Should-Reads:
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Richard Rubin and Margaret Collins: Early Tap of 401(k) Replaces Homes as American Piggy Bank: “The Internal Revenue Service collected $5.7 billion in 2011 from penalties, meaning that Americans took out about $57 billion from retirement funds before they were supposed to. The median size of a 401(k) is $24,400 as of March 31, with people older than 55 having $65,300, according to Fidelity Investments. Those funds can disappear quickly in retirement, and the early withdrawals indicate that the coming retirement crisis could be even more acute than expected…”
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Simon Gilchrist et al.: Monetary Policy and Real Borrowing Costs at the Zero Lower Bound: “For the ZLB period, we identify two policy surprises: changes in the 2-year Treasury yield around policy announcements and changes in the 10-year Treasury yield that are orthogonal to those in the 2-year yield. The efficacy of unconventional policy in lowering real borrowing costs is comparable to that of conventional policy, in that it implies a complete pass-through of policy-induced movements in Treasury yields to comparable-maturity private yields…”
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Mary C. Daly and Leila Bengali: Is It Still Worth Going to College?: “Earning a four-year college degree remains a worthwhile investment for the average student. Data from U.S. workers show that the benefits of college in terms of higher earnings far outweigh the costs of a degree, measured as tuition plus wages lost while attending school. The average college graduate paying annual tuition of about $20,000 can recoup the costs of schooling by age 40. After that, the difference between earnings continues such that the average college graduate earns over $800,000 more than the average high school graduate by retirement age…”
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Charlie Crist: “I left the Republican Party because the Republican leadership went off the cliff… so unfriendly to the African-American president. I’ll just go there…. Because I was a Republican, I saw the activists and what they were doing, and it was intolerable to me… and I saw how the party–some of them–were treating the African-American president and I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s a big part of why I left the party…”
Should Be Aware of:
Continue reading “Things to Read on the Evening of May 7, 2014”