. But contrast this from Bloomberg (!).

The US economy about to hit a brick wall Business Insider


TaxGrrrl, NFL’s Richard Sherman Talks Football, Taxes & Why Billionaire Owners Should Pay For Stadiums. Politicians think sports stadiums are economic development magic beans. They aren’t

Nellemann, C. (Editor in Chief); Henriksen, R., Kreilhuber, A., Stewart, D., Kotsovou, M., Raxter, P., Mrema, E., and Barrat, S. (Eds). 2016. The Rise of Environmental Crime – A Growing Threat To Natural Resources Peace, Development And Security. A UNEP- INTERPOL Rapid Response Assessment. United Nations Environment Programme and RHIPTO Rapid Response–Norwegian Center for Global Analyses.

Lycamobile's offices raided by French police over money laundering and tax fraud

Why are so many bankers committing suicide? New York Post

How can the world bridge its infrastructure gap? Barry Ritholtz

The Global Trends 2015 compiled by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) notes that 65.3 million people were displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of more than 5 million from 59.5 million a year earlier.
Grandmaster Putin (Grandiose multi-step operation lasting 16 years) Vineyard of the Saker. Chuck L: “A good backgrounder on Eurasian events over the past twenty or so years from a Russian perspective.”
Ukraine Seeks to Eliminate Rampant Corruption Der Spiegel. Resilc: “Our allies.”

Wesfarmers-owned Coles is testing its first online-only store in inner-city Melbourne as its pushes to drive volume in online sales.  Dark Stores

Retail Sector Adds 253,000 Jobs in 10 Months but Aggregate Hours Worked Unchanged: Why? Michael Shedlock


"As they shouted 'I want to commit suicide, I want to set myself ablaze,' two young men set fire to themselves in central Gaza City June 6, in protest against the poor living conditions and economic hardship they face." (Al Monitor)
The punch line? The incident was part of a sketch by "comedians Momen Shwaikh from the Shajaiya refugee camp and Thaer Abu Zubaydah from Bureij camp filmed with a hidden camera for a TV show called 'Tawel Balak' ('Take It Easy').


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