Today the French go to the polls to vote for a new president. French media are reporting what is to them a shockingly low turnout but which to us would be astonishingly high. We’ll see if that holds when the polls close.

Yesterday my wife pointed out that for the French election day is a Sunday. I responded that reflects the difference between secularist France and the culturally Calvinist U. S. The French want to maximize the likelihood that people will actually turn out and vote. We think or at least used to think that people should be in church on Sundays.

When the votes are tallied we’ll learn whether the conventional wisdom—that Macron is a shoe-in—is right or wrong, that is, whether there is a reason it is the conventional wisdom.

Eurocrats must be anticipating the vote’s result as a man anticipates his own execution. Will they receive a reprieve?

I’m still listening to old radio programs. After I gave up listening to the decreasingly listenable Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, following its move to New York and cast change, I started listening to that most archetypal of hard-boiled detective radio dramas, The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. The series began as a summer replacement in 1947 with the screen actor Van Heflin as the titular character. Only a few episodes with Heflin as Marlowe are extant and two of those are the pilot and the first episode, both dramatizations of Chandler’s story Red Wind. To my ear they have slightly different casts, delivery, and music so at this point I think they’re actually different performances of the same script.

The series returned in 1948, this time moving from NBC to CBS and featuring Gerald Mohr as Marlowe. The new version also opened with that same script and there’s really no comparison. Mohr was immeasurably better than Heflin as Marlowe, arguably the best portrayal of the character. Raymond Chandler, who had little connection with the radio series other than cashing his royalty checks, was reportedly happy with Mohr’s performance and he should have been.

Thank goodness someone is pointing out that the reason that large retail chains are having a horrible year isn’t just because of the rise of online buying. From CNBC:

With more than half of 2017 still ahead, the retail industry is seeing a record-setting pace for bankruptcy filings and store closings — and more are expected in the not too distant future, despite what most consider a healthy consumer.

This tipping point for retail is the result of a number of compounding reasons, but the inability to pay looming, massive debt bills is dealing the final death blow to many.

Yes, more shopping is shifting online in general, and to Amazon specifically, as in-store shopping traffic and sales trends fall for many retailers and shopping centers. Slice Intelligence said 43 cents of every online dollar is spent on Amazon, based on its analysis of millions of email receipts.

However, according to the latest Commerce Department retail sales data, 86 percent of all retail sales (excluding motor vehicles and parts and food service and drinking locations) are still made in physical, brick-and-mortar locations. To be sure, the online versus in-store sales breakdown varies wildly from retailer to retailer.

I think the more important answer is that massive retail chains, cobbled together through leveraged buyouts and financed by debt, just don’t serve people very well. And, importantly, depend on certain basic assumptions which aren’t panning out, specifically that you’ll always be able to make your interest payments based on increasing sales. And that there will always be increased returns to scale.

At Quartz Mark Manson presents five rules (or “levels”) for winning the game of life:

Level 1 – Find food; find a bed to sleep in at night

Level 2 – Know you’re not going to die

Level 3 – Find your people

Level 4 – Do something that’s important and valuable to both yourself and others

Level 5 – Create a legacy

For those of you who don’t recognize it, that’s a restatement of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I had Levels 1 and 2 licked by the time I was 17. I haven’t been nearly as successful with the others. By most standards I’ve failed at Level 5.

Unless this blog has informed people and change some minds, in which case I may never know. It could be that my dogs have created my legacy. Ah well, they also serve, etc.

I would add one reminder to his advice: the house always wins.

You might be interested in this quiz on retirement income from the Center for Retirement Income of New York Life. I passed but just barely. I knew more about current law than investment which doesn’t surprise me a bit.

You might want to take a look at this post at Investopedia on the Taylor Rule:

First, AI came for our jobs, now it wants to set monetary policy. With Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s first term as the leader of the Federal Reserve Committee coming to an end, there talk President Donald Trump may appoint a new chairperson who would adopt a rules-based policy, essentially turning the Fed into a robot. Setting monetary policy this way would see the Fed adjust interest rates based on key economic indicators such as inflation, GDP, and the unemployment rate.

The most popular formula is the Taylor Rule, which would see the Fed set a real fed funds rate, usually 2 percent, and then derive the nominal rate using current inflation, inflation expectations, GDP and GDP expectations.

The graph at the top of this page illustrates what interest rate the Taylor Rule would have produced over time.

Here’s the question: would protracted negative interest rates have been worse than what actually happened? That boiled down to increased financialization of the economy, preservation of zombie banks, and subsidies for rich people and did not produce the economic growth predicted by the Fed governors. I open the floor for debate.

I found physician Marc Siegel’s New York Times op-ed sufficiently thought-provoking that before completing it I immediately headed over to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Department of Health and Human Service’s report on health care spending. Here’s the summary of its findings. The big health care spenders are more likely to be white, old, prosperous, female, and, unsurprisingly, sicker than the general population.

If an insurance plan premiums must be proportional to risk for the plan to remain viable. What we implement as a matter of policy, whether you’re talking about Medicare or the health insurances exchanges of the still-breathing Affordable Care Act, is not insurance. Basically, we’re subsidizing the health care of old white women at the expense of poor black men.

I don’t believe the real big spenders in our system are women like Dr. Siegel’s 60 year old patient who comes in for a checkup every couple of weeks because she’s worried that her seasonal allergies are pneumonia. I think they’re more likely to be Medicare beneficiaries who are desperately trying to preserve their lives but the point remains.

Here’s another fact, unmentioned in the op-ed: co-pays constitute a much higher proportion of health care spending in other OECD countries. You can find the statistic in an article I cited last week if you’re interested in tracking it down.

Our system will remain fundamentally unjust—not to mention horribly expensive and just plain bad policy—unless we take a number of steps:

• Create a single health care system rather than four or ten as we have now.
• Abandon the insurance metaphor in characterizing how we pay for health care.
• Patients pay for more of their own care.
• Subsidies are based more on need than political clout.
• We maintain a commitment to controlling the costs of health care.

We will also need to end the agonistic appeals to emotion and put on our green eyeshades. I am not hopeful. The Republicans’ plan is no more a step in the right direction than the ACA was.

George P. Schultz and Martin Feldstein’s Washington Post op-ed on trade is so short you should read it in full:

If a country consumes more than it produces, it must import more than it exports. That’s not a rip-off; that’s arithmetic.

If we manage to negotiate a reduction in the Chinese trade surplus with the United States, we will have an increased trade deficit with some other country.

Federal deficit spending, a massive and continuing act of dissaving, is the culprit. Control that spending and you will control trade deficits.

The first sentence is axiomatic; it’s a tautology—true by definition. The third sentence combines tautology with hypothesis. Its truth really depends on circumstances.

I believe the fourth sentence is only true if you make certain assumptions, for example, that we must allow the Chinese to purchase and hold Treasuries with the dollars they receive in trade. That is not true. We could and IMO should force them to hold dollars.

I think we have a trade deficit with China for four reasons:

• The cost of labor in China is very low.
• In the 1990s the Chinese maintained an artificially low yuan in a deliberate move to siphon away U. S. productive capacity. That has had lingering consequences.
• The Chinese hold Treasuries rather than purchasing American goods and services, we allow them to, and they can enforce it in China because they’re still an authoritarian country.
• There’s an uneven playing field. Chinese goods are produced under conditions we consider abusive to workers, without the environmental, safety, human rights, and other protections enforced here. We could and should impose a Pigouvian tax on goods made in China to account for the factors we allegedly believe in.

Change those factors and the balance of trade between the U. S. and China will change, too.

“tl;dr” is Internet slang for “too long; didn’t read”. My “ss;mr” is the opposite of that—”so short; must read”.

Adolph Kiefer, who won a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics, has died at the age of 98. From the Los Angeles Times:

Addolph Kiefer, the 100-meter backstroke champion at the 1936 Berlin Games who was America’s oldest living Olympic gold medalist in any sport, has died. He was 98.

He died Friday at his home in Wadsworth, Illi., about 50 miles north of Chicago, according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. It said Kiefer had been hospitalized with pneumonia in recent months.

He had neuropathy that kept him confined to a wheelchair later in life, but he continued swimming because he could still stand in the water, according to the Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Kiefer became an Olympic champion as a 17-year-old in an Olympic-record time that stood for 20 years. He was also the first man to break 1 minute in the 100 backstroke, doing so as a high school swimmer in Illinois. He later competed for the University of Texas.

His accomplishments didn’t end there. After joining the U. S. Navy in 1942 at the age of 23 he redesigned the Navy’s swim training program. The Navy had been losing more men to drowning than to bullets and his “victory” backstroke was credited with saving many lives.

He went on to found a successful swimwear company. His company was the first to market a nylon swimsuit, he invented the kickboard, and his company introduced the world’s first turbulence-resistant swim lane. His company biography is here and his company’s obituary of him is here. They make interesting reading.