Coppola Comment Bill would encourage foreigners to buy U.S. homes Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles — American consumers and the federal government haven't been able to bail out the sinking U.S. real estate market. Now wealthy Chinese, Canadians and other foreign buyers could get their chance. Two U.S. senators have introduced a bill that would allow foreigners who spend at least $500,000 on residential property to obtain visas allowing them to live in the United States. The plan could be a boon to California, which has become a popular real estate market for foreigners, particularly those from China. Nationwide, residential sales to foreigners and recent immigrants totaled $82 billion in the 12-month period ended March 31, up from $66 billion the previous year, according to the National Assn. of Realtors. "Overall, Los Angeles is the perfect place for investors," said YanYan Zhang, an agent with Rodeo Realty in Beverly Hills, who travels to China several times a year to meet potential clients. The program would come with several restrictions.
What to do if the double dip is real? 18 August 2011Last updated at 15:36 It is gradually dawning on the global political elite that the economics they believe in do not work. They do not work, in particular, in the current crisis and continued pursuance of present policy is threatening a double dip recession (Morgan Stanley, the Bank of England's Andy Haldane), a 1930s-style monetary collapse (Fed dissenter Richard Fisher), Eurozone breakup (Nouriel Roubini) and political mayhem (Jeff Sachs). Free market economics caused the crisis and the rough-hewn Keynesian stimulus policies improvised in 2009 are failing to get us out of it. So, not particularly gradually, but rather with the urgency of Gerard Depardieu on an airplane, there is a sudden rush towards more radical solutions. Haldane, in a Bank of England discussion paper today, compares the situation with the one facing Roosevelt in 1938, when Congress forced him to rein in stimulus, prompting a double dip: he ripped up bank regulations and forced banks to LEND.
__________________________________________________ The Robin Hood tax: a big step for capitalism, a major stride for development | Global development What connects hunger in Africa, people dying for want of medicines or health care and fast-paced global capitalism? A small tax on financial transactions. A new report about computer-driven high frequency trading (HFT), compiled by supporters of the Robin Hood tax campaign, reveals a niche world of millions of transactions each day. The report highlights how HFT threatens a new financial crisis. HFT is a rapidly growing phenomenon, and now accounts for over 70% of the UK equities market. These millions of trades all rely on ultra-thin margins, meaning that one key way to reduce their number is a small tax on each transaction. The readiness of Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy to propose a transaction tax at European level is a significant boost. The announcement was greeted by the usual derision from the City and its supporters. But the UK already has one of the biggest routine transaction taxes in the world, the stamp duty, and raises £4bn a year.
8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination.
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Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook Facebook is the platform on which our generation negotiates its artists’ respective brands and the tenuous connections between them. Facebook is tactically governed by a kind of silent populism– the subtle linking of identities through ‘Likes’, ‘Shares’, and brief but favorable commentary. Silence, in this case, is fitting because the formation of social ties is a gradual process on the part of the Facebook viewer, who accumulates an understanding of which artists are in lockstep with whoever else through incremental calculations based on memory, viewership, and discussion. Silent populism’s faintly projected image of communal support is solidified through one’s placement in group exhibitions. The physical display of these artists’ works next to one another is not unlike the photos of parties artists attend, strategically tagging each other and posting those images to Facebook for their online audience to digest. But what is it that we call “work?”
'Haircuts' identified as a cause of financial crisis - physics-math - 09 August 2011 Editorial: "Ecology could teach economists a thing or two" With the world's financial system seemingly under threat this week, economic modellers have diagnosed a cause of the crisis and prescribed a possible solution. The cause, it seems, are "haircuts", Wall Street jargon for the amount subtracted from the market value of an asset, such as a government bond, that is used as security when a bank borrows cash from another bank. During boom times, haircuts range from 1 to 10 per cent, making it easy for bankers to borrow. By modelling a virtual banking network and varying the size of haircuts allowed, Andrew Haldane, Sujit Kapadia and Prasanna Gai of the Bank of England show that keeping haircuts at 20 per cent or above can prevent overheating. Hairy situation Besides keeping haircuts bigger than 20 per cent, banks should be forced to retain much larger reserves of genuine liquid assets that never lose their value – such as gold – the researchers say. More From New Scientist Recommended by
China’s Top 15 Social Networks China’s social networking landscape is diverse and thriving. No single player is nearly as dominant as Facebook in the U.S. and there’s a long tail of networks for different users (urban and rural) and different purposes (social, dating, and games). Here is China’s SNS universe for the top 7 sites. And here is a table of the top 15 social networks in China. The Top 15 (in words) Qzone - China’s largest social network is built on the back of the 637 million active accounts for Tencent’s QQ Messenger. Big Mac Index The Economist updates their Big Mac Index, which as we all know, is the most accurate way to measure the global economy: It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of a basket of goods and services around the world. At market exchange rates, a burger is 44% cheaper in China than in America. In other words, the raw Big Mac index suggests that the yuan is 44% undervalued against the dollar. But we have long warned that cheap burgers in China do not prove that the yuan is massively undervalued. Average prices should be lower in poor countries than in rich ones because labour costs are lower. When adjusted for GDP, we can see where Big Macs are actually expensive: Brazil, Argentina, and Sweden. [The Economist via kottke]
The Impact of Economics Blogs by David McKenzie, Berk Ozler David McKenzie World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG); Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Berk Ozler World Bank - Development Economics Research Group (DECRG)August 1, 2011 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5783 Abstract: There is a proliferation of economics blogs, with increasing numbers of economists attracting large numbers of readers, yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Number of Pages in PDF File: 47 Keywords: Tertiary Education, E-Business, Economic Theory & Research, Information Security & Privacy, Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems working papers series Suggested Citation McKenzie, David and Ozler, Berk, The Impact of Economics Blogs (August 1, 2011).