Welcome to the Curious Cat Investing, Economics and Personal Finance Carnival. The carnival is published twice each month. This carnival is different than others in two significant ways. First, I select posts from the blogs I read (instead of just posting those that submit to the carnival). I think this provides readers a better selection of valuable material (many of the best blogs don’t take time to submit to carnivals). And second, I include articles when I think they are interesting. If you are interested in hosting the carnival, add a comment including a link to your blog.
- Savers, who did nothing to create the financial crisis, are being punished – “Our policy makers do need to think about what we are transferring to the banks,” Mr. Todd said. “Why is the public obligated to provide them with all those subsidies? Nobody will ask these questions.” [I agree, the large financial institutions are most responsible for the credit crisis and what they get is welfare paid for by others and they don’t even admit to their welfare status, pretending that the large financial institutions are not getting billions of dollars in direct and indirect aid from the rest of us]
- You’d Be A Fool To Hold Anything But Cash Now, interview with David Stockman – “Q: You sound as if we’re facing a financial crisis like the one that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
A: Oh, far worse than Lehman. When the real margin call in the great beyond arrives, the carnage will be unimaginable.” - The end of cheap China – “Labour costs have surged by 20% a year for the past four years… Labour costs are often 30% lower in countries other than China, says John Rice, GE’s vice chairman, but this is typically more than offset by other problems, especially the lack of a reliable supply chain.”
- Killing the competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets by Barry Lynn – “the basic characteristics shared by all real markets. Most important is an equality between the seller and the buyer, achieved by ensuring that there are many buyers as well as many sellers.” [this is fundamental to how capitalism provides benefits to the society. As markets are made less free (think of any market with very few buyer or sellers – that is lots of them today) the risks increase that society will lose to those few players who can extract monopolistic rents from the broken markets. The concept that free markets result in benefit to society through competition require real markets and competition, just using the word capitalism doesn’t bring the benefits, the system must have capitalistic traits – John]
- What Portion Of Your Portfolio Should You Invest In Bonds? – “The universal rule is quite simple. If you own 100% of your portfolio in stocks and bonds you would invest so that: Bond proportion = your age %; Stock proportion = 100% – bond proportion” [I have a long comment on the post, I disagree with this specific advice today, the concept is sound, but bonds are not the right investment to balance the portfolio – John]
- Adam Smith versus Business by Sheldon Richman – “Smith knew the difference between being sympathetic to the competitive economy – which he called the ‘system of natural liberty’ — and being sympathetic to owners of capital (who might well have acquired it by less-than-kosher means, that is, through political privilege). He knew something about business lobbies.”
- USA Consumer and Real Estate Loan Delinquency Rates from 2001 to 2011 by John Hunter – “Residential real estate delinquency rates fell just 25 basis points (to a still extremely large 9.86%). Commercial real estate delinquency rates fell an impressive 186 basis points (to a still high 6.12%). Credit card delinquency rates fell 86 basis points to a 17 year low, 3.27%.”