In the international trade area, the language is almost always about how we must export, and what’s really good is an industry that produces exports. And if we buy from abroad and import, that’s bad. But surely that’s upside-down. What we send abroad we can’t eat, we can’t wear, we can’t use for our houses. The goods and services we send abroad, are goods and services not available to us. On the other hand, the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things, so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.MP: Here’s a formula summarizing Milton Friedman’s insights:
This carries over to the terminology we use. When people talk about a favorable balance of trade, what is that term taken to mean? It’s taken to mean that we export more than we import. But from the point of view of our well-being, that’s an unfavorable balance. That means we’re sending out more goods and getting fewer in. Each of you in your private household would know better than that. You don’t regard it as a favorable balance when you have to send out more goods to get less coming in. It’s favorable when you can get more by sending out less.
Environmental laws since the 1970s require public input into federal land-use decisions including logging on national forests. This has led to lawsuits challenging efforts by the U.S. Forest Service to prevent forest fires by thinning out trees (most of which are dead or diseased) and brush by machines and carefully controlled burns. This dead wood is the fuel that feeds catastrophic wildfires.
Removing the fuel reduces the likelihood of fires, and if fires do break out, makes them easier to fight. Meanwhile, the suppression of fires costs the federal government nearly $2.5 billion annually.
A fuels-management project to log and thin 4,800 acres in the Bozeman, Mont., watershed exemplifies the problem. This project has been held up since 2010 on grounds that the environmental-impact assessment did not adequately protect the habitat of the Canadian lynx and the grizzly bear, both listed as threatened species.
Now a wildfire threatens the watershed, burning over 10,000 acres and costing more than $2 million to fight. As one firefighter put it, "fire is the environmentalist's way of thinning the forests."
A recent analysis by Trulia concluded that buying a home today is 45% cheaper on average compared to renting a comparable home, see CD post here. That post generated a lively discussion with about 100 comments, and some questioned some of Trulia's assumptions and analysis (or lack of some key assumptions), although I think the general conclusion is valid that buying a home is relatively affordable today compared to renting a similar home -whether it's 10%, 20%, 30% or 45% cheaper.
Environmental laws since the 1970s require public input into federal land-use decisions including logging on national forests. This has led to lawsuits challenging efforts by the U.S. Forest Service to prevent forest fires by thinning out trees (most of which are dead or diseased) and brush by machines and carefully controlled burns. This dead wood is the fuel that feeds catastrophic wildfires.
Removing the fuel reduces the likelihood of fires, and if fires do break out, makes them easier to fight. Meanwhile, the suppression of fires costs the federal government nearly $2.5 billion annually.
A fuels-management project to log and thin 4,800 acres in the Bozeman, Mont., watershed exemplifies the problem. This project has been held up since 2010 on grounds that the environmental-impact assessment did not adequately protect the habitat of the Canadian lynx and the grizzly bear, both listed as threatened species.
Now a wildfire threatens the watershed, burning over 10,000 acres and costing more than $2 million to fight. As one firefighter put it, "fire is the environmentalist's way of thinning the forests."
From today’s report from the National Association of Home Builders:September 18, 2012 – Builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes rose for a fifth consecutive month in September to a level of 40 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI). This latest three-point gain brings the index to its highest reading since June of 2006 (see chart above).MP: The increase in the builder confidence index in September to a six-year high of 40 is a remarkable recovery from a reading of only 14 a year ago. The 24-point improvement in builder confidence over the last year is the largest 12-month gain in the history of the HMI going back to 1985, and surpasses the previous record of a 24-point annual gain in early 1992.
“This fifth consecutive month of improvement in builder confidence provides further assurance that the housing market is moving in a positive direction, but there’s still a long way to go on the road to recovery and several obstacles are slowing our progress,” said NAHB Chairman Barry Rutenberg, a home builder from Gainesville, Fla. “In particular, unnecessarily tight credit conditions are preventing many builders from putting crews back to work – which would create needed jobs — and discouraging consumers from pursuing a new-home purchase.”
“Builders across the country are expressing a more positive outlook on current sales conditions, future sales prospects and the amount of consumer traffic they are seeing through model homes than they have in more than five years,” noted NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe. “However, against the improving demand for new homes, concerns are now rising about the lack of building lots in certain markets and the rising cost of building materials. Given the fragile nature of the housing and economic recovery, these are significant red flags.”
The only black swan negatives on mid-stream MLPs (outside of exploding interest rates which will kill everything else as well) would be tax policy changes and a secular decline in nat gas use.
The above comment is right about one threat to MLPs that may or may not ever come to pass to adversely effect the space but the comment seems to not allow for the possibility of a threat that cannot be reasonably foreseen. If I am reading this correctly then the next question is what percentage of market participants have not acquired the awareness to be be concerned about what they don't know.
Studying private companies with less stringent reporting requirements is obviously a much different level of analysis than studying AT&T (T) or Proctor & Gamble (PG). This will probably be pitched as democratizing and good for America and that might be true but the net effect for individuals that invest will probably be that they get separated from the money they put up.
The company’s biggest division sells auto parts, youprobably know the name NAPA Auto Parts, there a couple of other divisionsincluding industrial components and oddly an office supply division that,although only a sliver of the business, I wouldn’t mind seeing them sell. There is very little debt and the company has been raisingits dividend since the pilgrims landed (slight exaggeration)..jpg)
We have owned a Norwegian stock, Norwegian sovereign debt and a Swedish stock for many years. We bought in for what I perceived, many years ago, as superior fundamental soundness from the top down. More often than not these holdings have done well, occasionally shooting the lights out but occasionally lagging too. As long term holds they have added value but for the last few years they have not done as well. A little over two years ago we added a Danish stock as well that started out very well and then has merely drifted higher.
When I write about investing for the long term this is what I have in mind. People who realize they are investing for the long term toward the goal of having enough money when they need it can take this kind of perspective as opposed to someone who must beat the market this quarter in order to stay in business. In thinking long term, obviously I believe I have been correct with the Nordics and of course believe that for the long term they will continue to do very well (or I'd sell them) but again this is a long term belief. When these stocks were lagging some they continued to pay great dividends and as mentioned above now they might be in for a period of outperformance, hopefully a long run of ourperformance..jpg)
The push back is that there have been no convictions because there is no evidence of actual illegal activity. Obviously unethical is not the same thing as illegal. The solution is complicated and I certainly don't have all the answers but it seems to me that a basic building block of running an investment bank is knowing the law and spending a lot of money to figure out every legal thing that can possibly be done without breaking the law. If you can accept that banks want to do everything they can without getting in legal trouble then it increases the likelihood that nothing illegal was done--or very little that was illegal was done. Again, unethical and unscrupulous are not the same as illegal..jpg)
I guess part of my assumption here is that there are not enough resources to both search for wrongdoing and trying to help everyday people fix things from here. If this does frame it correctly then my vote would be to help people from here but if there are enough resources to to do both then great do both although I think it will be very difficult to find evidence that the then existing laws were broken.
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The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.
In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s.
How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
We have all heard the old saying that giving a man a fish feeds him only for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Redistributionists give him a fish and leave him dependent on the government for more fish in the future.
If the redistributionists were serious, what they would want to distribute is the ability to fish, or to be productive in other ways. Knowledge is one of the few things that can be distributed to people without reducing the amount held by others. That would better serve the interests of the poor, but it would not serve the interests of politicians who want to exercise power, and to get the votes of people who are dependent on them.
Today's "National Home Sales Snapshot" from DQ News is displayed above, which has been updated with U.S. home sales during the last 30 days in 98 of the top 100 MSAs (excludes Louisville and Wichita), and covers about two-thirds of all U.S. home sales. Compared to the same period last year, home sales over the last 30 days have increased by 9.8%, following previous increases in September of 11.3% (last week) and 10.3% (first week of the month). 
We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:
It's a common experience for us to incorporate sounds we hear while we're sleeping into the narrative of our dreams. The real car alarm outside becomes a police siren in our exciting chase through dreamland. Given the way activities and sensations from the real world permeate our dreams, the author of a new study, Calvin Kai-Ching Yu at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, has investigated whether the simple fact of our sleeping position can also affect the kinds of dreams we're likely to have.
Amidst recent fraud scandals in social psychology and other sciences, leading academics are calling for a greater emphasis to be placed on the replicability of research. "Replication is our best friend because it keeps us honest," wrote the psychologists Chris Chambers and Petroc Sumner recently."Over one third of studies did not describe the number of trials, trial duration, and the range and distribution of inter-trial intervals. Fewer than half reported the number of subjects rejected from analysis; the reasons for rejection; how or whether subjects were compensated for participation; and the resolution, coverage, and slice order of functional brain images."Other crucial detail that was often omitted included information on correcting for slice acquisition timing, co-registering to high-resolution scans, and the modelling of temporal auto-correlations. In all, Carp looked at 179 methodological decisions. To non-specialists, some of these will sound like highly technical detail, but brain imagers know that varying these parameters can make a major difference to the results that are obtained.
Today, September 21, is World Alzheimer's Day and to mark the date Alzheimer's Disease International has published a new report on combating the stigma of Alzheimer's Disease.
In case you missed them - 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:
