"Anyone who has studied microeconomics knows... that an income transfer, as opposed to a gift in-kind, gets you to a higher level of utility," but as WSJ reports, putting theory under the tree is another matter. After years of studying the economics of gift-giving, economists have found that some gifts are valued more highly than others, and that some gift-givers seem to be better than others...
A suspected Russian airstrike east of Damascus has killed Jaysh al Islam chief Zahran Alloush, Retuers reports.
According to the London-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (so, according to Rami Abdulrahman's on the ground sources), five other commanders were also killed when Moscow's warplanes targeted one of the group's meetings in Eastern Ghouta, the site of the infamous chemical attack of 2013 that nearly resulted in the launch of a US air campaign against the Assad government.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul today released a special ‘Festivus: Airing of Grievances for 2015’ edition of ‘The Waste Report,’ which is an ongoing project cataloguing egregious examples of waste within the U.S. government.
The ‘Festivus: Airing of Grievances for 2015’ edition highlights over 30 examples of wasteful spending, misplaced priorities, and bad management in the federal government that have cost the taxpayer more than one billion dollars.
Of the 31 examples amassed from the past year, a few high-points of the ‘The Waste Report’ include:
Overnight China's finance ministry reported the latest data on state-owned firms profitability. At a cumulative CNY 2.04 trillion (or $316 billion) for the January-November period, this was another nearly double digit decline, or -9.5% from the year ago period, following a -9.8% drop for the 10 month period the month before.
Authored by David Swensen (Yale CIO) and Jonathan Macey, Op-Ed via NYTimes.com,
America's equity markets are broken. Individuals and institutions make transactions in rigged markets favoring short-term players. The root cause of the problem is that stocks trade on numerous venues, including 11 traditional exchanges and dozens of so-called dark pools that allow buyers and sellers to work out of the public eye. This market fragmentation allows high-frequency traders and exchanges to profit at the expense of long-term investors.