Below is an awesome picture which virtually illustrates of how man is seemingly helpless against wrath of nature. (please spare me the climate change drivel)
It’s just one of the 40 incredible tragic images captured by the Boston’s The Big Picture from yesterday’s 1-2 punch of earthquakes compounded by tsunamis that struck Japan.
See the rest here (ht: Mark Perry)
A popular traditional economic model has reportedly been losing its efficacy.
That’s according to the Wall Street Journal Blog, (bold emphasis mine)
In 1962, Yale professor Arthur Okun laid out in very clear and understandable terms a long-standing relationship between economic growth and the behavior of unemployment. If the economy dropped one percentage point below its long-term growth rate in a given year, the unemployment rate tended to rise by about a third as much. So a recession that pulled economic output three percentage points below the economy’s long-run trend would push the unemployment rate up by a percentage point.
![clip_image001[4]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/_H262-zY4QpU/TXmaIZRxp7I/AAAAAAAAGD0/WcVVr376P9o/s1600-h/clip_image001%5B4%5D%5B2%5D.jpg "clip_image001[4]")
Okun’s law has been a staple tool for economists ever since, but it’s been driving them crazy lately because it doesn’t seem to be working all that well.
The blog gives some possible reasons why the popular model can’t seem to explain today’s environment.
But they seem to overlook what matters.
Anyway here’s a clue from the same article...
Productivity – or output per hour worked by a country’s labor force — continued to rise in 2008, unusual for a recession, and surged by 3.7% in 2009
My bet is that economic models based on the industrial age will fall massively short of explaining the radical changes being brought about by the dramatic advances in technology that has been shaping the current economic framework.
In excoriating mainstream media’s miasmatic logic, author and Professor Steven Landsburg eloquently explains why government debt isn’t the problem.
Instead, government spending is.
Writes Professor Landsburg, (bold emphasis mine)
This is economic illiteracy in spades. The fact is that every single dollar of interest we pay on the national debt comes right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. If you don’t understand that, then you’re not thinking clearly about the national debt.
Suppose the government owes $100 and pays $3 a year in interest. The alternative to paying that interest is to raise current taxes by $100 and pay down the debt. If you do that, taxpayers are going to have $100 less in assets, and will therefore earn less interest on their savings. That costs them (roughly) the same $3 a year.
In other words, the damage was done back when the government spent that $100 in the first place. (Of course, if the $100 was spent wisely, the damage might have been worth doing. Or not.) Once that $100 has been spent, the taxpayers are out $3 a year forever regardless of whether the debt is ever paid off.
That’s why I say that the government’s interest payments come right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. The government pays $3 a year as an alternative to taxing you $100 and paying down the debt. The choice to do that puts an extra $100 in your savings account, which earns you $3 a year. There’s the $3 a year coming right back to you. Notice that it comes back to you regardless of whether the government makes its interest payments to Americans, Chinese or Martians. All of the benefits come back to American taxpayers.
Of course, you might choose not to save that $100 the national debt is saving you. That’s fine. Then presumably you’re spending it on something that you value more than an interest flow of $3 a year. Congratulations. You’re a winner.
Or you might grumble that you have no savings vehicle that will pay you the same rate as the government’s paying on its debt. That’s where you’re wrong. You can save by buying government bonds. That will get you exactly the same rate the government’s paying on its debt.
Bottom line
Again Professor Landsburg,
If the government borrows an extra $10 trillion dollars tomorrow in order to cut taxes by $10 trillion, it will have to make, say, an extra $300 billion a year in interest payments (for which we are collectively responsible) and at the same time, we’ll collectively earn an extra $300 billion on our savings portfolios. No favor to the taxpayers, but no harm done either.
It’s important to understand this in order not to be bamboozled by tricksters who try to misdirect every conversation about government spending into a conversation about government debt. It’s spending, not debt, that can impoverish us, and that’s what we should be talking about.
This serves as another vivid example of how the mainstream (deliberately or unwittingly) misreads the effects as the cause, and of ignoring the alternative paths or choices of action (here taxes versus borrowing). For the latter, it has been a predilection for most to focus on the tangible (debt) and dismiss the intangible (tax). Unless you are aware of it, this part of our mental heuristics.
Applied to financial market analysis, this is a fundamental reason why many celebrity gurus got it so bad—most of them misread debt as the primary driver of people’s action via the “aggregate demand” channel. They ignored or underrated money's non-neutral role and the impact of globalization.
Of course, the Landsburg lecture on borrowing and taxation is universally applicable, which means such tradeoff applies to the Philippine government as well.
To paraphrase the famous US Bill Clinton quote, It’s the spending, not the debt stupid!
A little over half of the world’s new billionaires hail from Emerging Markets, particularly from the BRIC (Brazil,Russia, India, China)
According to Forbes,
Brazil, Russia, India and China produced 108 out of the 214 new names added. Lakshmi Mittal of ArcellorMittal fame topped the list at No. 6 among the rich guys in the BRIC countries. His net worth was put at $31.5 billion. ArcellorMittal is the world’s largest steel maker. Brazilian investor and owner of a number of oil and mining companies, Eike Batista, will probably forever be known as the man who helped bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro. His net worth is around $30 billion. Not bad being the son of the guys behind the world’s leading iron ore exporter, Brazilian multinational Vale.
Others in the Top 20:
9. Mukesh Ambani, India, Reliance Industries, $27 billion
11. (This name is perfect…with a name like this, you have to be filthy rich) Li Ka-Shing, China, Hutchinson Whampoa, $26 billion
14. Vladimir Lisin, Novolipetsk Steel, $24 billion
see list here
Let me add that among the top 500, there are lots of non-BRIC emerging markets billionaires. The distribution appears diffused where some are from Latin America (Columbia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina) MENA (Saudi Arabia, South Africa) and ASEAN.
For ASEAN region we have:
Malaysia: Robert Kuok, Lee Shin Cheng, Quek Leng Chan, Teh Hong Piao, Syed Mokhtar AlBukhary and Yeoh Tiong Lay & family
Philippines: Henry Sy (ranked 173rd)
Indonesia: Michael Hartono, Peter Sondakh, Martua Sitorus and Low Tuck Kwong
The growing list of Emerging Market billionaires are just symptomatic of the wealth convergence happening from today’s ‘globalized’ environment.
The Business Insider presents a list of celebrity gurus whose predictions flunked badly.
The Business Insider writes,
Today marks the two-year anniversary of the bull market. In the past twenty four months, the S&P has nearly doubled, from 666 up to 1320.
During this period countless gurus have said it was a sucker's rally and told you to sell.
We hope you didn't listen to them.
Read it all here
My take: what is popular is mostly wrong.
More: wrong information+ inaccurate assumptions + misleading theories =misdiagnosis and subsequently wrong predictions or market actions.
If these people can't read the markets right, then how much more can they be relied on to prescribe the right policies.
Because of the ongoing revolutions in the MENA region, Pew Research attempts to distill on the sustainability of enthusiasm for democracy using past experiences.
In a recent study, using the East Europe’s experience, the Pew Research finds that enthusiasm for democracy has declined.
Pew Research’s James Bell writes,
These findings do not mean that East Europeans were inclined to abandon democracy. Publics across the region broadly endorsed the demise of communism. Rather these opinions point to the gap between what East Europeans hoped for and what they perceived in terms of political change. On one hand, East Europeans generally agreed that two decades of political and economic change had disproportionately benefited business owners and politicians, rather than ordinary people. On the other, many East Europeans felt democratization had yet to match expectations. In 2009, the median percentage in each country who said a fair judiciary, multiparty elections, uncensored media, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and civilian control of the military were very important significantly exceeded the median percentage who claimed these institutions described their country very well.
Reflecting on Mr. Bell’s statement, the issue isn’t about the loss of interest on democracy but rather the mismatch between people’s expectations on their definition or their concept of democracy and that of economic prosperity.
So when economic distribution has had “disproportionately benefited business owners and politicians” this only means that the political economic framework has segued from communism to one of crony capitalism based on a social democratic form of governance.
Furthermore, expectations for more freedom have not been met perhaps due to the same reasons.
This phenomenon seems to reflect on the Philippines too. After two People Power revolts, Filipinos have still been waiting for Godot.
Filipinos appear to be impassioned on democracy as demonstrated by the eagerness to vote. However eventually they get frustrated again. That’s because their expectations clashes with the reality: Filipinos largely see economic salvation from political distribution rather than from their own efforts.
We, Filipinos, seem to have little understanding that political distribution is a zero sum game (one gains the other losses, i.e. picking on Pedro’s pocket and giving to Mario), while economic distribution is a net value added.
Yet this doesn’t mean that any nation aspiring for democracy isn’t fit for it. It takes time for people to learn, understand and embrace the concept of economic freedom and civil liberties as this is a process of discovery.
And it all starts with the “right” education.
$1.1 trillion was spent by nations for defense.
According to the Economist, (bold highlights mine)
THE ten biggest defence budgets for 2010 add up to a total of more than $1.1 trillion, according to the latest Military Balance report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a think-tank. The defence budget of America alone, at $693 billion, accounts for more than 60% of the total. But when defence spending is compared to the overall size of each country's economy, Saudi Arabia tops the list. It spends over 10% of GDP on defence, more than double the proportion spent by America. China ranks second in the world's biggest defence budgets (spending some $76 billion) and also boasts the largest armed forces. Only America, India, Russia and North Korea (not shown) have more than 1m military personnel. Defence budgets have grown since 2005, but the balance of military power may be shifting. Western countries, many of which are engaged in Afghanistan, now face budget constrains and cuts, whilst emerging economies, such as Brazil and China, have increased military spending in line with economic growth.
That’s $1.1 trillion of resources wasted on whimsical government actions designed to promote self interests of the politicians.
Then US President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” Speech poignantly reverberates on this dilemma. (pointer Robert Higgs) [all bold highlights mine]
The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.
The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Bottom line: Politicians use the threat of war to expand control over us. Yet unknown to many, most of these military expenditures represents nothing more than a waste of valuable resources.
At the Thinkmarkets blog, Professor Andreas Hoffmann and Gunther Schnabl explains lucidly the real economic effects of monetary policy distortions.
Mr Hoffmann and Schnabl write, (all bold highlights mine.)
Speculative capital inflows and accelerating reserve accumulation in emerging markets are counteracted with sterilization measures and capital controls. In Brazil capital controls prevent a free allocation of capital to the best uses. In China non-market based sterilization and credit rationing is used to further stimulate the already overinvested export sector. While sterilization keeps credit generally tight (for instance for consumers), the export industries and state owned enterprises enjoy low-cost credit to keep the capital stock growing. As sterilization operations also hold inflation low, the real exchange is kept undervalued what helps to clear the overproduction on international markets.
Even worse: In countries with large raw material sectors, the global liquidity driven raw material price inflation causes huge public surpluses, which are distributed by mostly autocratic governments ad libitum. Rising public expenditure and/or thriving stabilization funds replace “competition as a discovery procedure” by guided structural change and state funded economic development. Dubai loves to invest in a palm shape island and Babylon towers. Russian bureaucrats see potential in pharmaceutical and military industries. Venezuela and Algeria pump money into social security systems to create political stability. The Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority sets up glamorous new cities that shall create more jobs in the name of the King.
While all these policies may be well intended, they distort markets, as public investment in subsidized industries misguides private investment decisions. Investment in industries, which are picked by the government, is risky. Once the golden rain stops, the readjustment will set in. This may happen, once the advanced economies exit from easy money policies as growth prospects lighten up or inflation accelerates. Only then, it will be obvious which of the many economic miracles which we currently observe is real and which is an illusion.
My comment
Notice the distributional effects?
The sectors that benefit from these policies are primarily those connected with the government or the government itself, as I also explain here and here.
And it is why policies of monetary authorities have systemic (externality costs) impact and can’t be ignored or dismissed by free market advocates.
The welfare-based political structure, crony capitalism and central banking have all been intertwined or all interconnected.
Competition for brides, due to gender imbalance, has led to China’s huge savings. That’s according to a study reported by Wall Street Journal Blog.
Writes the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis original italics mine)
Too few brides may be contributing to China’s trade imbalance.
That’s because “desperate parents” are using education and wealth to make their sons stand out as catches in an increasingly competitive marriage market, Professor Wei said.
Speaking on a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on the U.S.-China trade imbalance, Professor Wei said that China’s efforts in the past ten years to step up the social safety net haven’t reassured consumers enough to ease their savings.
Most Chinese consumers save for their children and for retirement, Professor Wei said, a finding put forth in a paper he wrote with Xiaobo Zhang, “The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China.”
Acknowledging that the marriage market was somewhat “outside macroeconomic thinking,” Professor Wei said that his research shows a “very clear pattern” of household savings rates — as well as entrepreneurship — rising as the competition for brides becomes more keen. He and Mr. Zhang, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, elaborated on the phenomenon in another paper, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Sex Ratios, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Growth in the People’s Republic of China.”
The most recent paper explains that areas in China with an acute imbalance of young men seeking wives tend to benefit economically from a high level of hard work and entrepreneurship. The authors attribute this initiative to the competitive marriage market. Young men who want to begin businesses have to turn to their families for start-up money; parents and relatives prepare for that by saving.
My comments:
While there may be some truth to this, which is why this study came about, this seems more of an example of Nassim Taleb’s narrative of Birds do not write books on birds
Think of the following event. A collection of priestly persons from Harvard or some such place lecture birds how to fly. The bird flies. They write books, articles, and reports that in fact the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal link. They even believe their own theories. Birds write no such books, conceivably because they are birds, so we never get their side of the story. Meanwhile, the priests broadcast theirs.
I don’t think the desire of every Chinese family to save is about securing a “bride”.
If this is true then once a groom marries, the couple tends to wind down savings as the incentive to acquire a bride has already been achieved. But of course the argument extends to the next generation, thus becomes circular.
Marriage is just a part of our manifold social activities, surely there many other factors involved such the state of undeveloped capital markets, uncertainties over health, cultural quirks, and government policies among many others.
The above is also a good example of the predilection to aggregate people with numbers and of the experts’ tendency to fall for the clustering illusion trap-seeing patterns where there is none.
Moreover, the study also puts into context Jessica Hagy’s graph of social signalling here.
Of course for me global imbalances is no more than another charade where experts try to pass the blame of their national policies to the others.
This is aside from the folly of applying reductio ad absurdum arguments into people’s trading activities, which has been seen and argued in the context of politics, based on statistical figures rather than trading activities as seen from the human dimensions.
Bottom line: Patterns or correlations does not imply causation.
Higher education is not only in a bubble, but is fast becoming an unviable activity or unworthy of personal investments—meaning costs exceeds the returns.
So argues Professor Laurence Kotlikoff at the Bloomberg, (bold highlights mine)
The notion that education pays and that better education pays better is taken for granted by almost everyone. For college professors like me, this is a very convenient idea, providing a high and growing demand for our services.
Unfortunately, the facts seem to disagree. A recent study by economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger showed that going to more selective colleges and universities makes little difference to future income once one accounts for the underlying ability of the student. Their work confirms other studies that find no financial benefit to attending top-tier schools.
It’s good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University (my employer), and that "better" higher education doesn’t pay better. But does higher education pay in the first place?
The answer seems obvious. On average, doctorate holders earn more than those with master degrees, who earn more than those with bachelor degrees, who earn more than high school graduates. How can education not pay?
The answer is that education isn’t free. Top undergraduate programs are now charging students $50,000 a year to eat, sleep and, hopefully, attend class. But that’s just the direct cost. Education’s hidden cost is the time spent learning rather than earning.
Read the rest here
Again the soaring costs of education are largely due to government’s numerous interventions, which renders what used to be a stepping stone personal development, as unfeasible.
Moreover, rising costs of education also reflects on the old political economic order. This is going to change see here and here.
This is great stuff from Professor Mark Perry. Economics 101 of Protectionism versus Free trade.
Professor Perry writes, (bold emphasis mine)
The graphical analysis above shows what happens economically to a country that moves from: a) free trade with the rest of the world, with consumers paying the world price for a given product, to a b) protectionist trade policy and a new higher price that includes a tariff (tax) that reduces the amount of trade that takes place. Here are the key outcomes of this protectionism:
1. The domestic producers are now better off because they are protected from more efficient foreign competition, and can charge higher prices and increase output. Economically, they have converted consumer surplus (gains) to producer surplus (gains) because of the tariff, and that transfer is represented by the yellow area labeled "Producer Surplus" above. Nothing lost there on net because of the tariff, although domestic producers have used the political process to gain at the direct expense of domestic consumers, who now pay higher prices and purchase fewer units.
2. With a tariff (tax) on imports, the government is now able to generate "Tax Revenue" in an amount represented by the blue rectangle above. This is also a transfer, this time from what used to be consumer surplus (gains from trade) to the federal government. Nothing necessarily lost here either on net, assuming that the government will transfer the tax revenue back to the consumers in the form of beneficial government spending (maybe) or lower taxes elsewhere (maybe).
3. However, the two pink triangles labeled "Societal Loss" are the amount of losses to the consumers and the economy (society) from the protectionist tariffs that are NOT offset by a gain to some other group: producers or government, and represent what economists call the "deadweight loss" or "deadweight cost" of protectionism.
Bottom Line: The deadweight losses from protectionism mean that the economy is worse off on net, or that there has been a reduction in total economic welfare, the total number of jobs, wealth, prosperity, and/or national income. You could argue about the size of the deadweight loss triangles, but it would be really hard to argue that they don't exist. Protectionism has to make the country worse off, on net, and that proposition is supported by 200 years of economic theory and hundreds of empirical studies.
Two additional comments:
-You get economic lessons free on the web.
-When you get to hear people babble about the benefits of protectionism, you can be assured that they’re not dealing with economic realities. Instead, protectionism is grounded on emotionally charged politics—characterized by the rhetoric of good intentions (social signaling or arguing for social conformity purposes or for getting votes), rather than what truly works.
Politics has been shifting along with the evolution in the economy. The problem is that most people’s mindset has still been stuck with archaic models and or of visions of the previous order.
Old One Horse Shay (Wikimedia)
Walter Russell Mead captures neatly this intuitive ‘resistance to change’.
Mr. Mead writes, (bold highlights mine)
Krugman and the Times editorial board are both examples of something important in American life today: left-liberal intellectuals are increasingly able to understand that individual supports of the blue social model are crumbling. But they are still so captivated by the blue model, so profoundly convinced that the Progressive movement’s solutions to America’s social ills in 1910 are still valid today, that they cannot yet look beyond the blue model to imagine a different and brighter future for the United States....
If, as Krugman posits, demand for US workers will be falling in both manufacturing and the professions, how exactly will labor unions get higher wages for their members? Factories will be closing in Krugman’s world and law firms will be turning more and more work over to computers or shipping it overseas. Perhaps stronger unions could make it harder for companies to do this for a while, but ultimately facts speak. Stronger unions making tougher wage demands will not exactly persuade American (and foreign) investors to create new jobs in this country — or to slow down their efforts to reduce their US workforce by outsourcing and automation. When human workers receive rising wages, become harder to fire, and are governed by ever more convoluted and expensive work rules, replacing them with computers becomes more attractive, not less.
Unions tend to flourish when demand for workers is rising (as in China today); they do not and cannot protect the situation of workers as a whole against a background of falling long-term demand for their work.
The problem isn’t that this or that piece of the blue social model is breaking down and needs to be fixed so that the rest of the model can go on working well. It’s not that the university system is broken and that if we fix that the model still works. Ditto the public sector unions or the situation of the labor movement as a whole. Mandating an expensive new set of health care entitlements at a time of looming insolvency won’t help either.
The problem with the blue social model today is systemic. It’s not a problem with one piece or another. The pieces are all falling down and breaking apart at once. It is what happened to the “One Hoss Shay” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem about, they used to teach us back in Pundit High, the breakdown of Calvinist religion in New England.
Read the rest here.
Like the transition of the economic order from agriculture to industry, we are seeing also the same transition from industrial era to the information age. And since the economy drives politics, so will the political structures shift accordingly.
The important point is that these ‘political-economic’ transitions represent a discovery process. It will NOT happen overnight. It will come with painful episodes of trial and errors with many fine tuning along the way.
It will also come with the auto response mechanism known as “resistance to change” especially from entrenched parties that had long benefited from the old order. Walter Mead’s take down of left-liberal intellectuals go along this line of thought.
Labor unions can be compared to current government budget deficits modelled after Bismark’s welfare states. All have been based on the industrial age top-down concept.
And the same top-bottom dynamic goes along with information flows as seen through the previous mainstream media model. But the web has been providing intense competition such that the old force appears to be breaking down. And unlike governments and their apologists, who seem plagued by intellectual stasis, many in the media appear as trying to cope with the changes of the current trends.
While the welfare construct could be seen to have worked earlier, these economically unsustainable platforms have been giving way. In short, the politics of the industrial age may have reached its tipping point.
And as the revolutions in Greece or the MENA, or the standoff in Wisconsin manifests, they operate on a common denominator—the political economic structure of the industrial age has been crumbling.
Many will struggle to maintain the old order, and that’s why transitions are never smooth. But at the end of the day, we are likely to learn how to adjust to these new realities in spite of the conflicts. Alternatively, this extrapolates to "don't fight the trend".
And I close with Mr. Mead’s conclusion...
This is the essence of progress: as we move forward less of our society’s time and energy goes into just staying alive; more of it goes into living better. The key to that now is to move as quickly as possible to reshape these critical professions with the full power of information technology
Amen.
Here is an awesome graphic representation of social signaling from the ever insightful Jessica Hagy. (published on her website Indexed as “So Who’s Winning”)
The US Economic Report of the President acknowledges the crucial role played by entrepreneurship in wealth generation...
America’s small businesses are an essential building block to economic growth and prosperity, in part because entrepreneurs create a disproportionate share of net new jobs in the U.S. economy.
The report includes the following data. (bold highlights mine)
One particularly important contribution of small firms to the Nation’s well-being is the jobs they create. According to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy, small firms accounted for 9.8 million of the 15 million net new private sector jobs created between 1993 and 2009—nearly two out of every three of the period’s net new jobs. In normal times, new small businesses account disproportionately for employment growth. Although many new firms fail, surviving Supporting America’s Small Businesses | 145 firms create enough jobs to offset those lost to firm exits, so that most jobs created by firm births persist. A recent Kauffman Foundation study, for example, shows that startup firms created 3.1 million gross jobs in the United States in 2000. By 2005, about half of the initial firms had failed, but the survivors still employed 2.4 million people (Kane 2010).
(source Tim Kane, Growthology.org Kauffman The Foundation of Entrepreurship)
I am reminded of the great Ludwig von Mises who wrote,
In the capitalist system of society's economic organization the entrepreneurs determine the course of production. In the performance of this function they are unconditionally and totally subject to the sovereignty of the buying public, the consumers. If they fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses and are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position. Other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them.
Entrepreneurs, aside from the capitalists, are the heroes of the modern capitalist (market) economy.
election. Today women hold seats in parliaments across the world, and in one case are even in a majority. This is one of many achievements that will be celebrated on March 8th 2011, which marks the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. Policies and quotas have helped women in politics and in business. In Norway, women make up nearly 40% of board members of the largest listed companies. Yet on average across Europe they only occupy one in every ten board seats. This may improve, with more women than ever now in the global business-school pipeline. In 2010, nearly 106,000 women sat the GMAT exam, an MBA entrance exam, accounting for over 40% of examinees. In the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, 61% of women are active in the labour force. But the difference in male and female employment rates in many countries is still large and persistent. While progress has been made, there is a long way to go before gender equality is reached.
The government presumes to own what you earn, and you are a tax evader!
That’s what the new tax regulation implies.
From the Inquirer.net
Every private citizen earning at least P500,000 annually will now have to file the equivalent of a statement of assets and liabilities and net worth (SALN)—previously required only of public officials.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) said the new rule was meant to give regulators “the whole income picture of [an individual] taxpayer” and to help improve collections by clamping down on tax evasion.
The order, Revenue Regulation No. 2-2011, was signed and issued on March 1 by Finance Secretary Cesar V. Purisima.
Every citizen making at least P38,461 a month (assuming he receives 13 months’ worth of salaries each year) will be required to file a personal SALN to justify his or her gross income to the BIR.
The Philippine Government wants to control you.
Of course, the middle class and the politically unconnected will be the hardest hit, since this is a slippery slope or prelude towards MORE taxes.
And obviously this is being done for the benefit of the politicians and the bureaucracy. See the difference between political and so-called market "greed"?
Maybe these guys don’t know what is going on in the Middle East and Africa.
UPDATE: My friend Paul How deals with the same problem here
From Eric Margolis at the Lew Rockwell.com, (bold emphasis mine)
Bin Laden’s primary goal is overthrowing US-backed autocratic regimes across the Muslim world. Attacking western targets that supported them was only secondary.
Col. Gadaffi was not totally wrong when he blamed al-Qaida for Libya’s uprising. Bin Laden was not pulling the strings of Libya’s rebellion, but al-Qaida’s revolutionary philosophy and anti-western jihad certainly inspired many young people from Morocco to Bangladesh.
That’s Washington’s big problem. Invading Libya will intensify the fires burning in the Arab world and create yet another anti-western jihad.
This is exactly Osama bin Laden’s strategy: draw the bull in the china shop – US into many small wars in the Muslim world – and so bleed it dry. So far, the US has been cooperating with Osama’s master plan.
Great graphic from Bespoke Investment
Bespoke Invest writes,
As shown, the correlation between the stock market and oil remained positive up until just recently, but the breakup between the two has been swift and extreme. At the moment, the one-month correlation between the two stands at -0.70.
As to whether US stocks will continue to fall as oil prices move higher or if the current retracement can be interpreted as just as a normal correction has yet to be determined or resolved.
Putting on too much emphasis on the present action of the US equity markets could mislead because these markets seem to be digesting on new information or simply undergoing a normal profit-taking environment. Remember, no trend moves in a straight line.
Bottom line: the oil-equity causal relationship can't be read as a reliable indicator.
Analyst John Mauldin cites Crestmont Research’s Ed Easterling who argues “stock market is not correlated with economic growth”.
They say “secular bear markets even have higher nominal GDP growth than secular bulls”, with the chart below as proof… 
And also say “34% of the years since 1950 with economic growth have experienced declining earnings per share (EPS) growth!” Again a series of chart below as proof…
I am puzzled.
If “low correlation” means economic growth has not functioned as a good indicator of the direction of the stockmarket price trends, then why the heck, do these experts keep talking about various aspects of “economic growth” at all? This is obviously a cognitive dissonance.
One factor for the insistence of the “economic growth” conversation could be that they don’t agree with the referenced opinion.
A second factor could be entertainment value. Experts write to entertain more than to disseminate positive knowledge.
A third factor could be to use of such contrarian evidence as cover to their earlier misdiagnosis of the markets and the attendant mistakes in prediction.
Finally this could all be about social signalling.
Yet this just goes to show how more and more ‘experts’ appear to be getting lost or confused about what’s been going on. In other words, traditional methodologies and metrics are becoming more dysfunctional.
And all this provides more credence to what I’ve been saying all along.
