One difference between Wall Street and Washington

There's less damage to the capitalist system when individuals and companies are held accountable for their mistakes than when politicians decide that every financial "crisis" is an opportunity to shoot the wounded and change the rules.

One difference between Wall Street and Washington is that in the latter no one ever admits a mistake, much less suffers for it.

Or most likely both.

All insurance systems impose limits on consumption, but a government-financed health care would remove any hint of the price mechanism.

That it will either vastly inflate health spending and lead to tax hikes or otherwise lead to government rationing.

Or most likely both.

Riskier people

In the same way that in order to be rich you have to take risk, countries where people don't use to take risk they use to be less wealthy than countries with riskier people.

But in today's winner-take-all economy, rich countries and rich people are especially drawn to bold gambles.

Low level of housing demand over the next several years

The percentage of homes that are owner occupied -- the homeownership rate -- dropped to the lowest point since the second quarter of 2003, according to the Census report.

This year, as many as 900,000 households moved from owning homes to renting them.

It implies a very low level of housing demand over the next several years.

Two virtues

Greed and selfishness are two virtues of the rich societies .

Two different stories.

Google's revenue, excluding commissions paid to marketing partners, totaled $3.01 billion,in the third quarter. It is 23% of partners work, it is up from 21%.in the second quarter.
International operations accounted for 48% of revenue during the third quarter
Google handled 53.6% of U.S. Web-search queries in August, compared with 52.7% in June,
The rate of revenue growth from partner sites(money taken from its partners) that carry advertising brokered by Google picked up during the quarter to 40% from 36% during the second quarter.

The $8.4 billion write down of Merrill Lynch is nearly one fifth of its $42 billion net worth.
Merrill recorded a $2.24 billion loss for the quarter, making it one of the biggest losses in Wall Street history.

One big factor is the shrinking dollar.

A broad group of developing countries face upward pressure on their currencies.

A decade ago some of these countries battled currencies crisis.

One big factor is the shrinking dollar.

The response by central banks to fight inflation has been to buy dollars.

Developing countries are sitting on massive U.S. dollars assets that they may not need.

Why do they do that?. Because they don't have real free markets and don't have modern financial systems.