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We need banks and financiers and entrepreneurs to take risks because that's how economies grow over time.
Low interest rates are usually attributed to low inflation, weak economic growth and super easy monetary policy. But there's another deep-seated factor that doesn't get much attention: demographics.
Back in the '60s, for example, just as inflation was beginning to be a big problem, Presidents J.F.Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would often publicly browbeat companies for raising prices and threatening to move federal defense purchases to different countries.
Research by James Poterba at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that the wealth of the U.S.'s elderly is highly skewed. About half of retirees have little or no financial wealth when they retire and depend almost entirely on Social Security for their income.
When people retire, their income drops much more sharply than their consumption. As a result, they stop saving and start drawing down the assets they've acquired during their high-saving years. That could start to put upward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on stock prices.
Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn't wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the '40s and '50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.
In the '70s, there were economists who argued that seat belts were causing people to drive faster and kill more pedestrians. But after 15 or 20 years of research, we can now conclude that's actually not true. Seat belts, on net, do make people safer. So, on an evidence-based process, we should have people wear seat belts.
Mr. Soros, the chairman of Soros Fund Management, is best-known as a speculator, philanthropist and political activist. He made a fortune by doing things such as betting against Britain's currency in 1992 and Thailand's in 1997. A Hungarian refugee, he has spent millions to promote democracy and learning in post-Soviet nations.
It is probably the case that some regulation of financing will make crises less likely, and I would say higher capital requirements are an almost fail-safe way to make banks safer. But there are a lot of other things that may not be doing that, and so we need to be careful about sort of, like, rushing to one conclusion or another.
If fertility drops much below 2.1 babies per woman, the population will shrink unless it is offset by higher immigration. For this reason, a demographic cloud hangs over China. It may be the first country to grow old before it grows rich. ... Its fertility rate is below two and its working-age population will start to decline around 2015.
You can sort of see elements of Donald trump policy in different walks of life. Brazil and France have a long history in intervening in business decisions to protect local jobs. What I don't think we see is much evidence that in the long run those types of tactics make much difference, when the economics of production are pushing in the other direction.
Donald Trump hasn't been specific, but if you go back over some of the campaign rhetoric, well, obviously, there's the bully pulpit, just publicly shaming out-sourcing companies. And that again is not new to Trump. If you remember, back in 2004, John Kerry was making noises about Benedict Arnold CEOs in a similar context. So, that's got a long and gloried tradition.
Tariffs are in the end taxes. And somebody has to pay that tax. I think one thing people are forgetting is that trade disputes are two-sided. When the United States imposes tariffs on a partner like Canada, there is always a possibility that Canada will say that's not fair and retaliate. And at that point, you have to ask the question, - which U.S. industry will suffer because the Canadians retaliated against it?
There's no question that protectionist or sort of moral suasion efforts like this can make a difference on a case-by-case basis. We have seen it in the past. It will probably save a few thousand, possibly more, jobs this time. But if the economics are saying that this is an expensive place to produce stuff, it's very hard to see that turning that around. That's why it would be more useful to focus on some of the other points that I think Donald Trump was making about making US a better place to manufacture.
Donald Trump can, for example, imply the threat that federal business will be withheld from some of companies. That's possibly dangerous precedent. You know what I mean? When - the Pentagon has very specific guidelines, for example, when it goes out and does procurement. You don't want them buying a jet engine which is actually inferior to another jet engine simply because that other company outsourced some jobs. The final thing that Trump could do is he could impose tariffs on any products that are imported once they have been outsourced to another country.
