Welcome to the Curious Cat Investing, Economics and Personal Finance Carnival. This carnival is different than other carnivals: I select posts, and articles, from what I read (instead of posting those that submit to the carnival as many carnivals do). If you would like to host the carnival add a comment below.
- How Much Should You Contribute To Your 401k? by David Weliver – “If your employer matches 401k funds, contribute enough to get the full match. Do this first. Even if you’re in debt. Even if you don’t put in a penny more. Next, if you can contribute to a Roth IRA, work on contributing the full $5,000 a year to that account before you contribute elsewhere.”
- USA’s creaking infrastructure holds back economy by Paul Davidson – “The U.S. is spending about half of the $2.2 trillion that it should over a five-year period to repair and expand overburdened infrastructure, says Andrew Herrmann, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Inland waterways, for example, carry coal to power plants, iron ore to steel mills and grain to export terminals. But inadequate investment led to nearly 80,000 hours of lock outages in fiscal 2010, four times more than in fiscal 2000. Most of the nation’s 200 or so locks are past their 50-year design life.” - Earth to Dimon: Banks Don’t Have a Right to Profit by Yves Smith – “banks that exist only by virtue of state-granted charters — and more recently, huge transfers from the public — have persuaded public officials and regulators that they have a God-granted right not just to high levels of profit but also high levels of employee and executive compensation.”
- Road Map for Saving Health Care with Fareed Zakaria – “our [USA] out-of-control health care costs continue to climb. No other nation spends more than 12 percent of its economy on health care. America spends 17 percent. What’s more, we don’t really benefit from the huge price tag. Our healthy life expectancy, the standard measurement, ranks only 29th in the world, behind Slovenia… All of them, including free market havens like Taiwan, have found that they need to use an insurance or government sponsored model. And all of them provide universal health care at much, much lower costs than we do.”
- Which are the undervalued countries these days? by Tyler Cowen – “1. Philippines. Their rate of growth has been picking up as of late, they have plenty of “low hanging fruit,” they don’t rely too heavily on durable goods exports to the wealthier countries (that’s the bad news too, of course), and sooner or later they are due for a burst of investor attention. I don’t wish to oversell this one, but we are talking ‘undervalued’ here, not ‘the next Singapore.'”
- How to sue a telemarketer – “I counted 5 violations, at $500 per violation, plus triple damages, for a total of $7,500. But the TCPA states that you can sue for $500 for each violation, not each violating call, so I think I should have sued for much more, since each call contained numerous violations… I emailed back and forth with the CEO, as he tried to threaten and persuade me to settle. He originally told me he would settle for nothing more than $2,000, then upped to $3,000, and, at 11:30pm, offered me $4,000, which I took.”
- Apocalypse Fairly Soon by Paul Krugman – “Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years.”
Sunrise at Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia by John Hunter