Economix Blog: Weekend Business Podcast: Europe, Pensions, Wealth and Phone Bills

For much of the past week, financial markets have fretted more about Italy than about Greece, which had been the main focus of worries for many weeks.

While the markets were calmer on Friday, the problems in the euro zone were hardly over.

In the new Weekend Business podcast, Floyd Norris, a veteran financial reporter, says that Italy’s sheer economic weight makes its problems quite threatening to the world’s financial system. An impending change in political leadership in Italy and a shift that has already occurred in Greece took some of the financial pressure off both countries temporarily. But the stability of the euro zone remains very much in doubt, he says.

In the United States, a Congressional “supercommittee” has been charged with reducing the fiscal deficit by $1.2 trillion. In a separate conversation in the podcast, and in her column in Sunday Business, Gretchen Morgenson says the committee might want to focus on the taxpayer financing of military contractor pensions, which, she says, are underfunded by some $30 billion. Since defined-benefit pensions have been reduced in other sectors, she suggests, it may be worth considering whether taxpayers ought to bear this burden for defense contractors.

Questions posed by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are the focus of the Economic View column in Sunday Business by Tyler Cowen, a George Mason economics professor, who says he has a libertarian and conservative perspective. While he says in the podcast that he’s sympathetic to the demonstrators’ targeting of abuses by the “top 1 percent,” he adds that the crucial distinction ought to be how you earn your money, not how much money you earn. The pursuit of wealth has long been valued in American society, he says, along with a culture of discipline and hard work, and in his view these values ought to be strengthened in the future.

Outrageous cellphone bills have raised the hackles of the Haggler, as David Segal calls himself in his Sunday Business column. On the podcast, he discusses his efforts to adjudicate a bill that amounted to more than $25,000 in long-distance charges plus more than $1,000 in recovery fees.

And Phyllis Korkki and Amy Cortese discuss the response of people in Saranac Lake, a small town in upstate New York, who realized that with the demise of a local store there would no longer be anyplace in town to buy underwear. They started a community-owned store, which sells assorted sundries, with the support of some local shopkeepers, who say that a variety of enterprises are needed to build customer traffic and keep the town’s businesses alive.

You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: Floyd Norris on European debt (34:20); news headlines (25:37); Gretchen Morgenson on pensions (23:22); Amy Cortese on Saranac Lake (18:46); The Haggler on phone bills (13:14); Tyler Cowen on wealth (8:44); the week ahead (1:41).

As articles discussed in the podcast are published during the weekend, links will be added to this post.

You can download the program by subscribing from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3a3d681194d14f9fa094fc77c63ee787