During this past week I found U.S. President Barack Obama’s state of the union address fascinating. So many promises -- free community college tuition (even though there is no evidence that works), help with child care, and tax breaks all aimed at helping out the beleaguered middle class.
There has been a lot of talk about income inequality lately, with one per cent of the world’s population expected to own 99% of the world’s wealth in 2015. But it turns out that inequality isn’t inevitable, it’s engineered, with that 1% spending a lot of time lobbying to protect their position.
And what can you do with all that wealth?
Well in Swaziland you can cancel school and make the school kids come and weed your lawn.
If you are looking for more riches one place may be the sewers. Apparently there is gold, silver and other metals in sewage sludge. Not that I’ll be looking for it.
But why bother trying to be richer. Apparently it doesn’t make you happier. But it does make you less sad.
Fears that highly indebted Canadians were heading for the poor house as interest rates rose got a reprieve with the Bank of Canada surprisingly cutting its overnight target rate on Wednesday. Well it was surprising to us. But Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz said he thought markets were already anticipating it.
Markets actually ended the week on an up note on the news.
And speaking of surprises, here are predictions from last year’s World Economic Forum held in Davos and how they panned out. Some predictions actually turned out to be true.
Thanks to Quartz for bringing a number of these stories to my attention this week.
