Finance Archive:

Settlement and fines for mortgage abuses are starting to add up to real money. Of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this is still just a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the related profits and scale of activities that took place.

(disclaimer: clever post title pilfered from the Economist)

A spiffy annotated interactive visualization by the NYT on what different industries actually pay in taxes. The differences in rates between industries illustrate who is getting tax breaks. The related article is worth a read.

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Bloomberg has several interactive tools for filtering and ranking the the world’s billionaires.

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If you click on any of them, individual profiles come up, like for Carlos Slim":

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You can plot them by industry, gender, number of children and all kinds of other variables.

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You’ll need an FT.com subscription to see it, but they have a nice presentation of where bank “spoils” (profits+staff pay) has been going to. Below are Bank of America and Citigroup.

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The 2012 Fortune 500 is out (which basically rates companies by revenue). I like this presentation of sales vs profits:image

There in also a charting of the Top 10 that let’s you take a look at revenue vs profits:

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Two charts examining the size of debt restructuring by countries. The second chart is more useful since it aggregates the restructurings of countries that had several over different years (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, etc).

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One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care about these numbers.

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I’m not a fan of the Heritage Foundation, and the one time I dug into the data of their Economic Freedom Index I found that they occasionally compare apples and oranges to get around data scarcity – BUT: they do put a large research effort into the report each year. The below interactive map is well executed – but you should drill down to country level data to get a feel for what is really being measured (click on a country, then the “learn more about this country” link that pops up in the lower left. Why this requires two steps I have no idea).

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There are a number of interesting and well designed charts in the 2011 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse. The private sector actually does a lot of good analysis and visualization work that just doesn’t get publicized much.

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This one took me a minute to figure out – it’s showing distribution of wealth by decile:

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There are a series of charts on wealth and age:

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Thanks to Sean R for sending in the link!

Wow. I didn’t realize China’s investment in the USA was so small.

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A billion here, a billion there – soon you’re talking about real money.

News reports often focus on debt to gdp ratios, but it’s powerful to actually show the magnitudes of each, and compare the amounts already committed to what remains to be financed, as is done here by Spiegel:

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A rawer way of looking at the debt of all of the PIIGS, in piles of euros:

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This version shows who loaned Greece the money:

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The World Economic Forum always has some interesting visualizations and info-videos.

Global Risk Map:

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Interactive Risk Explorer (be sure to play with the menu tabs on the right):

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