Females earn more than 70 per cent of the income, mainly as traders, in the country

North Korea is a militarised, male-dominated society, but it is women who are making the money as the insular nation allows an unofficial market-based economy to take shape.
Women earn more than 70 per cent of household income in North Korea, mainly as traders in the informal markets that have proliferated in recent years, research by the South Korean government-run Korea Institute for National Unification (Kinu) found.
That is despite women making up only about half of the 12 million economically active North Koreans, experts say.
Women make the money in male-dominated North Korea

Barry Ritholtz writes:  Behavioral economics is grounded in the idea that homo economicus (economic man) fails to account for real-world human behavior. The behaviorists argue that people are not rational; they don’t act narrowly in their own self-interest as profit maximizers. Instead, they are biased and emotional and often fail to make rational judgments about money.

In other words, the traditional starting point of economics is actually false. As a model, it helps conceptualize commerce, but in the real world it can be and often is wrong. This is where the behaviorists come in to show how peoples’ irrationality affects their decision-making. Specifically:

— We get too emotional about the possibility of making lots of money;

— We get too depressed about the risk of losing money;

— Our cognitive processes fool us constantly into believing things that are untrue;

— We have poor impulse control, an inability to think long term and lack patience.

Nowhere does behavioral economics promise to make you as a human being less irrational. At best, its goal is to inform you of your own irrational tendencies.

• Vanguard’s assets under management have at least tripled to more than $3 trillion since the end of the financial crisis. About two-thirds of those assets are in broad, inexpensive passive indices;

• Exchange-traded funds let investors gain broad exposure to almost any asset class in a single purchase at very low cost;

• Asset allocation can now be had for little cost or free via all manner of automated software-based advisers.

Rather than brainwashing investors, behavioral economics has helped create a set of investing alternatives that meet their financial benchmarks and cost very little.  That you may have chosen to ignore these alternatives and plunge into the latest fund of funds or private-equity offering isn’t a failure of behavioral economics; it is your own failure to apply what we now know about investing.

The basic premise of economics is that transactional commerce — the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services — is a key way to understand society. What behavioral economics has done is point out the false assumptions and erroneous conclusions inherent in the dismal science of economics.

Your wetware developed to keep you alive on the savannah, not to make risk-reward decisions in the capital markets. A secret brainwashing machine is unnecessary. You are not wired for investing. You never were. That is a feature, not a bug. But our brains have allowed our species to survive long enough to develop expensive, unnecessary financial products.

It is your job to figure that out. Behavioral economics can help.

Daniel Halper writes:  Wealthy Americans who seek to amass political power have always been able to do so with relative ease, as long as they go about it with skill. Until recently, however, it has not been the case (as it is in many countries) that political power has been a precursor to, or a significant factor in, the accumulation of immense wealth.

Peter Schweizer in his important new book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Business Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich writes: When Hillary entered the Senate, and then the State Department, she became the one who had real power, rather than Bill.”

Schweizer sets out to provide a window into just how the former president and former secretary of state (and perhaps future president) left the White House “dead broke,” as Hillary Clinton claimed in a book-tour interview last year, before earning at least $136.5 million in the decade and a half since then.

Bureaucratic or legislative obstacles were mysteriously cleared or approvals granted within the purview of his wife, the powerful senator or secretary of state. Huge donations then flowed into the Clinton Foundation while Bill received enormous speaking fees underwritten by the very businessmen who benefited from these apparent interventions.

Sometimes the money would go directly to Bill Clinton’s personal bank account, other times to the family foundation. There was also the case involving the telecom company Ericsson, which invested in Bill Clinton’s biggest single payday: $750,000 for a 2011 speech in Hong Kong. A week after the speech, “the State Department unveiled its new sanctions list for Iran. Telecom was not on the list.”

There was Hillary Clinton’s push as secretary of state to have Russia buy airplanes from Boeing.   Two months after the American company and the Russians inked the deal, Boeing gave $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Schweizer offers details about a financial windfall after Bill was befriended by those seeking to buy a share of America’s uranium supply and about how the former president helped give prominence and credibility to the strongman in Kazakhstan.

The majority of the examples Schweizer provides are of business conducted in countries ruled by despots. This is because, as he explains, “in places like Germany or Great Britain…business and politics are kept separate by stringent ethical rules and procedures, but in despotic areas of the developing world…rules are very different.”

But there is no definitive proof of any quid pro quo at work in this lawyerly book: Schweizer even allows that in certain instances, it may very well be pure coincidence

There is much talk that Mrs. Clinton would be a pathbreaking president should she win in November 2016. That would surely be true, but it would be as much for her innovations in blurring the lines between political power and personal economic gain as it would be for her gender.

Matt Levine writes:  European leaders are working frantically with the International Monetary Fund to finalize their proposal on how to restructure Greek debt, though differences remain “over whether Greece can hit ambitious budget surplus targets to be included in an agreed text,” as well as over “whether they present their proposal to Mr Tsipras’ government during a meeting or a teleconference.” This being Europe, one official says that there was “at least a meeting of the texts; minds are probably further apart,” which is the opposite of how normal negotiations work.

Meanwhile, as the European leaders’ texts were being so agreeable, boom, Greece submitted its own proposal to its creditors.  “After submitting a complete proposal for a deal last night to institutions, we are not waiting for them to submit their own plan back to us,” Tsipras said. “Greece is the one that submits the plan.”

So to recap: Greece’s creditors have more or less worked out the text of the proposal to submit to Greece, though they don’t agree on what that text means, or on how to deliver it. And Greece has worked out its own unrelated proposal, and plans to ignore the proposal that the creditors have been slaving over, though I guess that would be easier to do by teleconference than in person? Anyway, everything seems super, carry on.