09-01-2017, 11:10 PM
Giving every adult in the United States a $1,000 cash handout per month would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025, according to anew study on universal basic income. The report was released in August by the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. Roosevelt research director Marshall Steinbaum, Michalis Nikiforos at Bard College's Levy Institute, and Gennaro Zezza at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio in Italy co-authored the study.
$1,000 per month cash handout would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion
The earnings recession is over. S&P 500 operating earnings per share were eclipsed by the energy recession from Q4-2014 through Q2-2016, when the Thomson Reuters (TR) measure was flat to down on a y/y basis. Growth resumed during the second half of 2016 and first half of 2017. The TR measure of earnings rose 10.1% y/y during Q2-2017 to a new record high, while revenues rose 5.7% y/y. That put the S&P 500 operating profit margin (based on TR data) at a record high of 10.8%. “Ouch” is the sound you just heard from all those reversion-to-the-mean bears, who can go back to sleep.
Dr. Ed's Blog: S&P 500 Earnings: The Shining
Emerging markets will start to dominate rankings of the world's top economies by 2030, according to a report published earlier this year. The report, published by PricewaterhouseCoopers, finds that emerging markets such as India and Brazil will increasingly challenge the economic dominance of the USA and China, while others slip behind.
PwC predicts the most powerful economies by 2030 - Business Insider
Just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans in 2005, economist Cary Leahey of Decision Economics Inc. sat down and wrote a report to his clients estimating that total damages would total $125 billion, making the storm the nation’s largest natural disaster ever. A dozen years later, Leahey’s estimate stands the test of time. In fact, the official government estimate of the cost of the storm is $125 billion in nominal terms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. Leahey now thinks that the damage from Hurricane Harvey could be “mind boggling” and rival or even exceed Katrina. Estimates he has seen from some major Wall Street banks are too timid, he said.
Moore’s Law owed its success to the fact that as transistors were made smaller, they became simultaneously cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient. The payoff from this win-win-win scenario enabled reinvestment in semiconductor fabrication technology that could make even smaller, more densely packed transistors. And so this virtuous circle continued, decade after decade. Now though, experts in industry, academia, and government laboratories anticipate that semiconductor miniaturization won’t continue much longer—maybe 5 or 10 years. Making transistors smaller no longer yields the improvements it used to. The physical characteristics of small transistors caused clock speeds to stagnate more than a decade ago, which drove the industry to start building chips with multiple cores. But even multicore architectures must contend with increasing amounts of “dark silicon,” areas of the chip that must be powered off
The Future of Computing Depends on Making It Reversible - IEEE Spectrum