Search

Germany may run into a shortage of critical medical equipment and hospital capacity even though the country has done relatively well in combating the coronavirus so far, scientists and politicians warned Sunday. "We can't rule out we'll have more patients in need of ventilators than equipment", Lothar Wieler, president of the public health group, Robert Koch Institute, told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- Climate provisions in President Joe Biden's tax-and-spending plan are critical to fulfilling his pledge to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 but are far from enough, according to a new analysis that finds sweeping changes are required to confront global warming. Biden's Build Back Better plan contains about $555 billion worth of climate provisions, but it is still subject to changes amid Senate negotiations. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic-relief bill, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials including deputy director of the National Economic Council, David Kamin -- who wrote a 2019 paper on "Taxing the Rich" -- are in the process of fleshing out the Biden tax plans. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses taxation and economic issues in China, particularly the need for the government to bolster its revenue to expand its welfare programs and boost local government funding. Also cited are how President Xi Jinping implemented tax cuts in previous years, and how said reductions led to business growth, increased consumer spending, and better economic growth.

As Biden left for his European summit meetings, House Democrats release a rough draft of legislation to enact the plan, but it likely will take days or even weeks before it may be ready for a vote. Biden's Plea In his comments to House Democrats, Biden urged them to quickly clear the infrastructure measure for his signature. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden told House Democrats in a private meeting Thursday that his presidency and their political fortunes depend on passage of his multitrillion-dollar economic agenda -- yet it was unclear whether his warning would unite the party's factions. "Any single element of this framework would be viewed as a fundamental change in America", Biden said in remarks at the White House after the private meeting with House Democrats. [Extracted from the article]

(Biden on the campaign trail proposed applying income-tax rates, which would be higher) White House economist Heather Boushey underlined that Biden doesn't intend to boost taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year. (Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic-relief bill, according to people familiar with the matter. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic-relief bill, according to people familiar with the matter. "We'll have a big robust discussion about the appropriateness of a big tax increase", Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month, predicting Democrats would pursue a reconciliation bill that forgoes the GOP and would aim for a corporate tax even higher than 28%. [Extracted from the article]

Ocampo is a former finance minister, head of National Planning Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos on Tuesday appointed Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former finance minister who now teaches at Columbia University, to the country's central bank board to replace Cesar Vallejo. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg View) -- Do Index Funds Put Us on the Road to Communism? For one thing, public stock markets are not really a mechanism for raising capital any more.(1472046713983) But more fundamentally, there is an alternative view that the rise of passive investing will improve capital allocation, because bad active investors will be driven out but good ones will remain.(1472047785908) The passive investors can't influence relative prices, since they just buy the market portfolio, meaning that the fewer but better active investors will continue to make the capital allocation decisions. Instead they buy a S&P 500 index fund, say, which is a market-cap-weighted portfolio of large-cap U.S. stocks -- itself a capital-allocation decision. If you do that, you are making a capital-allocation decision; you are giving money to companies that you think the market undervalues, whose fundamental performance should justify higher prices. [Extracted from the article]

Oil is down, Brexit negotiations are dragging on and China eases a little more. British Prime Minister David Cameron is in Brussels trying to get a deal on the U.K.'s membership of the European Union that would allow him to win the coming referendum on that membership. [Extracted from the article]

(Bloomberg View) -- Primakov Would Have Ruled Russia Like Putin: Leonid Bershidsky After Primakov gave up the idea of running for president, the parties merged, and Yeltsin resigned, bequeathing Russia to Putin. [Extracted from the article]