2012 March FIRE Policy News

The March issue of FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) Policy News reports on Louisiana’s unusually expensive automobile insurance rates, symptomatic, author Kevin Mooney writes, “of public policy favored by trial lawyers that typically results in anti-business settlements.”

Also in this issue:

• With Standard & Poor’s having downgraded the government debt ratings of nine European nations in mid-January, some experts are saying there’s also a message for the U.S. government, states, and localities.

• A billionaire hedge fund manager and other billionaires in what is arguably the nation’s most dysfunctional state--California--are bankrolling initiatives to extract billions of dollars of additional taxes from the state’s already tax-beleaguered businesses and citizens.

• “The Obama administration responded to the recession in classical Keynesian fashion. Government spending has risen to $3.8 trillion, entailing an annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion and total federal debt of $15.5 trillion, a bit larger than the nation’s gross domestic product. In 2010, U.S. government spending was the highest relative to GDP since 1945. ... The benefits of these massive expansions of federal spending and money stock have been approximately zip,” writes Emeritus Professor Edwin Mills of Northwestern University.

• Can college towns become the nation’s next retirement communities? Community marketing consultant John Gann thinks so, and his book The Third Lifetime Place: A New Economic Opportunity for College Towns sets out to show municipal leaders how they can attract seniors to the places where they spent their college years.

• Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and John Barrasso (R-WY) have introduced legislation that would exempt some smaller companies from the regulatory burden of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s Section 404 top-down risk assessment process.