Bloomberg (July 29)
We need to treat climate change like fire. “You insure your house against fire not because you are certain it will burn down but to guard against the risk that it might. Yes, climate change involves various costs known with reasonable confidence—but it also creates big risks. It’s only rational to insure against them.
Tags: Climate change, Confidence, Costs, Fire, Insurance, Rational, Risk
The Economist (July 6)
“Good economic news has begun to fall on Britain like drops of rain in the midst of a drought. The country is parched: revisions to GDP estimates released last week suggest that output is still 3.9% lower than its 2008 peak, a worse performance than any other G20 country except Italy. As confidence returns, it seems almost impolite to point out that the British economy still has a sickly core of weak investment, productivity and wages, and that hard policy decisions lie ahead.”
Tags: Confidence, Economy, G20, GDP, Investment, Italy, Output, Productivity, UK, Wages
Bloomberg (July 1)
Hong Kong has long been ambivalent about mainland China and now “faces perhaps its biggest challenge: China’s wobbly economy. A downturn on the mainland threatens to erode Hong Kong’s AAA credit rating, and to alienate the city’s population once and for all…. If it’s not careful, China may lose 7 million votes of confidence, too.”
Tags: Challenge, China, Confidence, Credit rating, Downturn, Economy, Hong Kong
Wall Street Journal (August 5)
“They say there’s always a silver lining. Yesterday there wasn’t.” Worldwide, markets were battered and a common “theme among the wreckage was a generalized loss of confidence in the policy-making role of governments, here and in Europe.” More specifically, the Journal points to the main problem. “The economies of Europe and the United States have arrived at the moment when they no longer have any conceivable hope of being able to pay for the huge public commitments they’ve amassed the past 40 years.”
“They say there’s always a silver lining. Yesterday there wasn’t.” Worldwide, markets were battered and a common “theme among the wreckage was a generalized loss of confidence in the policy-making role of governments, here and in Europe.” More specifically, the Journal points to the main problem. “The economies of Europe and the United States have arrived at the moment when they no longer have any conceivable hope of being able to pay for the huge public commitments they’ve amassed the past 40 years.”
Tags: Confidence, Government, Markets, U.S., UK
