The World’s Top Energy Producing Countries in coal, oil, gas, nuclear and hydro are shown in the chart below. China is the world’s top producer and consumer of coal. France is one of the top producers of electricity from nuclear power. Together with the U.S., just these two countries account for about half of the world’s nuclear energy production.
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Source: RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
The following inflation-adjusted chart shows the S&P 500 bull and bear markets from 1871 thru July, 2019. The US market as represented by the S&P 500 is in a secular bull market about 60% vs. about 40% in the bear market. Currently we are in a secular bull market which started in Mar-Apr 2009 at the trough of the global financial crisis.
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Source: Doug Short, dshort.com
Related ETF:
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The chart below shows the top 15 drugs by revenue in 2018. Abbvie’s (ABBV) Humira was the top selling drug with total sales of over $18 billion.
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Source: Gen Eng News
Earlier:
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The American middle is going deeper into debt to maintain their middle class lifestyle, according to an article in the journal earlier this month. The article discusses a few sample families that are struggling to stay in the middle class. One of the main reasons for the current state of the working class is that incomes have not kept up with expenses. To put it differently, the rate of rise in income is much lower than the rate of increase of other essential items like shelter, health care, college education, etc.
So how does the US middle class continue to maintain their standard of living?
Credit.
Credit is available for pretty much anything. From cars to homes US families tend to put a lot of household expenses on credit. For example, consumer debt excluding mortgages total $4 Trillion and student debt stands at $1.5 Trillion.
The following is an excerpt from the piece:
Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level. Without adjusting for inflation, over the three decades through 2017, incomes are up 135%.
Average tuition at public four-year colleges, however, went up 549%, not adjusted for inflation, according to data from the College Board. On the same basis, average per capita personal health-care expenditures rose about 276% over a slightly shorter period, 1990 to 2017, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
And average housing prices swelled 188% over those three decades, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.
“The costs of staying in the middle class are going up,” said Adam Levitin, a Georgetown Law professor who studies bankruptcy, financial regulation and consumer finance.
Source: Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class, WSJ, Aug, 2019
