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Gene Ellis

Efforts to Revive the Economy Lead to Worries of a Bubble - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Federal Reserve is well into its third round of “quantitative easing,” in which it buys longer-term assets to bring down long-term lending rates.
  • In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
  • In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
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  • Ben S. Bernanke and company would also like to kindle inflation expectations, spurring people to buy and companies to invest today instead of waiting until tomorrow. Supposedly, all of this will drive a self-sustaining economic recovery.
  • Instead, the Fed has kindled speculation.
  • Investors are desperate for yield and are paying up for riskier assets.
  • There are more reliable measures of stock market value, and they look frothy. One gauge, the price of stocks based on the past decade of earnings, is named after the Yale economist Robert J. Shiller. Using that, stocks are too expensive by 65 percent.
  • Alternatively, many investors look at something called the Q, devised by the economist James Tobin, which compares stock prices with corporate net worth. The nonfinancial companies are overpriced by 57 percent.
  • Last month, investors were paying more for such loans than at any time in the last five years. They are snapping up billions of dollars in securities made up of subprime auto loans.
Gene Ellis

Recasting high school, German firms transplant apprentice model to U.S. - The Washingto... - 0 views

  • Recasting high school, German firms transplant apprentice model to U.S.
  • The apprentices are grouped together for coursework that leads to an associate’s degree in mechatronics, a hybrid discipline pioneered in Japan and Germany that melds the basics of mechanical engineering, electronics and other areas.
  • It produces workers that can program, operate and fix the machines common to the factories run by Siemens and other top companies. There used to be an elective among the 24 courses the students take. That was replaced with a logic class.
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  • The curriculum as it stands now, he said, is in “lockstep” with how mechatronics is taught in Germany.
Gene Ellis

How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed
  • The pipeline, known as South Stream, was Mr. Putin’s most important European project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Europe hooked on Russian gas, and further entrenching Russian influence in fragile former Soviet satellite states as part of a broader effort to undermine European unity.
  • The bill that Parliament took up on April 4 was arcane. But it swept aside a host of European regulations — rules that Mr. Putin did not want to abide by — for a pipeline that would deliver gas throughout southern Europe. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage In Diplomatic Defeat, Putin Diverts Pipeline to TurkeyDEC. 1, 2014
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  • In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.
  • Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.
  • Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.
  • On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.
  • “If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.
  • The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.
  • When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.
  • In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.
  • While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”
Gene Ellis

Kenen on the euro | vox - 0 views

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Early work on optimum currency areas by Robert Mundell had emphasised the symmetry or asymmetry of disturbances hitting different regional economies as a key criterion on which to gauge their suitability for sharing a common currency.
  • Peter took this insight further by arguing that disturbances were often sector specific and that the diversification of regional economies was therefore a key consideration in gauging their suitability for monetary union (the better diversified an economy was, the less likely it was to be badly destabilised by a sector-specific shock). (Kenen 1969).
  • We now know that Kenen flagged a problem for which the Eurozone could have been better prepared. With an outsized capital-goods producing sector, Germany benefitted from a strong positive shock as a result of China’s emergence onto the global stage, given the Chinese economy’s voracious appetite for capital goods.
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  • Portugal and Italy, on the other hand, specialised much more heavily in consumer-goods producing sectors and felt the brunt of Chinese competition. No Eurozone member was sufficiently well diversified to shrug off this kind of shock, something that should have made the euro’s architects think twice.
  • Specifically, they should have thought again, Kenen argued, about the coordination of national fiscal policies, the need for a common Eurozone budget, and mechanisms for transferring fiscal resources from booming to depressed regions.
  • More than any other economist, Peter understood that monetary union was a legal as well as an economic construct. His careful parsing of the Maastricht Treaty explained to the economics profession exactly what the treaty did and did not allow (Kenen 1992).
  • Peter even anticipated the debate over TARGET2 imbalances, observing in 1999 that it was possible to “easily conceive of conditions…in which one [national central bank] would be reluctant to build up claims indefinitely on some other national central bank.” (Kenen 1999).
  • Finally, Peter observed that the possibility of a member state exiting from the Eurozone could not be ruled out but warned that European officials should be cautious in bandying about the idea (Kenen 1999). “The costs of defecting,” he wrote back in 1999, “could be very high.”
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    Good Eichengreen, Wyplosz EUVox article on Peter Kenen and insights on why the Euro might have difficuties.
Gene Ellis

Happy 2013? | vox - 0 views

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Hopefully the following ten observations are less controversial in 2013 than in previous years.
  • As long known by elementary textbook readers, austerity policies have contractionary effects.
  • Debt reduction is a very long process; we're talking about decades,
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  • The debt-to-GDP ratio is best reduced through sustained nominal GDP growth.
  • Besides, having been there, no one really wants to unleash inflation anymore. That leaves us with real GDP growth as a necessary condition for bringing the debt-to-GDP down painlessly.
  • But in today’s world voters are angry at everything that is called Europe and will not back a fiscal union.
  • The crisis has delivered a surprising degree of wage flexibility and labour mobility.
  • This means that the need for dissolving the euro back into national currencies at almost any cost has evaporated.
  • Sustained real growth should be the number one priority.
  • In most Eurozone countries, structural reforms are as needed now as they were before the crisis.
  • Banks are at the heart of a diabolic loop: bank holdings of their national public debts (Brunnermeier et al., 2011).
  • Massive forbearance has allowed many banks to not fully account for the losses that they incurred in 2007-8.
  • For that reason, they deleverage, which leads to a credit crunch, which slows growth down.
  • The ECB is the lender of last resort both to banks and to governments.
  • This involves massive moral hazard.
  • The long-hoped-for awakening of the ECB has produced several miracles, especially a major relaxation of market anguish.
  • Austerity policies must stop, now.
  • Growth will not return unless bank lending is adequately available.
  • The ECB may act as lender in last resort to banks and governments, but who will bear the residual costs?
  • The only remaining option is public debt restructuring, a purging of the legacy.
  • This will lead to bank failures. This means that debt reductions must be deep enough to make it possible for governments to then borrow, to shift to expansionary fiscal policies and to bail out the banks that they destroyed in the first place, in effect undoing the diabolic loop.
  • Who will lend? Even the best-crafted bank restructuring will not allow an immediate recovery of market access. The ECB is the only institution in the world that can help out.
  • There is no easy option for the Eurozone after three years of deep mismanagement. Governments will not accept drastic action unless forced to. This means that we need another round of crisis worsening.
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    Good article by Wyplosz on ten observations and five consequences of Euro policy. 4 Jan 2013
Gene Ellis

The roots of the Italian stagnation | vox - 0 views

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    Excellent article on reasons for lack of Italian competitiveness.
Gene Ellis

Italy's 'this time it's different' moment: With rejoinder by Giavazzi | vox - 0 views

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    Wyplosz - good article on self-fulfilling phrophicies
Gene Ellis

Worried Banks Pose Obstacle to Forming Financial Union - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • French loans to Spanish banks plunged 34 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the previous quarter, according to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements.
  • For Italian banks, French bankers cut their exposure by 16 percent. German banks have also been increasingly wary of their Italian and Spanish peers, reducing lending to them by about 19 percent last year
  • In the last six months, as fears about Spain and Greece have intensified, Spanish and Italian banks have been by far the biggest users of the European Central Bank’s program of cut-rate, three-year loans to banks that cannot find money elsewhere.
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  • But instead of funneling that money back into the Spanish and Greek economies as loans to cash-starved businesses and individuals, these banks have become the primary buyers of their governments’ bonds.
  • Most delicate will be whether the Spanish banks receiving the largest cash injections, like the nationalized mortgage giant Bankia, will be forced to impose losses on holders of their subordinated bonds. Those are the investors whose bonds are not backed by collateral and are thus considered more risky.
  • In Spain, though, the problem is that 62 percent of the holders of Bankia’s subordinated debt are Spanish individual investors, not overseas hedge funds and investment banks. It is not likely that Madrid will be willing to hit those citizens with a 65 percent loss — the loans are currently priced at about 35 cents on the dollar — at a time of 25 percent unemployment in the country.
  • “There are compelling reasons for the euro zone to insist on losses for subordinated and even senior bondholders, the least of which is a reduction in moral hazard,” said Adam Lerrick, an expert on banking and sovereign debt at the American Enterprise Institute. “Losses for bondholders is now euro zone policy, so Europe’s credibility is also at stake.”
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    Good article on bank behavior
Gene Ellis

Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System - 0 views

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Standard Occupational Classification FONT SIZE: PRINT: SOC Standard Occupational Classification SOC Homepage 2018 SOC Revision Process 2010 SOC System Search 2010 SOC Materials Contact SOC SHARE ON:
Gene Ellis

New Hurdle for Resolving Euro Crisis: Constitutions - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • In the latest example, Portugal's Constitutional Court on Thursday shot down the government's attempts to improve the country's competitiveness by making it easier for companies to shed workers—as demanded under the terms of the country's international bailout. The court ruled against the measures because, it said, they went against the principle of firing workers only when there was just cause.
  • Courts have been able to thwart some attempts to shrink the state bureaucracy or make the labor force more flexible.
  • Portugal's 1976 constitution calls for "opening the path to a socialist society." It obliges the state to promote employment, move toward free health and education services and even develop "centers of rest and holiday" for workers.
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  • So perhaps it comes as little surprise that, in the last five months, the country's Constitutional Court has struck down four government measures, including a tax on unemployment benefits and temporary trims in wages and pensions that the judges said were unfairly targeted at civil servants.
  • Last month the court ruled against a plan to steer redundant public employees into a retraining program and lay off those who aren't placed in new jobs after 12 months
  • "To fulfill what the [judges] want, we need to leave the euro," said Medina Carreira, an economist and former Portuguese finance minister.
  • Under the terms of its 2011 bailout, the government has until the end of this year to move 25,000 civil servants into a labor reserve—at reduced pay—that many view as a prelude to layoffs.
  • "In several cases, local political norms seem incompatible with euro-area membership in the long term," said J.P. Morgan Chase economist Alex White.
  • Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which has seven articles and 27 amendments, Europe's national charters tend to be lengthy and prescriptive, limiting the space for judicial interpretation. Portugal's has 296 articles, Italy's has 139 and Greece's has 120.
  • "The constitution can't set a series of obligations for a state that simply has no money to fulfill them,"
Gene Ellis

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Weaning Europe From Russian Gas
  • European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.
  • Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.
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  • Some countries in Central Europe — such as Austria and the Czech Republic — and the Balkans would run out of gas they import through Ukraine.
  • that Russia cuts supplies of gas through Ukraine but continues pumping it through its other two pipelines to the West — one through the Baltic and the other through Poland.
  • In such a scenario,
  • The European Union also responded to the 2009 shutdown by building “interconnectors” between different countries. As a result, it is easier to shunt gas and electricity from countries that have excess energy to those that face a shortage — though these connections are still patchy and need to be built up.
  • n the short run, European Union countries can use more coal and less gas in their electricity generation.
  • The European Union can also increase imports of liquefied natural gas, mainly from Qatar. But there are problems. First, most of the Union’s L.N.G. terminals are in Western Europe, whereas it is the eastern part of the Union that is most vulnerable to a cutoff of Russian gas. So more terminals need to be built, which takes time. What’s more, L.N.G. is expensive — partly because Japan is buying lots of it after closing its nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
  • Longer term, European Union nations should embrace shale gas. It is cheap and local. Britain and Poland have the most potential.
  • Meanwhile, countries such as Germany should abandon their knee-jerk aversion to nuclear energy.
  • The problem is not the carbon goal, said Raoul Ruparel of Open Europe, a research institute. Rather it is the renewable target, which results in uneconomic wind and solar power being built across the Union.
Gene Ellis

IMF: Austerity is much worse for the economy than we thought - 0 views

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    Good article
Gene Ellis

Even Greece Exports Rise in Europe's 11% Jobless Recovery - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • “The current- account deficits of countries that have been under stress diminished over the last years considerably.”
  • Just two of 14 euro-zone government leaders have kept their posts in elections since late 2009 and extremists such as Golden Dawn in Greece are gaining support.
  • “The internal rebalancing in the euro area is progressing,” said Fels. “Some of them, especially Spain but also Portugal not to speak of Ireland, are regaining competitiveness.”
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    • Gene Ellis
       
      This is the same sort of response which companies would have made to a depreciation in the local currency without the euro, but with the added problem of deflationary effects on the rest of the economy.
  • Ford Motor Co. (F) (F) said at the end of last year it will increase capacity near Valencia as it shuts plants in the U.K. and Belgium.
  • While a slide in imports accounts for some of the correction, Greece boosted its exports outside the EU by about 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 from the previous year, while Italy’s rose 13 percent in January from a year ago, he said.
  • In Ireland, U.S. companies such as EBay Inc (EBAY) (EBAY)., Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG) and Facebook Inc (FB). all have expanded in the past two years, taking advantage of a corporate-tax rate of just 12.5 percent compared to Spain’s 30 percent.
    • Gene Ellis
       
      'Beggar thy neighbor' kinds of effects.
  • The metamorphosis is known as internal devaluation
  • Prevented by membership of the euro from driving down currencies, governments and companies are squeezing labor costs to spur productivity.
  • reducing social- security payments
  • aising the retirement age, making it easier to fire workers in downturns and preventing unions from clinging to boom-time wage deals.
  • On average, the periphery is about halfway to eliminating large structural current-account deficits, which allow for declines related to recession-driven weaker import demand, estimates Goldman Sachs (GS).
  • The OECD today published an index showing that relative labor costs in Spain and Portugal have now dropped below Germany’s for the first time since 2005.
  • “It’s potentially good for the economy but only if it results in faster investment,”
  • “If not then there’s a downward spiral risk.”
    • Gene Ellis
       
      An important point.
  • The smaller trade imbalances really reflect a collapse in demand for imports as consumers and companies hunker down,
  • It’s the mirror image of the euro’s first decade, when historically low interest rates in the periphery fueled inflationary spending booms, reflected in credit bubbles and deteriorating current accounts and government budgets.
  • “At this stage it is still demand destruction which has helped current-account deficit countries balance their accounts,” said Mayer. “It’s not a healthy situation.”
  • They also say countries will need to run even healthier current accounts than now if they are to stabilize the debts they owe abroad.
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    Good update article, as of March, 2013.
Gene Ellis

Iowa Beef Processors, Boxed Beef and a New Big Four - 0 views

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    Article by David Warsh on tech. change
Gene Ellis

Op-Ed Columnist - The Making of a Euromess - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.
  • Consider the case of Spain, which on the eve of the crisis appeared to be a model fiscal citizen.
  • But with its warm weather and beaches, Spain was also the Florida of Europe — and like Florida, it experienced a huge housing boom. The financing for this boom came largely from outside the country: there were giant inflows of capital from the rest of Europe, Germany in particular.
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  • The result was rapid growth combined with significant inflation: between 2000 and 2008, the prices of goods and services produced in Spain rose by 35 percent, compared with a rise of only 10 percent in Germany. Thanks to rising costs, Spanish exports became increasingly uncompetitive, but job growth stayed strong thanks to the housing boom.
  • Then the bubble burst.
  • But the flood of red ink
  • was a result, not a cause, of Spain’s problems.
  • The nation’s core economic problem is that costs and prices have gotten out of line with those in the rest of Europe. If Spain still had its old currency, the peseta, it could remedy that problem quickly through devaluation — by, say, reducing the value of a peseta by 20 percent against other European currencies. But Spain no longer has its own money, which means that it can regain competitiveness only through a slow, grinding process of deflation.
  • Now, if Spain were an American state rather than a European country, things wouldn’t be so bad. For one thing, costs and prices wouldn’t have gotten so far out of line: Florida, which among other things was freely able to attract workers from other states and keep labor costs down, never experienced anything like Spain’s relative inflation. For another, Spain would be receiving a lot of automatic support in the crisis: Florida’s housing boom has gone bust, but Washington keeps sending the Social Security and Medicare checks. But Spain isn’t an American state, and as a result it’s in deep trouble.
  • None of this should come as a big surprise. Long before the euro came into being, economists warned that Europe wasn’t ready for a single currency.
  • What we’ll probably see over the next few years is a painful process of muddling through: bailouts accompanied by demands for savage austerity, all against a background of very high unemployment, perpetuated by the grinding deflation I already mentioned.
  • Yes, some governments were irresponsible; but the fundamental problem was hubris, the arrogant belief that Europe could make a single currency work despite strong reasons to believe that it wasn’t ready. More Articles in Opinion »
Gene Ellis

Read, I, Pencil | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views

  • Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.
  • Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
  • a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon
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  • The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California.
  • The slats are waxed and kiln dried again.
  • The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces.
  • Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
  • Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
  • The graphite is mined in Ceylon.
  • The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
  • My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are.
  • Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
  • My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain. RP.18
  • An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide
  • Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.
  • There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.
  • Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.
  • There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found.
  • For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
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    " Articles EconLog EconTalk Books Encyclopedia Guides Search "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" A selected essay reprint Home | Books | Read | Selected essay reprint Read, Leonard E. (1898-1983) BIO Display paragraphs in this essay containing: Search essay Editor/Trans. First Pub. Date Dec. 1958 Publisher/Edition Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Pub. Date 1999 Comments Pamphlet PRINT EMAIL CITE COPYRIGHT Start PREVIOUS 4 of 5 NEXT End "
Gene Ellis

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Files/Filer/Articles%202012/Project%20Syndicate%2016... - 0 views

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    Germany's Sunshine Daydream
Gene Ellis

Japan Should Scare the Eurozone - Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

shared by Gene Ellis on 13 Dec 12 - No Cached
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    exc Sabastian Mallaby article
Gene Ellis

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    Excellent article!
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