1. Chart of the Day I. In 2010, Obama set an ambitious goal to double US exports and create two million new export-related jobs. That ended being a completely unrealistic goal – US exports over the last five years have increased by only about 28% in nominal terms and by only 22% in real terms. The chart above shows one example of an export success story that did meet Obama’s goal – US exports of natural gas to Mexico, which have more than doubled over the last five years – from fewer than 30 billion feet per month in January 2010 to more than 71.5 billion cubic feet this year. But fossil fuels probably weren’t the kind of export Obama had in mind when he announced his goal in 2010, and yet they’ve been the only types of export products that have doubled in the last five years.
2. US Shale Revolution. “Natural gas abundance in wake of the shale revolution powered the US petrochemicals business ahead at a pace the market could not have contemplated 10 years ago,” said James O’Brien (Chair of international law firm Baker & McKenzie’s Global Energy, Mining & Infrastructure Practice Group) about the petrochemicals success story that has been developing since the US shale bonanza substantially lowered the price of gas. Source.
3. Fact of the Day: Since 2000, the number of Internet users worldwide has increased four-fold to 3.2 billion users in 2015.
4. John Nash: A Beautiful Free Marketeer: “Nash’s work validated the idea that free markets matter and individual human choices matter — the very basis for Western civilization and the free markets that propel its prosperity,” according to this IBD editorial.
5. Markets in Everything I: “Minnesota Lice Lady” is Minnesota’s first full head lice removal business/salon.
6. Markets in Everything II: Timeless Timber uses premium wood which is milled from logs that sank during the logging boom of the 1800s and early 1900s. These logs were perfectly preserved by the icy temperatures and low oxygen content of the waters of the Great Lakes. Timeless Timber currently recovers, reclaims and processes two million board feet of lumber each year without sawing down one single tree.
Bonus Market: HyreCar is a start-up that lets individuals rent out their personal cars to anyone who wants to work as a driver for Uber, Lyft, or any other ride-sharing service. CNN calls it an “Airbnb for Uber cars.”
=======================================
8. A Downside of Rising College Tuition and Skyrocketing Student Loan Debt — It stifles entrepreneurship and small business formation, according to a new Philadelphia Fed study featured in a WSJ article today “Want to Be an Entrepreneur? Beware of Student Debt.” The financial burdens of non-dischargable student loan debt can stifle lots of other things too like home ownership, savings for retirement, buying automobiles, etc. The average student loan debt is now about $30,000, which would mean 10 years of monthly payments of $318 (at 5% interest). For graduates with $100,000 of student loan debt, they face monthly payments of more than $1,000 for ten years.
9. New Research on CEO Pay. In a new NBER paper “Firming Up Inequality” researchers from Stanford, Minnesota and the Social Security Administration have an interesting finding about CEO vs. worker pay and earnings inequality:
Using a matched employer-employee data set covering all U.S. firms between 1978 to 2012, the authors find that the “wage gap between the most highly paid employees within these firms (CEOs and high level executives) and the average employee [of those firms] has increased only by a small amount, refuting oft-made claims that such widening gaps account for a large fraction of rising inequality in the population.”
10. Map of the Day. I featured this map before on CD, but it got a lot of attention today when I posted it to Twitter, so thought I’d feature it one more time here on the blog before it gets updated in June with new state GDP data for 2014.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1LKzmBU
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment