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Category: Economics/Business

In the U.S., workers are now paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners

In the U.S., workers are now paying a higher tax rate than investors and owners

Christopher Ingraham writes: Most Americans have to work to earn a living. But the rich are different: They get most of their income not from labor but from what they own — companies, stocks, real estate and the like. These income-generating assets are what economists call capital. And because capital is heavily concentrated among the rich, the U.S. government taxed earnings derived from capital at a higher rate than earnings made through labor for the entirety of the 20th century….

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Leading investment banks pump billions into fossil fuel industry

Leading investment banks pump billions into fossil fuel industry

The Guardian reports: The world’s largest investment banks have provided more than $700bn of financing for the fossil fuel companies most aggressively expanding in new coal, oil and gas projects since the Paris climate change agreement, figures show. The financing has been led by the Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase, which has provided $75bn (£61bn) to companies expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration, according to the analysis. The New York bank is one of…

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Companies ignoring climate crisis will go bankrupt, Bank of England governor warns

Companies ignoring climate crisis will go bankrupt, Bank of England governor warns

The Guardian reports: Companies and industries that are not moving towards zero-carbon emissions will be punished by investors and go bankrupt, the governor of the Bank of England has warned. Mark Carney also told the Guardian it was possible that the global transition needed to tackle the climate crisis could result in an abrupt financial collapse. He said the longer action to reverse emissions was delayed, the more the risk of collapse would grow. Carney has led efforts to address…

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Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

The Washington Post reports: Last year, income inequality in the United States reached its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it in 1967, according to federal data released Thursday. In the midst of the longest economic expansion the United States has ever seen, with poverty and unemployment rates at historic lows, the separation between rich and poor from 2017 and 2018 was greater than it has ever been, federal data show. Nine states saw spikes in that divide:…

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Farming subsidies — $1 million a minute — are destroying the world, says report

Farming subsidies — $1 million a minute — are destroying the world, says report

The Guardian reports: The public is providing more than $1m per minute in global farm subsidies, much of which is driving the climate crisis and destruction of wildlife, according to a new report. Just 1% of the $700bn (£560bn) a year given to farmers is used to benefit the environment, the analysis found. Much of the total instead promotes high-emission cattle production, forest destruction and pollution from the overuse of fertiliser. The security of humanity is at risk without reform…

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The companies practicing ‘secret sustainability’

The companies practicing ‘secret sustainability’

The Observer reports: There’s a factory in Asia that uses only a single litre of water to make a pair of jeans. That’s 346 litres less than Levi-Strauss estimated it took to make a pair of its jeans in 2015. Wouldn’t you love to buy your jeans from this amazingly innovative factory? Me too, but I don’t even know what it’s called. The manufacturer in question does not want to tell anyone about its groundbreaking water-conserving techniques – not even…

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Trump might like Brexit less after he sees what it does to the economy

Trump might like Brexit less after he sees what it does to the economy

The Washington Post reports: If Britain were to quit the E.U. without a formal withdrawal agreement — as Johnson has threatened — the biggest blows would fall on the United Kingdom and its European trading partners. U.K. output would shrink by more than 5 percent while unemployment and inflation would soar, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told Parliament earlier this week. Broader effects on business and investor confidence would ripple through global financial markets. A further…

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How Amazon’s next-day delivery network brought chaos, exploitation, and danger to communities across America

How Amazon’s next-day delivery network brought chaos, exploitation, and danger to communities across America

BuzzFeed reports: Amazon is the biggest retailer on the planet — with customers in 180 countries — and in its relentless bid to offer ever-faster delivery at ever-lower costs, it has built a national delivery system from the ground up. In under six years, Amazon has created a sprawling, decentralized network of thousands of vans operating in and around nearly every major metropolitan area in the country, dropping nearly 5 million packages on America’s doorsteps seven days a week. Amazon…

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The man who got economists to take climate worst-case scenarios seriously

The man who got economists to take climate worst-case scenarios seriously

Bloomberg reports: What if climate change turns out to be worse than we think? That anxiety is now commonplace, but a decade ago it took an influential paper by a Harvard professor to convince the insular world of climate economists to focus more of their attention on worst-case scenarios. Martin Weitzman, who passed away this week at the age of 77, forever connected the notion of “fat tails” to the economics of climate risk. Before his 2009 paper overturned standard…

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The anatomy of the coming recession

The anatomy of the coming recession

Nouriel Roubini writes: There are three negative supply shocks that could trigger a global recession by 2020. All of them reflect political factors affecting international relations, two involve China, and the United States is at the center of each. Moreover, none of them is amenable to the traditional tools of countercyclical macroeconomic policy. The first potential shock stems from the Sino-American trade and currency war, which escalated earlier this month when US President Donald Trump’s administration threatened additional tariffs on…

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The next recession will destroy Millennials

The next recession will destroy Millennials

Annie Lowrey writes: The Millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages. The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now back up. As of 2014, Millennial men were…

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Trump’s command economy

Trump’s command economy

David A. Graham writes: Fate sometimes has an acute sense of irony. This morning, the political donor and philanthropist David Koch died. Koch’s father was an early, prominent supporter of the limited-government, red-baiting John Birch Society. Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian in 1980, but he and his brother Charles eventually shifted their focus to pushing the Republican Party in an aggressively small-government, low-regulation direction. They had remarkable success, but had serious disagreements with the current Republican president,…

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Group of top CEOs says maximizing shareholder profits no longer can be the primary goal of corporations

Group of top CEOs says maximizing shareholder profits no longer can be the primary goal of corporations

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The Washington Post reports: The organization representing the nation’s most powerful chief executives is rewriting how it views the purpose of a corporation, updating its decades-old endorsement of the theory that shareholders’ interests should come above all else. The new statement, released Monday by the Business Roundtable, suggests balancing the needs of a company’s various constituencies and comes at a time of widening income inequality, rising expectations from the public for corporate behavior and proposals from Democratic lawmakers that aim…

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The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

The coming economic crash — and how to stop it

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Elizabeth Warren writes: I warned about an economic crash years before the 2008 crisis, but the people in power wouldn’t listen. Now I’m seeing serious warning signs in the economy again — and I’m calling on regulators and Congress to act before another crisis costs America’s families their homes, jobs, and savings. I’ve spent most of my career getting to the bottom of what’s happening to working families in America. And when I saw the seeds of the 2008 crisis…

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Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

Ebola treatment breakthrough highlights Wall Street’s obsession with profit and indifference to saving lives

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Barron’s reports: Monday brought a spot of good news in a bleak summer: Scientists testing Ebola drugs in the Democratic Republic of Congo found some that seemed to work. Wall Street shrugged. Scientists cut short a trial of four experimental Ebola drugs after two of them, including one developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (ticker: REGN), showed extremely promising results. Ninety percent of patients who took the drugs soon after infection survived. Overall, 29% of Ebola patients dosed with Regeneron’s drug died,…

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U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

U.S. economy ‘may be a lot sicker than people believe’

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Politico reports: Wall Street hoisted another hurricane warning on the economy on Wednesday as fear continues to rise that a recession could arrive by next year, potentially crashing into President Donald Trump’s attempt to win a second term. This time, the warning came from the bond market where investors began to demand more interest on two-year Treasury debt than 10-year debt, an “inversion” of a measure known as the yield curve that last happened in 2007 before the financial crisis….

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