Business Insider. Stock Market Quotes, Business News, Financial News. The Ten Happiest Jobs. Making Sense with Paul Solman. Insights - Investment Outlook. Who owns America? Hint: It's not China. Editor's Note: The following piece comes from Global Post, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and odd. By Tom Mucha, Global Post Truth is elusive. But it's a good thing we have math. Our friends at Business Insider know this, and put those two principles to work today in this excellent and highly informative little slideshow, made even more timely by the ongoing talks in Washington, D.C. aimed at staving off a U.S. debt default.
Here's the big idea: Many people — politicians and pundits alike — prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt. But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. Here's a quick and fascinating breakdown by total amount held and percentage of total U.S. debt, according to Business Insider: So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. Investment Outlook - School Daze, School Daze Good Old Golden Rule Days.
A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America’s students wasting theirs by going to college? All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing, but at least it used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could pass an SAT test. For those who made it to the good schools, it proved that your parents had enough money to either bribe administrators or hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points. And a degree represented that the graduate could “party hearty” for long stretches of time and establish social networking skills that would prove invaluable later on at office cocktail parties or interactively via Facebook. College was great as long as the jobs were there.
Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it’s worth the time or the cost. What then, shall we do? William H. The Front Page. • Stock market crash, right on schedule. Time to Short? • Is the Yellen Fed doing a Roy Young? • China's Great Wall of Money crumbles. Who will be America's IMF this time? • Why do they call them Emerging Markets? Because it's hard to get your money out in an Emergency. • Gold says, "I'm not dead yet! " How many times can your reflate a torn up rubber raft? Time to chuck it out and get a new one.
Except that there isn't a new one. And, gosh, looking back on it, over the past 20 years, maybe we shouldn't have taken it through Class V rapids twice loaded with beer kegs. But here we are, cheek to cowl, in this giant, flaccid, half inflated economy, damage from the last two runs shoddily patched, headed over the rapids again. Not that I didn't try to build an optimistic case to counter my June 2013 forecast The Post-Market Economy – Part II: The Crash of 2014, it's just that the data kept dragging me off that run.
I don't blame anyone for wanting to turn and look the other way. Mozilla Firefox. Login to Netbenefits.