Sri Krishnan Temple, Singapore

• The Economics of Netflix’s $100 Million New Show – “ith Netflix spending a reported $100 million to produce two 13-episode seasons of House of Cards, they need 520,834 people to sign up for a $7.99 subscription for two years to break even.”
• Chart of Top Countries for Manufacturing Production 1999-2011 by John Hunter – “the four leading nations for manufacturing production remain solidly ahead of all the rest. Korea and Italy had manufacturing output of $313 billion in 2011 and Brazil moved up to $308 are in 4-6 place. Those 3 countries together could be in 4th place (ahead of just Germany). Even adding Korea and Italy together the total is short of Germany by $103 billion.”
• Why a Transaction Fee Matters to You by David Brin – “By raw extrapolation, this zero-point-zero-three-percent (0.03%) fee could raise a whopping deficit-curbing $352 billion dollars in ten years, while helping capital markets to settle down” [I agree we should use a very small fee to raise money and reduce incentive for high frequency trading/frontrunning – John]
• Mexico: The New China – “Today, what Shenzhen is to Hong Kong, Tijuana is becoming to San Diego. You can drive from our San Diego engineering center to our Tijuana factory in 20 minutes, no passport required. (A passport is needed to come back, but there are fast-track lanes for business people.)”
• Why I added ConocoPhillips to my Dividend Income portfolio by Jim Jubak – “I still like these shares as a dividend income play, however, even at this slightly higher price. Through a series of asset sales and the May spin off of its refining assets into a separate company, Phillips 66 (PSX), ConocoPhillips has turned itself into the biggest U.S.-based independent exploration and production company.”
• Adding Passive Income Flows: Buying A Farm? Am I Crazy? – “The world population continues to expand and is likely to keep doing that for a significant amount of time. Much of that growth is happening in emerging countries which are quickly increasing food imports as they can gradually afford to do so. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that food prices have increased so much in the past few years and I honestly don’t think there’s anything that will stop that increase.”
• Health Care Costs Continue to Grow Including Costs Missed in Economic Data by John Hunter – “The burden of long term supervisor care (that which can be provided by a non-health care professional) is one reason a resurgence in multi-generation housing options make sense to me. There are other good reasons also (child care, socialization, financial support to the young…). There are some real advantages and real disadvantages to such options.”

• QE3 is Ben Bernanke’s masterstroke of market manipulation by Matt Phillips – “it’s way more profitable to make mortgages now than it was during the peak of the housing frenzy. This is because at that time banks were competing like crazy to make new mortgages, driving profit margins way down.”
• Long Term View of Manufacturing Employment in the USA by John Hunter – “In 1980 manufacturing jobs accounted for over 22% of USA jobs; by 1990 that fell to 17%, by 2000 to 14% and by 2010 to 10%.” During this period jobs fell from 18 million to 12 million while manufacturing output increased.


Fruit at outdoor market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia by John Hunter.

• Let’s Increase America’s Savings Rate in November! by Jim Blankenship – “Recent figures have shown that we Americans are doing a little bit better of late, at a 5% savings rate versus around 1% back in 2005 – but this is a dismal figure when you consider how most folks are coming up short when they want to retire.”
• The Importance Of Elizabeth Warren by Simon Johnson – “We should confront excessive market power, irrespective of the form that it takes. We need a new trust-busting moment. And this requires elected officials willing and able to stand up to concentrated and powerful corporate interests. Empower the consumer – and figure out how this can get you elected.”
• Dollar-cost averaging just means taking risk later by Vanguard – If an investor is “satisfied with his or her target asset allocation, and is comfortable with the risk/return characteristics of each strategy, the prudent action is investing the lump sum immediately to gain exposure to the markets as soon as possible.”
• Savings Snowball Update – “Even though I’m within $10 of my previous Emergency Fund goal, I’m not stopping now! My rent was just raised, so the previous goal wouldn’t really cover 3 months of living expenses any more. It’s time to bump the goal up to a solid $5,000.”
• Private Equity Funds Investing in Single Family Housing by Prashant Gopal and John Gittelsohn – “The company projects an average net yield, or cash flow after all expenses and management costs, of about 8.5 percent for purchases this month, Fuhrman said. It can finish renovations in an average of 15 days for about $15,000 per house and get a tenant in a property in at most 21 days after it’s available for lease, he said.”
• The news on the Greek debt deal is bad enough that I’m raising some cash today by Jim Jubak – “the unpleasant truth that even with the latest austerity package Greece is not on track to reduce its debt to GDP ratio to a sustainable level—defined as 120%–by the 2020 deadline. Some calculations show that the ratio would be 145% by the deadline.”

• We Need a Warby Parker for Mattresses by Rohin Dhar – “Like eyeglasses, mattress technology is fairly stable. Yet, publicly traded mattress wholesalers have gross margins of 41-64% (TPX, ZZ, SCSS). Across the industry, the retailers then mark up the mattresses another 96% on average (calculated from here). By the time a customer buys a mattress, it costs them ~74% more than the production cost of the product. An 74% gross margin is a lot of room for a startup to figure out how to acquire customers!”
• Manufacturing Output as Percent of GDP from 1980 to 2010 by Country by John Hunter – “For the 10 largest manufacturing countries in 2010, the overall manufacturing GDP percentage was 24.9% of GDP in 1980 and dropped to 17.7% in 2010.”
  

  This chart shows manufacturing output, as percent of GDP, by country and was created by the Curious Cat Economics Blog based on UN data. You may use the chart with attribution.

• Wall Street doesn’t know what business it is in by Mark Cuban – “Regulators have got to start to recognize that traders are not investors and vice versa and treat them differently. Different regulations. Different tax structure. Different oversight. Individual investors and the funds that just invest in stocks and bonds are not going to crash the market. Big traders who are always leveraging up and maximizing the number of trades/hacks they make will always put the system at risk…
  There is absolutely NO VALUE to High Frequency Trading. None.”
• Who is speaking for the poor? by Felix Salmon – “the smarter you are (as measured by IQ), the more likely you are to be invested in the stock market. And this distribution is independent of wealth… Most impressively, check out this paper from 2007. It asked just three “simple mathematical questions” of couples to judge the numeracy of each one. If neither got any questions right, the total wealth of the couple, on average, was $202,000. If they both got one question right, it was $505,000. If they both got two questions right, it was $853,000. And if they both got all three questions right, their average wealth on average was a whopping $1.7 million. (If they got different scores from each other, the wealth ended up somewhere in between.)”
• Too Big to Fail and Too Risky to Exist by William Quirk – “In 1989, the CEOs of our seven largest banks earned an average of $2.6 million. In 2007, the average CEO income had risen to $26 million… In 2011, Phil Angelides, chairman of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, summarized the problem: ‘These banks are too big to fail. They’re too big to manage. They’re too big to regulate. They’re too complex to understand and they’re too risky to exist. And the bottom line is they offer very little benefit.’ (as you can imagine CEO’s taking $26 million [and all the other well paid minions] want to continue doing whatever allows that and they pay the politicians enough to avoid and actual fixes being implemented – John).
• Europe’s crisis will be followed by a more devastating one, likely beginning in Japan – “About half of the Japanese government’s annual budget now goes to pensions and interest payments. As the government has spent more and more to support its growing elderly population, Japanese savers have willingly financed ever-increasing public-sector debts… Japanese savers are essentially tendering their savings in return for newly issued government debt, which is not backed by hard assets. It is backed only by an aging, shrinking population of taxpayers.”
• The Rise of Market Correlations – “…formed the bases of Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). The correlations between individual assets and their impact on the overall portfolio return/risk profile are crucial elements of this theory. MPT has received many recent criticisms; however, the contributions to managing risk through uncorrelated investments are invaluable to the long-term success of individual investors.”
• Surprise! There Are 386,000 More Jobs Than We Thought – “We thought the U.S. economy added just under 2 million jobs between March, 2011 and March, 2012. Turns out, the actual number was more like 2.4 million — a big difference!”

Also see related investing and economics books and articles.

• A controlled break-up of the euro would be hugely risky and expensive – “Estimating the price of a “Grexit” is guesswork, but Germany’s share might reach €110 billion of this, about 4% of the country’s GDP.”
• Personal Finance: Minimal Budgeting by John Hunter – “I just leave that in my checking account and what is in checking is what I have to spend… I couldn’t spend any more, I didn’t have it. If I were to go over (I never did), but if I were to have (say my credit card bill exceeded my checking account balance), I would have had to reduce my cash the next month.”
• Are Dividend Stocks Overvalued? Four Reasonable Blue-Chips to Consider by Matt Alden – “Although I do think the market as a whole is modestly expensive (via the Shiller P/E for an overview as well as inspection of individual securities), dividend stocks in general do not appear to be at dangerous valuations.” [Aflac has been on my almost buy list for over a year – John]
• Actually, The U.S. Lost 1.2 Million Jobs Last Month by Jacob Goldstein – “Everyone (including us) is saying this morning that the U.S. economy gained 163,000 jobs last month. Strictly speaking, this is a lie. In fact, the U.S. economy actually lost 1.2 million jobs last month. There were 134.1 million jobs in June, and 132.9 million jobs in July… the government releases “seasonally adjusted” jobs numbers every month. The basic idea is to correct for these predictable fluctuations.”
• Current crisis exposes weakness in China’s economic system by Jim Jubak – “The current obvious fakery is degrees of magnitude different from the usual distortion in Chinese economic data. So, for example, the Public Safety Bureau has simply stopped publishing data on new car registrations because the numbers show such a big drop in new car sales that they can’t simply be fudged. Data on the steel industry has been revised and revised again because the government can’t come up with a methodology that disguises the drop in steel sales and yet isn’t completely unbelievable. And, of course, the government hasn’t published data on the number of vacant apartments in China—a reflection of the country’s real estate boom and bust—since 2008.”
• For the first time since 1998 more money leaves China than enters it – “more than 16% of China’s rich have already emigrated, or handed in immigration papers for another country, while 44% intend to do so soon. Over 85% are planning to send their children abroad for their education, and one-third own assets overseas.”

More and more the ability to continue to delay the huge problems continued from the credit crisis (too big to fail fakery plus the decades of the USA and Europe living beyond their means) seems to be coming to an end. And onto that the problems in China and it is difficult to see how we avoid big problems. It is amazing the bad behavior in the USA and Europe has been only as bad as it has the last 4 years – but there is a very good chance that will not continue. China is not looking like it can be a savior. Certainly India is not doing much right recently. Japan continues to struggle. 2013 looks very tough economically. Eventually the central bank games of given essentially huge cash payments to bankers will cause people to lose faith in those currencies (frankly I can’t understand why they haven’t already). When that happens we will see some real problems.

• The Apple (Used) Premium? by Daniel Mrdjenovich – “In short, if the Apple product you desire is available refurbished, you are in luck. Refurbished Apple products seem to be a rare case of a great deal with very limited downside. If you can’t find a refurbished version of the product you are looking for, you have a more difficult dilemma. A 17% discount on a used Apple device is a nothing to sneeze at but it’s not enormous either.”
• The fiscal cliff and rationality by James Hamilton – “Although the risks are real, the rational thing to expect is that the actual fiscal contraction next year will be significantly more modest than what is implied by existing law. But the cumbersome process of getting to that outcome will once again exact its own unique toll.”
• Idle corporate cash piles up by David Cay Johnston – “newly released IRS figures show that in 2009 these companies held $4.8 trillion in liquid assets”
• Case Shiller Home Price Indexes Surge – “The real estate market news keeps getting a little bit better as Standard & Poor’s reported big increases for the Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes in May, both the 10-city and 20-city indexes rising 2.2 percent for the month on an unadjusted basis after gains of 1.3 percent in April.”
• USA Treasury Yield Fall to New Record Low by John Hunter – “The yields are corporate bonds are not good for companies that are strong. The alternatives are not great. But real assets, strong dividend stocks, strong company stocks, and short term bonds seem like better options to me in many cases.”
• The role of high salaries and wages in health care inflation – “A physician practicing in a primary care setting, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earned an average of just over $200,000 in 2010, while specialists averaged over $355,000 (the highest of any professional category tracked). By comparison, lawyers average just over $110,000, airline pilots about $92,000… all this expense is not producing significantly better health care outcomes.”
• Top International Dividend Stocks, Time To Stay Away From A Few Countries (Spain?!) – “Today I’m posting a ranking of the top names that I follow, companies that are based elsewhere but traded on US markets (not as pink sheets), making it easy and cheap.”

• A Nation of Public Housing by Neal Peirce – “One government agency manages 80 percent of the housing stock — all called public housing. It checks your age and whether you’re married to decide whether and when you’re eligible for an apartment.” Racial quotas are used, unmarried people can’t apply until they turn 35. Any guess on what country this is? The same country is ranked as the easiest, or close to it, country run business in the world.
• China’s end game:the dark side of a great deleveraging by Dee Woo – “The dilemma is that business entities will need more and more credit to achieve the same economic result, therefore will be more and more leveraged, less and less able to service the debt, more and more prone to insolvency and bankruptcy. It will reach a turning point when the increasing number of insolvencies and bankruptcies initiate an accelerating downward spiral for underling assets prices and drive up the non-performing loan ratio for the banks. And then the over-stretched banking system will implode. A full blown economic crisis will come in full force. The chain of reaction is clearly set in the motion now.
  …
  The biggest problem for China is the state, central enterprises and crony capitalists wield too much power over national economy, have too much monopoly power over wealth creation and income distribution, and much of the GDP growth and vested interest groups’ economic progress are made on the expanse of average consumers stuck in deteriorating relative poverty.”


Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky by John Hunter

• Challenges faced by middle-class L.A. families by Meg Sullivan – “Managing the volume of possessions was such a crushing problem in many homes that it actually elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers. Only 25 percent of garages could be used to store cars because they were so packed with stuff.” (read the book: Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century)
• USA Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) by John Hunter – Benefits have a maximum of $2,346/month (in 2011). The average benefit payment now is $1,111. More than 8.7 million people are received disability benefits currently (partially disabilities are not eligible for SSDI.
• Chinese economy is slowing and is likely to slow a lot more – “After three decades of annual growth averaging 10%, China’s bullet-train economy is slowing markedly… This year growth in gross domestic product could slip to 8%—and it may get a lot worse from there…”
• U.S. sugar program pitting growers against soda and candy firms by Kim Geiger – “Makers of sodas, candy bars and other sweetened snacks are taking aim at a long-standing federal program that keeps sugar prices high by restricting imports.” [Yet another special interest favored for decades by politicians. One day we will learn to stop electing these people that sacrifice the interests of the country to favor those giving politicians cash. This is one of the smaller redirection of public goods to special interests but it is such a blatant abuse that has gone on for decades that it helps illustrate how corrupt our political system is. – John]
• 5 Signs of the Chinese Economic Apocalypse: From hog ratios to growing coal stockpiles, the Chinese economy is blinking red by Trefor Moss – “Chinese prosecutors have said that close to 19,000 officials have been caught in the last 12 years while trying to flee overseas with money earned illegally… China’s wealthy and politically powerful are often members of the same family, and if China really does go into recession, a lot of rich people may decide to cut and run.”
• When the Storms Pass, the U.S. Dollar Will Be Hung Out to Dry by Jeff Opdyke – “Currencies like the Norwegian krone and the Canadian dollar will continue to have long-term strength because of these fundamental trends. Hand-in-hand, currencies with direct exposure to growing markets, such as the Singapore dollar, which stands as the gateway to Southeast Asia, will also find continued strength after the storms have cleared.”
• Patent trolls cost economy $29 billion yearly – “An earlier study by the same two academics measured indirect costs of patent troll lawsuits, using public companies’ stock prices as a proxy for the damages. That study found those costs to be about $83 billion annually… The $29 billion number comes from measuring the more straightforward costs associated with fighting off patent troll suits…”

Mushroom, Rocky Gap State Park, Maryland, USA by John Hunter

• The U.S. Content of “Made in China” by Galina Hale and Bart Hobijn (SF Federal Reserve) – “Goods and services from China accounted for only 2.7% of U.S. personal consumption expenditures in 2010, of which less than half reflected the actual costs of Chinese imports. The rest went to U.S. businesses and workers transporting, selling, and marketing goods carrying the “Made in China” label.”
• 7 equations to build a secure retirement by Robert Powell – the equations are not complex but might scare those that don’t like math. Even without really understanding the equations the text is useful.
• Stock Market Capitalization by Country from 1990 to 2010 by John Hunter – The USA was 32.5% of the total stock market capitalization of the global stock markets in 1990. The USA grew to 46.9% as the tech, finance and housing bubbles were all underway (also Japan was stagnating and the Chinese stock market hadn’t started booming to a significant extent) in 2000. By 2010 the USA was back down to 31.4%.
• 5 stages of retirement crisis–and what to do about yours by Jim Jubak – “Certainly you weren’t planning for three-month Treasury bills to be paying you 0.08% or 10-year Treasuries 1.61%. And you’re worried by projections that say the real return on stocks going forward is going to be more like 5% (if we’re lucky) than the 7.5% real return that has been the assumption of choice recently. (That assumption replaces the 10% assumption that was the common wisdom in the years before the 2000 bear market.)
• One more summit: The crisis rolls on by Charles Wyplosz – “There was nothing on collapsing Greece, nothing on unsustainable public debts in several countries, and no end in sight to recession in an increasing number of countries.”
• US Stocks are Expensive and Bonds are Disgusting by Robert Huebscher – “Abnormally high earnings will lead to disappointing US equity returns, Grantham said. ‘The great majority think US equities are reasonably cheap, he said, ‘but we don’t, because we want them to be priced to normal earnings.’ … The ‘real problem’ among asset classes is bonds, Grantham said. Their overvaluation is the result of Fed policies that have artificially depressed real interest rates.
• Real House Prices and Price-to-Rent Ratio by Bill McBride – “In real terms – and as a price-to-rent ratio – prices are mostly back to late 1990s or early 2000 levels.”

• Big Investors Don’t Know Where to Put Their Cash by Sven Böll and Martin Hesse – “‘In the past, we searched for risk-free returns.’ He pauses for effect. ‘Today we know that what we mainly have are investments with return-free risk.’… Corporate bonds and the sovereign debt of emerging economies, once something for the intrepid, are suddenly seen as safe havens.”
• Are More Bailouts to Banker and Politicians the Answer to the Credit Crisis Aftermath? by John Hunter – “It feels to me similar to a situation where I have maxed out 8 credit cards and have a little bit left on my 9th. You can say that failing to approve my 10th credit card will lead to immediate pain. Not just to me, but all those I owe money to. That is true. But wasn’t the time to intervene likely when I maxed out my 2nd credit card and get me to change my behavior of living beyond my means then?”


My parents in front of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Photo by John Hunter, see more of my photos.

• The Great Recession is changing our behavior–in ways that point to slower growth for a longer period of time by Jim Jubak – “The third, most powerful in its effects and the least obvious, is the way that the Great Recession has undermined existing belief in financial security. That decline in real and perceived security is likely to change where people put their money, what kinds of returns they think they can count on, and, therefore, how much money they think they can spend and how much they have to put away.”
• A Global Perfect Storm by Nouriel Roubini – “To prevent a disorderly outcome in the eurozone, today’s fiscal austerity should be much more gradual, a growth compact should complement the EU’s new fiscal compact, and a fiscal union with debt mutualization (Eurobonds) should be implemented. In addition, a full banking union, starting with eurozone-wide deposit insurance, should be initiated, and moves toward greater political integration must be considered, even as Greece leaves the eurozone.
  CommentsUnfortunately, Germany resists all of these key policy measures…”
• On The Verge Of A European Collapse? Spain Prime Minister “The Euro Is At Risk” – “Unemployment rates are sky high everywhere, especially for young people in Europe. 50% People under 30 years old are jobless in Spain, almost 23% of the entire Greek workforce is looking, the US unemployment rate has climbed back over 8%…”
• Over-indebtedness in Microfinance – Who Should Bear the Risk? by Jessica Schicks – “Our over-indebtedness study in Ghana shows that many borrowers only manage to repay their loans on time because they go through unacceptably high personal sacrifices. Instead of delaying or stopping repayments when idiosyncratic shocks hit and debt service becomes unmanageable, borrowers absorb these shocks with personal suffering.”
• Expenditures on Children by Families, 2011 (pdf) by the US Department of Agriculture – “In 1960, average expenditures on a child in a middle-income, husband-wife family amounted to $25,229, or $191,723 in 2011 dollars. By 2011, these estimated expenditures climbed 23 percent in real terms to $234,900 (assuming a family had child care and education expenses on a child). Housing was the largest expense on a child in both time periods and increased in real terms over this time. Food was also one of the largest expenses in both time periods, but decreased in real terms.”
• Looking for Yields in Stocks and Real Estate by John Hunter – “I would want to have a stable of at least 10 very strong stocks for any significant amount of retirement money I was relying on for dividends. Some others to consider [in addition to ABT, INTC, PFE, AAPL]: PG (3.7%), Aflac-AFL (3.4%) and Kimberly Clark-KMB (3.8%). I personally would add to that with a few like OKS (that offer higher yields but that I didn’t want to commit as much to)…”

• 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.”


Sunrise at Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia by John Hunter

• 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.”

• Long Term Care Insurance – Financially Wise but Current Options are Less Than Ideal by John Hunter – “The questions about long term care insurance are not about the sensibility of the coverage abstractly, it is very wise. But the complexities, today, in the real world make the question of buying more a guess about what coverage you will actually receive if you need it.”
• Figuring Out The Real Price Of College by Jacob Goldstein – “For the current school year, the average sticker price for tuition and fees at a private, nonprofit college is $28,500, according to a report from the College Board.

  The average price students actually pay is less than half that — $12,970. That’s almost identical to the $12,650 that students paid, on average, in the 2001-2002 school year. (These are inflation-adjusted dollars.) Of course, this is just the average. What students actually pay varies wildly.”



Marina Bay Sands Casino, Singapore. Singapore added their first two casinos in 2010 and have already the 2nd most gambling revenue of any area: after Macau and ahead of Las Vegas.

• The Philippines Astounds the Skeptics by Bruce Einhorn – “Much of the credit for the good feeling should go to Aquino and his efforts to tackle corruption and improve the country’s infrastructure… As wages rise in China, the Philippines has a chance to attract investment from companies looking for low-wage alternatives, but the country’s notorious culture of bribery remains a major obstacle to growth”
• Periodic Table Of Dividend Champions by David Van Knapp – the post looks at the 105 stocks raising dividends 25 straight years and looking at current yield and dividend growth rate highlights 34 for further study by an investor “Similarly, some investors may be interested in stocks that have a low current yield coupled with a high rate of dividend growth.”
• Why You Should Teach Your Kids Personal Finance Now – “We all want the best for our kids, and although our focus is generally on getting them into a good school and insuring their health, parents also need to take the time to focus on proper financial education. Not only with teaching proper finance skills keep your kids from becoming a consumer debt statistic, but it will also allow them to achieve their future financial goals more easily.”
• Canada’s only experiment in guaranteed income – “For a four-year period in the ’70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments… Only two segments of Dauphin’s labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families.”
• Why France Has So Many 49-Employee Companies by Gregory Viscusi and Mark Deen – “Once a company has at least 50 employees inside France, management must create three worker councils, introduce profit sharing, and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers for economic reasons… The cost of labor isn’t the main problem, it’s the rigidities… With 2.9 million people out of work—the worst joblessness in 12 years—France may need to overhaul its rigid labor laws.”

Related: Investing dictionary – personal finance articles and books