What We Read Today 27 September 2013

Econintersect: Click Read more >> below graphic to see today’s list.

The top of today’s reading list reports on the positive effects on India of the Fed decision to delay taper …….. and the last article shows how the decline in wages has been predominantly in manufacturing.

• US Fed holds tapering: We have only breathing room, not an elixir (Sajjid Chinoy, The Economic Times) Hat tip to Sanjeev Kulkarni.

“We [India] have caught a lucky break. To use T20 parlance, we have been granted a free hit. And we need to use that time wisely. Keep narrowing our twin deficits and our external vulnerability. The taper will come sometime. You can be sure of that. And we need to be more prepared than we were in May.”

• Disingenuous at best (Bill Mitchell, Billy Blog) Hat tip to Roger Erickson. Any more bite in this short essay and the subjects would be fatally “chomped”

• Will Social Security be gone when you retire? (Leslie Kramer, MSN Money) Very general discussion – doesn’t address the real solution options.

• How Close do You Live to America’s Dirtiest Power Plants? (John Light, Moyers & Company)

• Google announces health research venture (Gimag Team, gizmag) Effort to tackle health issues of aging, the new effort will be headed by Arthur D. Levinson, chaiman of Apple and Genentech.

• Return of the steam engine: cheap storage for solar (Giles Parkinson, RE New Economy) Hat tip to Derek Markham, Newsana. Markham wrote:

A group of Australian engineers have “re-invented” the steam engine and combined it with solar thermal energy to deliver a cheap solar storage solution. What’s more, it works on the distributed level and can operate behind the meter, and is far cheaper than PV combined with batteries.

• Financing the Federal Government with Inflation-Protected Securities (Carola Binder, Not Quite Noahpinion) Carola Binder has contributed to Global Economic Intersection.

“… the balance of evidence supports the idea that TIPS are mildly cost-effective, or at least not cost-increasing, for the Treasury… Rubin, remember, suggested that TIPS would increase the nation’s saving rate and in turn increase productivity. John Campbell and Robert Shiller listed other potential upsides and downsides to TIPS in their 1996 A Scorecard for Indexed Government Debt. I’ll discuss some of these other issues in future posts.”

• Pitfalls of Retiring Abroad (Mason Braswell and Elliot M. Kass, Financial Planning)

• Professor Says He Has Solved a Mystery Over a Slave’s Novel (Julie Bosman, The New York Times) Amazing story revealing the intellectual capacities hiden beneath the veil of slavery.

• The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share (Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Aysegul Sahin, Brookings Institute)