Is California Over?
By now it’s painfully obvious that we humans tend to ruin our favorite places by overrunning them. And no place makes this point better than
By now it’s painfully obvious that we humans tend to ruin our favorite places by overrunning them. And no place makes this point better than
Lacking monetary printing presses, US cities and states tend to behave more like normal economic entities than do most nations. That is, they’re always balanced
The past decade was a uniquely smooth stretch of financial highway. Pretty much every major asset class – stocks, bonds, real estate, fine art, you
The apocalyptic fires that hit California last month have left observers scratching their heads and wondering how destruction on that scale could be possible –
Yesterday an entire California town burned down. Paridise, CA has (had) 27,000 residents and over 1,000 buildings, and now it’s pretty much gone. A fire
The “public pension crisis” is the kind of subject that’s easy to over-analyze, in part because there are so many different examples of bad behavior
The idea that as more people move to Hurricane Alley and other storm-prone places, the future cost of those storms will rise – and that
One of the big recent changes in American life is the ongoing mass-migration from the middle of the country to the coasts, especially those of
Money manager Rob Arnott and finance professor Lisa Meulbroek have run the numbers on underfunded pension plans and come up with an interesting – and
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a better method of analysing the impact of public sector pensions on state and local budgets. The results are
“War” and “pensions” are conceptually about as different as it’s possible to be. But – in a measure of how far into Crazy Town we’ve
When an entity needs to borrow ever-greater amounts of money to survive, the markets – that is, the people who are being asked to lend
Last year the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, otherwise known as Calpers, cut the expected return on the funds it invests for plan beneficiaries from
Back when society’s balance sheet was reasonably solid, the occasional bear market was no big deal. A 20% drop in the average S&P 500 stock
Not so long ago, a reasonably-presentable American could live an hour outside of a city and commute in for a government or banking job, thus
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