Daily Policy Digest
Economic Issues
| Not All Economic Commentators Believe the Worst Is Behind Us The year 2013 will be challenging for the large, developed and ailing nations suffering stagflation and the burdens of enormous public debt... |
| Housing Market without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Ending new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac activity in the housing market would reduce gross domestic product an estimated 0.0037 percent, while employment would decrease an estimated 14,000 jobs or just 0.01 percent... |
| Americans Are Raiding Their 401(k)s in Record Numbers Twenty-five percent of workers dip into their nest egg to pay mortgages, credit card debt and other bills, with 33 percent of those in their 40s raiding their savings... |
| Economic Freedom Declines in America for Fifth Straight Year Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Mauritius, Denmark and the United States all lost ground in this year's index of economic freedom... |
| Ten Ways Dodd-Frank Will Hurt the Economy in 2013 Rather than eliminating the market's expectation that certain big financial firms are too big to fail, the Dodd-Frank Act creates an explicit set of too-big-to-fail entities... |
| If Demography Is Destiny, Good News for Texas, North Dakota and D.C. North Dakota and Washington, D.C., experienced the largest population inflows from other states, at 2.6 and 2.4 percent of their 2010 populations, respectively... |
| How to Reduce the Debt Burden for Future Generations Politicians need to focus on making the debt easier to pay off with growth strategies... |
| Demography as Destiny: The Vital American Family Before the 2008 collapse, the U.S. fertility rate was at 2.12; since then, the fertility rate dropped precipitously to 1.9 per woman... |
| How the Federal Housing Administration Hurts Working-Class Families and Communities An estimated 40 percent of the Federal Housing Administration's business consists of loans with either one or two subprime attributes -- a FICO score below 660 or a debt ratio equal to or greater than 50 percent... |
| Gauging the Guidance that Models Give the Fed The computer-modeling programs the Federal Reserve uses have overestimated the strength of the economy for several years... |
