Word: economisters
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...itself that move will have little impact on housing. Yet the Fed is widely expected to push the rate to 2% by year's end and 3.5% by the end of 2005. The typical mortgage rate will surge to 7.5% from about 6% today, says Douglas Duncan, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. In that environment, says Duncan, home sales will fall 10% and mortgage activity, including refinancings, will fall more than half, to $1.75 trillion of new loans in 2005. Nonetheless, experts say the average home price will inch higher. But there is at least one sign that...
...market inside, with workers trading futures contracts on such "commodities" as sales, product success and supplier behavior. The concept: a work force contains vast amounts of untapped, useful information that a market can unlock. "Markets are likely to revolutionize corporate forecasting and decision making," says Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, in Virginia, who has researched and developed markets. "Strategic decisions, such as mergers, product introductions, regional expansions and changing CEOs, could be effectively delegated to people far down the corporate hierarchy, people not selected by or even known to top management...
...gross domestic product in the E.U. compared with about 29% in the U.S. Income taxes have jumped, but so too have taxes on social insurance contributions and vat on goods and services. "Everyone feels like they are paying too much tax - and they are," says Baudouin Velge, chief economist at the Federation of Belgian Enterprises. Reducing that burden wouldn't just help taxpayers; it could help the entire euro zone, which is suffering from a long-term decline in economic vibrancy. While growth in the E.U. averaged about 3% per year in the 1970s, it slowed...
...Unlike the U.S., Europe has a powerful, Continent-wide tax instrument at its disposal: vat. (Sales tax in the U.S. is administered by states, and thus can't be coordinated for economic effect.) Many economists argue that consumption taxes such as vat are inherently fairer than other types of taxation because you only pay the tax if you buy something. Some even argue that vat rates - which are now largely aligned in the E.U. - could be raised and lowered depending on how the economy is doing, just as the European Central Bank raises interest rates to prevent overheating, and lowers...
...charges. Yukos might in effect be nationalized, with the government holding a controlling stake and the rest spread out among compliant domestic and foreign investors. Yukos' inexorable demise has made the markets nervous, and capital flight has jumped sharply. Destroying Yukos, warns Christof Ruehl, the World Bank's chief economist in Russia, will "undermine Putin's biggest economic accomplishment, the creation of two to three years of stability." Until very recently, such pessimism was a minority view. The government hard-line was seen by business executives and analysts as a political power struggle, not a reassertion of the Kremlin...