From the UPS Web Site….

UPS Ground and UPS Standard to Canada services will increase 4.9%.

Air and International express services will increase a net 4.9% through a combination of a 6.9% increase in rates and a 2% reduction in the air and international fuel surcharge.

From Naked Capitalism…

The latest policy is a regulatory change by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that says employers can reduce benefits when retirees reach age 65 and become eligible for Social Security and Medicare.

Another instance of the Bush Administration, while having come into office claiming to be a compassionate conservative and anti-large-scale government, being anything but that. This allows corporations to shift their obligations on to taxpayers, and will make it politically more difficult to implement changes in Medicare and Social Security.

From Calculated Risk….

According to the Fed, the discount rate spread is 145 bps. This graph was released this morning.

From The Age….

The depth of the housing crisis was underscored by the head of one of America’s largest banks, Bank of America, the straight-speaking Kenneth Lewis, who warned of a completely new attitude by Americans to their homes amid fears that as many as 20 million householders may “walk” from them, further deepening the crisis.

Lewis’ comments came as a new expression – “jingle mail” – referring to the growing trend where Americans mail the keys to their homes to the lenders before vacating, entered the US lexicon. Figures for November revealed more than 200,000 US homes were foreclosed, a 68% increase on November 2006.

Robert Folsom via Financial Armageddon…..

At the end of 2006, the financial assets of financial institutions surpassed 20% of annual GDP (those assets had never even eclipsed 5% of GDP until the early 1990s).

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, follow the link and look at the graph. It will do a much better job of communicating the dramatic nature of the change then mere words will.

If I was good with graphs, I would take the graph that Robert Folsom made and I would slap a graph of the national savings rate over it. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the growth of the financial assets of financial institutions matches the dramatic fall of America’s saving rate over the same period.

Over at the Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asks….
The question is, when inflation comes, why doesn’t the expectation of that inflation lead to proportional increases in nominal interest rates, thus keeping the real rate constant?
In the comment section on his post I said…
I am going to reveal my ignorance here, but it would seem to me Click Here to continue reading.