Money

The change is from regulating internet providers as “public utilities” to regulating them as most other businesses in the economy. We have had a long experience with public utility regulations where companies and municipalities have provided telephone, electricity and water services across the country. Tight regulation is great for such services that do not experience a lot of change – when was the last innovation in municipal water delivery, for example? With a rapidly changing product such as internet access, it is much tougher to have regulations that benefit consumers both in terms of price and innovation. more »

From 2017, any organisation that has 250 or more employees must publish and report specific figures about their gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women, expressed relative to men’s earnings. For example, ‘women earn 15% less than men per hour'. Employers must both: publish their gender pay gap data and a written statement on their public-facing website report their data to government online - using the gender pay gap reporting service. If your organisation has fewer than 250 employees, it can publish and report voluntarily but is not obliged to do so. more »

House price growth has varied significantly nationwide since the end of the Great Recession in 2009: In some metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), prices have grown as quickly as 7 percent annually, while others have seen prices decline almost as quickly, with many more MSAs falling somewhere in between. Since households spend more on housing than any other good or service, we would expect that inflation rates would show the same variation. They do not.  more »

The ripple effects of a market collapse would be severe, and taxpayers would potentially be on the hook for losses posted by failed mortgage companies. In addition to loans backed by the FHA or VA, the government is exposed through Ginnie Mae, the federal agency that provides payment guarantees when mortgages are pooled and sold as securities to investors. The mortgage companies are supposed to bear the losses if these securitized loans go bad. But if those companies go under, the government “will probably bear the majority of the increased credit and operational losses,” the paper concludes. Ginnie Mae is especially vulnerable because almost 60 percent of the dollar volume of the mortgages it guarantees comes from nonbank lenders. more »