New Long Run Blog Feature - Favorites

It is "Cyber Monday" and you are probably shopping online at work. If you aren't shopping, your co-workers probably are. Since the office is generally unproductive, why not indulge in some personal reading time? May I suggest checking out our newest feature, a page called "Favorites & Most Popular"? Here you'll find lists of each author's favorite posts along with a list of the most popular posts as measured by views. You can find it near the top right corner of the TLRB page. Enjoy!

Some bearish news for the dollar

Since I wrote the 3-part piece about the dollar (parts I, II, III), some nasty things have occurred in Washington. It was just one-month ago that I made the following warning in "Part III: Can the Dollar Weaken Anyway?"

"Another very bad outcome for the dollar may happen if Congress starts dismantling the Fed’s independence"

Guess what?

Can you afford the subway increase?

Toronto has a subway system. It used to be a pretty decent subway system. Clean, modern, fast, and reasonably priced. These days it's dirty, has not kept pace with Toronto's expansion, break downs are common, and the fare box price has been seeing big jumps in price, well above annual inflation rates. When prices jump way above inflation, that sounds pretty counter intuitive.

[caption id="attachment_1295" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The subway only gets you about half way across the city these days"][/caption]

What's going on?

Chinese Effrontery

Monday's WSJ brought a front page article that made me LOL at the hypocrisy. The sub-headline was all it took. The article in question is "China's Blunt Talk for Obama" and the humorous sub-headline "Regulator Says U.S. Policy Puts Global Recovery At Risk as President Arrives in Beijing". What specifically is so funny? Let me quote:

Data Security at Financial Institutions

Would someone please explain the security procedures that banks and other financial institutions implement? I happen to run into a "verification process" quite frequently. This normally entails answering a series of questions. You know, questions like "what city did you get married in?" or "what is the first name of your paternal grandfather?" There seems to be about 15 standard questions used by financial institutions, not all of which are used by each. My problem with these has to do with a lack of understanding exactly how they are supposed to protect me.

How is Vegas treating jugglers?

A few months back The Long Run blog's founder Brett Spurr was in Vegas and observed an interesting economic phenomenon: while hotel room prices were at all-time lows, food was now pricier. So a hotel room at a major hotel might run you $50 a night but the Coke machine on your floor is now charging double. The old "if you can't make it in popcorn, make it in peanuts" strategy.



Brett cautioned his observations were purely anecdotal. I thought I'd follow up on Brett's intriguing observation by wrangling my connection¹ with Vegas local Michael Goudeau (former co-host of the Penn Jillette Radio Show and an occasional panelist for the yearly The Amazing Meeting) and get his observations about how the down economy is affecting what is surely one of the most interesting local economies on earth.

GDP, Truth Twisters and, well, Duh

A couple of noteworthy items made their way to my attention this week and unfortunately both are sad. Let's start with our official paper of record, The Wall Street Journal. Yesterday, the WSJ featured a 6-column article on the top of page 2 about the Fed's "Path to Higher Interest Rates". The article goes to great lengths speculating about how the Fed will raise rates when it ultimately decides to do so. Not only did I waste a few moments of my life reading this useless piece, but my only response was, well, "duh!" More precisely, many many "duhs".