Business

After failing miserably if their efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, Republicans are set to shift their legislative agenda to focus on tax reform when they get back from their generous month-long August recess (taxpayers are such great employers).  Among other things, proposed changes to the personal tax code would include eliminating nearly all tax write-offs, including those for state and local taxes, and instead doubling the standard deduction.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

About a month ago I joined the Board of Directors of a publicly-traded company that invests in US real estate. The position brings a lot of insight into what’s happening in the US housing market. And from what I’m seeing, the transformation that’s taking place today is extraordinary.

Buying and renting out single-family homes has long been the mainstay investment of small, independent, individual investors.

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

For savvy investors the fact that the US Dollar loses value every year is no surprise.  CEO of JP Morgan (JPM) Jamie Dimon characterized this eloquently with an analogy of ‘musical chairs’ – basically that at some point some asset class has to blow up.  There’s actually a reason for this, because in a debt based fiat monetary system, fresh credit needs to be created on a growing basis even to payback the interest on previous credit, or the system will implode (systemically speaking).

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

World GDP in current US dollars is in some sense the simplest world GDP calculation that a person might make. It is calculated by taking the GDP for each year for each country in the local currency (for example, yen) and converting these GDP amounts to US dollars using the then-current relativity between the local currency and the US dollar.