Maybe Valuations Do Matter – J.Q.
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Audit the Fed Legislation Sinks: Plan Accordingly
This article, sent in by C.T., should run right along side that one: Vote to Audit the Federal Reserve, guess who didn’t vote?
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Items from Professor Preponomics:
U.S. News
Puerto Rico’s Slide (Bloomberg) Excerpt: “Puerto Rico has the population of Oklahoma and a gross domestic product smaller than Kansas. It also has more debt— $70 billion— than any U.S. state government except California and New York. This fact and the reasons behind it help explain why the territory has tumbled over a fiscal cliff, and why the resulting dismay extends to investors far beyond the Caribbean island. It’s a tale of financial mismanagement, Wall Street complicity and good intentions gone awry.”
Fiscal Failures (Taxpayers for Common Sense) If we fail to make the tough decisions, those decisions will ultimately be made for us. Excerpt: “What I want, but don’t necessarily expect to hear, is a challenge to the country and to Congress to move beyond the now non-stop pontificating about how to bring the country’s fiscal house in order. For the duration of this presidency, and several years before, policy makers have been publicly searching for ways to reduce our national debt, shrink the deficit, and make the difficult decisions of prioritizing what we must do for a healthy country. Yet when it comes to actually making those tough decisions, by investing only in what we can afford to do and stopping what we can no longer afford, both the president and Congress have failed.”
New Reporting Rule Flushes Out $3T of Hidden Global Debt(Contra Corner) All too often debt hides in the shadows of accounting. Excerpt: “Companies around the world will be forced to add close to $3tn of leasing commitments to their balance sheets under new rules from US and international regulators— significantly increasing the net debt that must be reported by airlines and retailers.”
What Blows Up Next? Pension Funds with Nowhere to Hide (Dollar Collapse) Excerpt: “…however they got here, it’s now all but certain that pension funds will soon start blowing up, either defaulting on promised benefit or bond payments, leveraging themselves for one last roll of the dice, or demanding new taxes that cause local political chaos.”
International News
How China Could Trigger a Global Crisis (Washington Post) Excerpt: “The question, though, is whether China is sicker than it seems and how contagious that would be for the global economy.”
The World’s Strangest Currencies (Visual Capitalist) From Parmesan cheese to tea bricks, this is an interesting look at currency across history. Perhaps we will see these forms of currency again?
Personal Economics and Household Finance
Save Money: 18 Popular Salad Dressing Recipes (Living on the Cheap) Better food. More affordable. Fun and tasty too. Excerpt: “Bottled salad dressing is common on the dinner table in households across America. While convenient, these prepared salad dressings are much more expensive than those you prepare from scratch.”