Business

This was not teh Santa Claus rally that everyone was promised...

Even as China’s credit-fueled boom – which helped it surpass Japan in 2011 to become the world’s second-largest economy – is losing its efficacy as new credit creation is now failing to drive economic growth as we pointed out last week (and many times before that), many economists believe it will eventually surpass its western rivals and become the world’s largest economy.

In an article published by the WSJ today, which was originally titled "Are Central Bankers About to Lose Control?" but after some shoulder taps was renamed to the far more neutral "Can Central Banks Keep Control of Interest Rates?" author Jon Sindreu looks at the current Goldilocks state of the market, in which global growth is "coordinated and widespread" yet inflation remains absent preventing central banks from hiking rates rapidly, resulting in "elated investors" who nonetheless are haunted by a question "will interest rates develop a mind of th

Via Political Calculations blog,

The city of Philadelphia's controversial soda tax is providing a lot of material for serious scientists to evaluate the effects of arbitrarily imposing a tax on the distribution of a range of naturally and artificially-sweetened beverages. Since we're near the end of the tax's first year of being in effect, we thought we'd focus upon one of the more interesting findings to date.

Consumers are primarily the ones paying the tax

Despite the GOP's tax reform victory, over the past few weeks, Congress once again punted on a formal decision how to keep government funded and what to do with America's debt ceiling and as a result US legislators simply kicked the can on the agreement of raising the nation’s borrowing limit for another few months. However, with the Treasury expected to breach the ceiling as soon as late March, today's $45 billion 3-Month Bill auction was closely watched as it serves as a fresh gauge of investor anxiety about the ongoing impasse.