Tag: Economy & Business

China Grows Protectionist Alienating Business Supporters

In some ways, I do think the Chinese government has been pretty stupid over the past year in executing its “Pissing Off As Many Countries As Possible” strategy. China rankled the Europeans over its climate change diplomacy at Copenhagen. For all of Beijing’s bluster, it failed to alter U.S. policies on Tibet and Taiwan. It backed down on the Google controversy. It overestimated the power that comes with holding U.S. debt. It alienated South Korea and Japan over its handling of the Cheonan incident, leading to joint naval exercises with the United States — exactly what China didn’t want. It’s growing more isolated within the G-20. And, increasingly, no one trusts its economic data.

This doesn’t sound like a government that has executed a brilliant grand strategy. It sounds like a country that’s benefiting from important structural trends, while frittering away its geopolitical advantages. Alienating key supporters in the country’s primary export markets — and even if Chinese consumption is rising, exports still matter an awful lot to the Chinese economy — seems counterproductive to China’s long-term strategic and economic interests.

via Beijing has alienated the most pro-China interest groups in the United States and Europe | Daniel W. Drezner.

Business Jobs, Not Government Jobs, Create Wealth

In the two decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created 73 million new private sector jobs—while simultaneously losing some 44 million jobs in the process of adjusting its economy to international competition. That was a net gain of some 29 million jobs. A stunning 55 percent of the total workforce at the end of these two decades was in a new job, some two-thirds of them in industries that paid more than the average wage. By contrast, continental Europe, with a larger economy and workforce, created an estimated 4 million jobs in the same period, most of which were in the public sector (and the cost of which they are beginning to regret).

Over the years, the transformation of American industry has been nothing short of phenomenal. U.S. companies replaced large, mass-produced consumer products with sophisticated goods derived from intellectual output and knowledge-based interests, the fastest-growing segment of the world’s economy. Management was assisted by a level of labor flexibility that is the envy of both Europe and Asia. Europe struggles with the legacy of the steam age in the form of craft, union, and management demarcations that limit management’s role. In Asia, management is often stifled by large, oligopolistic networks and government mandates.

via Obama’s Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina – US News and World Report.

Relax, We’ll Be Fine

The U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Relax, We’ll Be Fine – NYTimes.com. Continue reading “Relax, We’ll Be Fine”

Federal pay ahead of private industry

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

via Federal pay ahead of private industry – USATODAY.com.

The Rising Sovereign Debt Crisis

Bond giant PIMCO spoke of a “sovereign debt explosion” that has taken the world into uncharted waters and poses a major threat to economic stability. “Our sense is that the importance of the shock to public finances in advanced economies is not yet sufficiently appreciated and understood,” said Mohamed El-Erian, the group’s chief executive.

Mr El-Erian said most analysts are still using “backward-looking models” that fail to grasp the full magnitude of what has taken place in world affairs since the crisis. Some 40pc of the global economy is in countries where governments are running deficits above 10pc of GDP, with no easy way out.

Italy has to refinance 20pc of its entire debt – the world’s third largest after Japan and the US – tapping the bond markets for a total €259bn this year. Belgium has to roll over 22pc of its substantial debt.

via Eurozone could risk ‘sovereign debt explosion’ – Telegraph.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner

At first, some people on Wall Street feared that the Obama Administration was simply seeking a pretext for taking over embattled firms like Citigroup and Bank of America, as liberal Democrats had urged. But Geithner was resolutely opposed to such an option, at least at that stage. He and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, intended to use the stress tests to bolster banks’ finances rather than nationalizing them. “That would have been a deeply transforming policy mistake,” he said to me. “The country would have suffered for decades. We’d have spent hundreds of billions of dollars more that we didn’t need to spend, and would have been stuck in those institutions for years.”

In fact, some commentators agreed that the Treasury and the Fed were being too tough on banks.  One of these skeptics was Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities, who has been following the financial industry since 1965. He has since changed his mind. “Geithner recognized that the system needed overkill on security and soundness to rebuild the confidence that was lacking,” he said. According to Bove’s calculations, U.S. banks now have more capital as a percentage of assets than in any year since 1935. “He built in that safety and soundness throughout the industry. As time goes on, I’m getting more and more respect for him.”

Between March 9th and May 7th, when the results of the stress tests were announced, the Dow rose by almost two thousand points, and the spread between AAA and BAA bonds—a reliable indicator of financial distress—fell sharply

Read more: via Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner : The New Yorker.

Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!

About a quarter of the world's economic output is produced by the United States, whose population is less than a fourth of China's 1.3 billion. So there's a very long way to catch up for a country beset by a variety of Third World problems, from lack of paved roads in many rural areas to water pollution so severe that 700 million people have to drink contaminated water every day, according to the World Bank.

via Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!- International Business-News-The Economic Times.

How Wall St. Enabled Unsustainable European Welfare States

For all the benefits of uniting Europe with one currency, the birth of the euro came with an original sin: countries like Italy and Greece entered the monetary union with bigger deficits than the ones permitted under the treaty that created the currency. Rather than raise taxes or reduce spending, however, these governments artificially reduced their deficits with derivatives.

In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come. Critics say that such deals, because they are not recorded as loans, mislead investors and regulators about the depth of a country’s liabilities.

via Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis – NYTimes.com.

Rap Video Boosts Economist’s Book Sales

Friedrich Hayek, Nobel-prize winning economist and well-known proponent of free markets, is having a big month. He was last seen rap-debating with John Maynard Keynes in the viral video above, (in which Hayek is portrayed as the sober voice of reason while Keynes overindulges at a party at the Fed). His 1944 book, “The Road to Serfdom,” provided the theme for John Stossel’s Fox Business News program on Valentine’s Day.

Hayek, who died in 1992, is also reemerging as a bestselling author. A new edition of Hayek’s seminal book, “The Road to Serfdom,” was published in March 2007 by the University of Chicago Press as part of a series called “The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek,” for which I serve as editor. For over a year-and-a-half, the book sold respectably, at a clip of about 600 copies a month.

But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since. What’s more, the Kindle edition went on sale in late May 2009 and is now the best-selling book that the University of Chicago Press has offered in that format. This would be a pretty good sales record for a contemporary author, but it is nothing short of amazing for a book originally published in 1944, and by an economist, no less.

via The secret behind the hot sales of “The Road to Serfdom” by free-market economist F. A. Hayek – Short Stack.

How America Can Rise Again

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future. – by James Fallows

via How America Can Rise Again – The Atlantic (January/February 2010).