Date: 11-02-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Andy Kessler
Medical tech allows us to monitor health, get advice and seek care remotely and cheaply.
Barack Obama famously and falsely said, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period.” But . . . what if you don’t like your doctor?
Let’s say you, like me, are one of the 20 million Americans who work for themselves—no boss, but also no corporate-tax deduction for health insurance. The smart move is to get a high-deductible insurance plan. Now it suddenly matters what doctors charge: $500 to take your blood pressure and bang your knee with a rubber hammer, $1,200 for a blood test that uses pennies worth of chemicals to tell you your hemoglobin levels are fine. Plus four months to get an appointment, and then the doctor asks you to fax an authorization. What? It’s 2019. It’s time to fire your doctor.
Like roughly half of American adults, I’m borderline: hypertensive, high cholesterol, though only “pre”-diabetic. A streak of misdiagnoses has led me and many others to take doctoring into our own hands. I do an annual blood test for $199 through WellnessFX and get results on a smartphone app. A Bluetooth-connected cuff from Omron Healthcare tracks my blood pressure and even notes atrial fibrillation or irregular heartbeat. A Fitbit scale tracks my weight. Beautyrest Sleeptracker tells me my REM sleep duration. My Apple Watch charts my resting pulse and does a simple electrocardiogram. The more data, the better. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Nouriel Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, was Senior Economist for International Affairs in the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton Administration. He has worked for the International Monetary Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank.
NEW YORK – Auf das synchronisierte globale Wirtschaftswachstum von 2017 folgte das asynchrone Wachstum des Jahres 2018, in dem, von den USA abgesehen, in den meisten Ländern Konjunkturabschwünge einsetzten. Sorgen über die US-Inflation, den geldpolitischen Kurs der US Federal Reserve, anhaltende Handelskriege, Italiens Haushalts- und Schuldenprobleme, den Konjunkturabschwung in China und die Anfälligkeiten der Schwellenmärkte führten am Jahresende zu steilen Kursrückgängen an den weltweiten Aktienmärkten.
Die gute Nachricht zu Beginn des Jahres 2019 ist, dass das Risiko einer unmittelbaren globalen Rezession niedrig ist.Die schlechte Nachricht ist, dass wir auf ein Jahr des synchronisierten globalen Abschwungs zusteuern; das Wirtschaftswachstum wird in den meisten Regionen in Richtung seines Potentials fallen und dieses in einigen Fällen noch unterschreiten. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 09-02-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Christopher Mims
Automation might not mean lower employment overall, but it can still take away jobs as it notches gains in productivity
Right in the center of Florida is a metro area that’s home to more than 600,000 people, along with some of the most technologically sophisticated distribution centers in the country.
In and around the city of Lakeland, you’ll find operations from Amazon, DHL (for Ikea), Walmart , Rooms to Go, Medline and Publix, along with a huge Geico call center, the world’s largest wine-and-spirits distribution warehouse and local factories that produce natural and artificial flavors and, of all things, glitter. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 07-02-2019
Source: The Economist: Free exchange
The Green New Deal touted by Democrats largely dispenses with cost-benefit analysis
As deals go, the New one was a big one. Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to yank America out of depression permanently altered the contours of the country’s economy and politics. Proponents of a “Green New Deal” harbour similar ambitions. Though still nebulous the proposal, championed most loudly by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a new congresswoman from New York, has been met with surprising enthusiasm in Washington. It is an outright rejection of the orthodox economic approach to climate change.
In economics, climate change is a big but straightforward example of a market failure, with a correspondingly straightforward solution. People take environmentally harmful decisions because the private benefits of doing so (using a car to get to work, say) outweigh the private costs(the price of the petrol to run the car). But emission-producing activities also impose social costs—deaths from pollution and collisions, the contribution of carbon emissions to climate change—that do not influence an individual’s decision to drive rather than walk or take public transport. To solve the climate problem, then, governments need only include the social cost of carbon in the prices people pay. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Date: 08-02-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Peggy Noonan
He’ll face one eventually, and there’s good reason to worry the administration will be unprepared.
Someday this White House will face a sudden, immediate and severe foreign-policy crisis. It’s almost a miracle it hasn’t happened already. George W. Bush had 9/11 less than eight months into his tenure; John F. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs three months into his presidency and the Cuban missile crisis the following year. In two years Donald Trump has faced some turbulence, but not a full-fledged crisis.
Such good fortune won’t continue forever. I sometimes ask past and present officials of this administration their thoughts on a crisis, and how the White House would handle one. They are concerned. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
The two areas represent arenas of growing competition between the U.S. and China
Next-generation 5G wireless promises to bring far faster speeds and greater capacity to wireless networks.
WASHINGTON—President Trump is preparing an ambitious plan to ramp up the government’s role in speeding next-generation technologies such as 5G wireless and artificial intelligence, two key areas of competition with China.
In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Trump said he would work with lawmakers on an infrastructure package, one that would include “investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future.”
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. The co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, his new book, The Curse of Cash, was released in August 2016.
Despite improvements in the financial system since the 2008 crisis, the piecemeal reforms that have been enacted fall far short of what is needed. And an inexorably growing financial system, combined with an increasingly toxic political environment, means that the next major financial crisis may come sooner than you think.
CAMBRIDGE – A decade on from the 2008 global financial crisis, policymakers constantly assure us that the system is much safer today. The giant banks at the core of the meltdown have scaled back their risky bets, and everyone – investors, consumers, and central bankers – is still on high alert. Regulators have worked hard to ensure greater transparency and accountability in the banking industry. But are we really all that safe?
Normally, one would say “yes.” The kind of full-blown systemic global financial crisis that erupted a decade ago is not like a typical septennial recession. The much lower frequency of systemic crises reflects two realities: policymakers respond with reforms to prevent their recurrence, and it normally takes investors, consumers, and politicians a long time to forget the last one. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Some investors say it is difficult to imagine stocks being able to continue at January’s pace
One force helping boost the stock market is faith that the Fed will leave short-term interest rates unchanged for now.
U.S. stocks and bonds are rallying together, an atypical pattern that some investors worry suggests the January rebound in equities is fated to run up against a painful reversal.
Major indexes have started off the year on an upbeat note, closing out their best January since the 1980s. The gains are a testament to fresh optimism about the U.S. and China’s trade negotiations, as well as confidence that the Federal Reserve will pause its campaign of raising interest rates while it gauges a slowdown in global growth.
Yet yields on both shorter- and longer-term government debt have continued a monthslong slide, a development that has historically signified growing pessimism about the outlook for the U.S. economy. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Atour of the modernist building of the Harley-Davidson museum in Milwaukee helps to explain why the midwestern maker of motorcycles has iconic status, but also why it is struggling. Nearly all the visitors are white, middle-aged men, some clad in leather and heavily tattooed, others dressed conservatively. Harley is the quintessential baby-boomer brand but its customers are slowing down.
The firm has been losing sales at home for eight consecutive quarters with the latest being no exception. Sales in America plunged by a tenth in the three months ending at the end of December compared with the same period a year earlier, it said this week. The total cost of tariffs (those imposed specifically on its bikes by the European Union and China, and also those levied by America on imports of steel and aluminium, its main materials), together with restructuring costs, wiped out its profits.
The 116-year-old business has been through tough times before. It almost went under in 1981 when America was in recession and Japanese makers of motorcycles dumped unsold inventory onto the American market at extremely low prices. Then a group of employees bought the company, persuaded the government to impose tariffs on Japanese bikes, improved the quality of its wares and returned to the heavy retro look of the 1940s. That did the trick for baby boomers who flocked in droves to the expensive toys cleverly marketed as a symbol of freedom, individualism and adventure on America’s scenic roads. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »
Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, chaired President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. In 2006, he was appointed to President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and, in 2009, was appointed to President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Currently, he is on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Group of 30, a non-profit, international body that seeks greater understanding of global economic issues.
Chinese negotiators recently offered to buy enough American products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit to zero by 2024. Why, then, have US negotiators rejected that as a way to end the dispute?
CAMBRIDGE – The current conflict between the United States and China is not a trade war. Although the US has a large trade deficit with China, that is not the reason why it is imposing high tariffs on imports from China and threatening to increase them further after the end of the current 90-day truce on March 1. The purpose of those tariffs is to induce China to end its policy of stealing US technology.
Die gute Nachricht zu Beginn des Jahres 2019 ist, dass das Risiko einer unmittelbaren globalen Rezession niedrig ist. Die schlechte Nachricht ist, dass wir auf ein Jahr des synchronisierten globalen Abschwungs zusteuern; das Wirtschaftswachstum wird in den meisten Regionen in Richtung seines Potentials fallen und dieses in einigen Fällen noch unterschreiten. Den Rest des Beitrags lesen »