China's Summer slowdown

With regards to the recent Chinese stock market decline, Federal Reserve policymakers may confirme that conditions for the first rate hike are not yet been met.

 

Although U.S. growth is showing it is in better shape than we thought three months ago, and its unemployment rate fell to 5.1 %, a September rate hike is "less compelling" now.

Unfortunately, with China's devaluation of currency and Shangai Stock Market's slowdown, which we saw in August, the consensus is gradually shifting to December for a rate hike.
It world be the FED's first rate hike in almost a decade and show that the central bank is confident in the health of the first world economy. Global economic slowdown in Summer 2015 and volatility in stock markets seemed to have lowered the chance of a rate hike in September. It is still unclear if it will happen. 

When super-riches grow unchecked

I am so happy to see how the French economist Thomas Piketti began the New Year. After the world's leading expert on income and wealth inequality had criticised Mr. Hollande's policy, on January 1st he refused the award of the Legion d'Honneur. Mr. Piketti, who is the author "The Capital in the twenty-first century", said that "it isn't the government role to decide who is honorable". His main criticism is about the French tax policy: on the one hand, the French Prime Minister promised in 2012 a more progressive tax system. On the other hand, Mr. Hollande recently increased tax on the middle class.

As Mr. Piketti underlined in his bestseller, an apparently small gap between the return on capital and rate of growth can on the long run have powerful and destabilizing effects on the structure and dynamics of social inequality. In this perspective, the French economist wrote that a progressive tax on capital and income would be an "efficient response to the eternal problem of private capital and its return. A progressive levy on individual wealth would reassert control over capitalism in the name of the general interest while relying on the forces of private property and competition".

As mentioned in a brief article recently published by the Harward Business Review, no society should desire a class of super-rich. When super-riches grow unchecked, no one wins, not even the super-rich themselves, in the long run. Everyone possibility is stipled when the invisible line from rich to super-rich is crossed. When societies allow the rich to grow into the super-rich, they are limiting what those societies can achieve. Of course, if someone were to avoid that destructive trend about the future of economic inequality, she/he would not be the world last communist shaking her/his fist ridiculously :) 

Happy New Year.      

P.S.: the picture above shows the Conciergerie, which is a former prison in Paris, located in the west side of the "Ile de la Cité". I took the picture in 2010.