TradingEconomics.com - Economic Data for 196 Countries

TradingEconomics.com - Economic Data for 196 Countries:

This is a great site for country statistics.

Pull up the country to get more detail and trends.

The main page right now shows the fastest growing GDPs (Mongolia, Bolivia, Rwands and Kazakhstan). And the slowest (Iceland, Paraguay, Portugal).

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Crises of Generational Proportions Boomers - BoomAge... Economist...

The next crisis: Sponging boomers | The Economist:

The math is ugly. This is a great article that summarized some really big key issues that arise from the generational move of the Boomers into retirement. BoomAge could be the syndrome.

Those age 65 or older are expected to consume about $333B more in benefits/services than they paid in taxes. No worries, let's let our kids and grandkids take care of that bill.

And the bad thing about doing nothing (gridlock and more) is that it simply delays the solution and compounds the impact.

Some really cool (ugly really, but interesting) stats are the impact that inflation has had on the US national debt. The young, with debt, benefit from inflation. Older, with savings, get hit. The voting and politically active retirees will increase by almost 10% to 26% of the voters and will have time to push for services, benefits and low inflation.

Social Irresponsibility: Debt, Population, Inflation, Politics, gridlock, Boomers, BoomAge

Article also posted to SustainZine.

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Obama Uses Budget to Set Election-Year Priorities - NYTimes.com

Obama Uses Budget to Set Election-Year Priorities - NYTimes.com:

Obama has come out with his budget for FY2013. (Note that the US gov does not use the calendar year.)

This budget is aiming for less than $1T deficit for next year and getting the Federal debt down to a "sustainable?" level by 2017.

With the laps of Bush-era taxes and the tax increases, this mainly a move to stake out the budget negotiations that will ensue.

Here's where you go to get the 256 page doc. (It seems that the 300 to 400 pages in the budget have been overstated!:-)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/budget.pdf (actual doc)

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Wall Street opens higher after payrolls data - Yahoo! Finance

Wall Street opens higher after payrolls data - Yahoo! Finance:

Great JOBS report. Unemployment drops to 8.3%, and this improvement was not because people fell out of the job market. All the numbers are great.

Quite a surprise to the estimates. Small upward revision to December.

The ISM report of manufacturing sentiment was up 1% to 54.1 (with more than 50 being expansionary in nature).

=> Economists will have to revise their estimates for the 2012 GDP growth up toward 3%. =>Happy stock market!:-)

Couple other things this means.

1) More people working means more money to spend in the economy, a virtuous positive feedback loop!:-)

2) More people working boost the housing market with housing at a generational low and mortgage rates at an all time low of 3.8%.

3) More personal income means more spending and more taxes (sales and income), resulting in much higher government revenues that many were forecasting.

4) People start to feel better about their jobs and their homes, they will start to invest. And the MOUNTAINS of cash on the sidelines will start to flood the stock and commodity markets.

5) When peoples net worth in the market improves, they will feel more comfortable with all investments including expanding/starting businesses.

Growing economy is the single best possible thing that could happen to relieve the pressure on the US debt. A rising tide lifts all BOATS!

I, for one, would like to see water under my boat for a change.:-)

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Writing and Research

This is a great compilation of articles by Brent Muirhead.

Writing, research and distance learning. Great stuff.

Link: http://www.itdl.org/DistEdReader.pdf

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CEO’s and Their Outa Control Pay?... Or Is It???

Apple CEO Tim Cook could top pay list in 2011 | The Salt Lake Tribune:

What do you think about pay for executives. In publically traded companies, the CEO often gets paid 500 to 5,000 times what the average employee of the firm makes. Mostly stock options, actually, so the options are worth more if the stock performs over time, and worth less (worthless) if the company stock does well.

Let's take Cook from Apple. He gets almost $400m. That's quite a bit up from Jobs who got paid a lonely $1 per year (before taxes and deductions:-). Of course, Steve owned a lot of stock as the founder so he made up for the paltry salary when the company and its stock did well.

So Let's compute. Say that the average salary at apple is $100k (far more if you don't count outsourced production, far less if you do).

Cook makes $378,000,000 divided by the average of $100,000 = 3,780 times what the average worker makes. See company's SEC filings or visit an artile like this one from the Salt Lake Tribute (Shima, 2011).

Is Cook worth it?

Stated differently, if we fired Cook, we could hire another 4,000 employees.

When you do this analysis, make sure to separate the owner-founders from the professional managers of the companies.

What's a leader really worth?

Hmmm...

References

Shima, R. N. (2011, January 10). Apple CEO Tim Cook could top pay list in 2011. Salt Lake Tribute. Retrieved from: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/53269308-79/million-cook-stock-apple.html.csp