CARPE DIEM:
CD regular reader Jim Moore writes in an email:"I don't know if you're interested in reader-provided links, but there's an excellent little economics tutorial in the WSJ today (Wednesday) by Allen Barra, "Sports Salaries Show What We Really Value," page A11."Here's at least part of that economic lesson:The athletes and thei (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
Private for-profit clinics are a booming business in Canada -- a country often touted as a successful example of a universal health system. Facing long waits and substandard care, private clinics are proving that Canadians are willing to pay for treatment."Any wait time was an enormous frustration for me and also pain. I j (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
The marketplace doesn't determine how many doctors the nation has, as it does for engineers, pilots and other professions. The number of doctors is a political decision, heavily influenced by doctors themselves.And Congress also controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencie (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
The general improvement in global financial conditions since March has fostered a marked improvement in investor sentiment and led many to inquire when (rather than if) the current U.S. recession will end. Increasingly, market commentary has focused on evidence of “green shoots” that would suggest the rate of economic deter (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
LOS ANGELES (June 25) – Home sales increased 35.2% in May in California compared with the same period a year ago, while the median price of an existing home declined 30.4%, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS (C.A.R.) reported (see chart above).“With affordability for first-time buyers at a record high, sales of existing (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
NEW YORK, June 19 (Reuters) - A gauge of future U.S. economic growth rose along with its yearly growth rate, reaffirming hope that yearly growth will turn positive in the summer months, a research group said on Friday. The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Lea (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
As the top chart above shows, the male-female jobless rate gap of 2.5% is truly unprecedented. During and following the last two recessions of 1990-1991 and 2001, the male unemployment rate was about 1% higher than the female unemployment rate. But there has never been any recession in U.S. history, or any time during even (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
Arthur Laffer in the WSJ on June 11, "Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates":As bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant de (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn h (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
In times of economic crisis, the ability of the free market to solve problems may come into question. But in one vital corner of the economy, a little creative capitalism is helping fill a gap.Enter the retail health clinic. In the past decade, more and more pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens, supermarkets such as Kroger and (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis (the "man-cession") because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
Table 1.(Note: All results displayed in both tables are statistically significant at the 5% level or higher.)Table 2. The tables above show selected statistics from the paper Global Sex Differences in Test Score Variability (see summary here), published by two economists, one from the London School of Economics and the othe (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
DQNews.com -- Southern California home sales rose for the 11th consecutive month in May as sales of $500,000-plus homes started to come back. The median price paid increased slightly from the prior month for the first time since July 2007, the result of a shift in market activity where sales of deeply discounted foreclosur (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
LA TIMES (front page of today's Business Section) -- Southern California's median home price rose slightly in May for the first time in nearly two years. But the increase was more reflective of a change in the types of homes sold than an end to falling values, a real estate research firm reported Wednesday. The $249,000 med (Read More)
CARPE DIEM:
The Philadelphia Fed reports today that the Six-Month Forecast Indicators Show Continued Improvement:Broad indicators of future activity showed significant improvement this month. The future general activity index remained positive for the sixth consecutive month and increased markedly from 47.5 in May to 60.1, its highest (Read More)