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Anyone who travels abroad can see that the United States no longer has a world-class infrastructure. And there’s hard evidence to back up that impression. The World Economic Forum compiles a massive annual “Global Competitiveness Report.” The 2012-2013 edition finds that the United States has fallen well behind many members of the European Union, Canada, and Asian countries such as Singapore, Japan, and South Korea in the overall quality of its infrastructure. We rank 18th in railroads, 19th in ports, 20th in roads, 30th in airports, and 33rd in the quality of our electrical system.

There are three papers that have recently used taxicabs, or Autorickshaws, as it is, to study bargaining and discrimination in prices among various customers. Well, three I have been aware of, at least...

These are (in alphabetical order)

Not one but two companies have now decided that they're going to mine asteroids to collect gold and platinum.

3. Five years of uncertainty ahead of 'Brexit' - Reuters' Hugo Dixon explains what British Prime Minister David Cameron's pledge to hold an 'in-out' referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union means for the economy.

The big story of 2012 was the incredible decline in available housing inventory for sale.  This trend appears to be continuing and is adding a tremendous amount of pressure on the current market especially for those looking to buy.  Ironically, the increase of real estate values will also revive many home owners from their zombie slumber in negative equity.  Over 1.4 million borrowers came out of a negative equity position in 2012.  This is a large number given...

This next chart shows how the value of the yen has been an important factor driving the Japanese equity market. Beginning in 2007, the yen surged from 123 to its all-time high against the dollar in late 2011—a staggering increase of 62%. This coincided quite closely to the 55% decline in the value of the Japanese stock market over the same period. Tight money not only gave Japan a case of deflation, it severely depressed the value of the Japanese equity market. Now, with the yen down 13% since mid-November, the Nikkei 225 is up 26% in dollar terms—a remarkable reversal of fortune.

This Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, shows the US dollar against the Japanese yen since the beginning of the financial crisis.  The dollar fell almost 40% from the peak in 2007 until the low in 2011.  

To him, debt is the driver of the process. Increase debt, generate inflation to erode the value of the debt and come out with “superior” growth!

He forgets that debt is endogenous. Why did the debt ratio rise during the “Great Moderation?” Maybe for the same reason that after being flat (in nominal terms) all through the “Great Inflation”), stock prices trended up for seventeen straight years between 1982 and 1999.

LPS released their Mortgage Monitor report for December today. According to LPS, 7.17% of mortgages were delinquent in December, up from 7.12% in November, and down from 7.89% in December 2011.

  In my time I’ve watched a bunch of countries go south. In the 80’s it was all of South America. Poland, Yugoslavia and South Africa also hit the skids during those years.   There was an...

How Google searches can predict economic indicators and give us an accurate picture of today’s economy.

Must watch TV!

I choose again to harp on my comments made in my first post that spoke to no matter how the Germans chose to repatriate some of their gold, the story was going to spun by the usual conspiracy suspects in order for them to attempt to justify their long standing claims that the vaults in New York were empty.  Business Insider’s title actually goes right to the point.

Deutsche Bank commodity analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu recently weighed in on the German Bundesbank's decision for Business Insider and here’s what they had to say:

Brebner and Xiao write:

The rising labor force participation of the elderly in the last two decades represents a remarkable social change. Here's a figure created with the ever-useful FRED website at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, showing the labor force participation rate of those over age 55, going back to the late 1940s.Through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the notion that more and more people would retire earlier and earlier seemed like an inexorable social trend.

By the way, where were the deficit hawks during the Bush years? Here's what Martin Wolf means by "If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast":