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American industry and fracking

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.

“What makes it difficult is that it is very fragmented,” he continued. “It is diversified in different countries and they are not used to working together, so it’s a huge organizational effort, and it’s also a huge political effort in the sense of convincing everybody to converge to common styles of supervision.”

three parts.

a broad assessment of a bank’s risk profile

But the reforms often fail to work. The Spanish law is intended to promote restructuring of viable firms but in practice most insolvencies end in liquidation after lengthy court proceedings.

High household debt helps explain why the Netherlands, along with Italy and Spain, remained in recession in the second quarter of 2013 even as the euro area in general embarked on recovery. Dutch GDP this year will be 2% lower than in 2011 and more than 3% below its previous peak, in 2008.

it illustrates the malign effect of high debt when house prices fall

The average cost of Tunisia's external debt is nearly 4%, and is mainly denominated in euros and US dollars.

Today, Tunisia’s situation under the troika comes down to the fact that the country is borrowing to consume and not to invest.

Another fact that will render paying off the debt more difficult is that the redeemable portion of the foreign debt within 10 to 20 years or more is 81.3 % of all loans taken from abroad.

Cyprus had developed its financial center over three decades ago by having double taxation treaties with a number of countries, the Soviet Union for example. That means if profits are booked and earned and taxed in Cyprus, they are not taxed again in the other country. Russian deposits are there because Cyprus has a low corporate tax rate, much like Malta and Luxembourg, which annoys some people in Europe.

In addition, Cyprus has a legal system based on English law and follows English accounting rules

This government took a country with excellent fiscal finances, a surplus in fiscal accounts, and a banking system that was in excellent health. They started overspending, not only for unproductive government expenditures but also they raised implicit liabilities by raising pension promises, and so forth.

The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.

Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?

including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.

To train its new American engineers, Nissan flew workers to its Zama factory in eastern Japan. There the Nissan officials, assisted by English-speaking Japanese workers called “communication helpers,” imparted the intricacies of the company’s production techniques to the Americans.

Early on, Nissan guarded against quality concerns by not relying on parts from American suppliers. Most components were either shipped from Japan or produced by Japanese companies that set up operations nearby.

Gradually, American parts makers were allowed to bid on supply contracts. Even that came amid arm-twisting by Congress, which passed a law in 1992 requiring auto makers to inform consumers of the percentage of parts in United States-made cars that came from North America, Asia or elsewhere.

The federal government would give Foxconn tax breaks, subsidized loans and special access through customs and lower tariffs for imported parts if it started assembling Apple products in Brazil, where Foxconn was already producing electronics for Dell, Sony and Hewlett-Packard.

Apple products remain expensive; the latest iPad, for instance, costs about $760 in Brazil, compared with $499 in the United States. But because those devices are made in Brazil and lower tariffs are charged on parts used to assemble them, Foxconn and Apple are pocketing larger shares of the profits, analysts say, offsetting the increased costs of building outside China.

No-Frills Car With Romanian Lineage Is Hottest in Europe

Reversing the Flow of Oil

“Economically, it means that money that was flowing out of the United States into sovereign wealth funds and treasuries around the world will now stay in the U.S. and be invested in the U.S., creating jobs. It doesn’t change everything, but it certainly provides a new dimension to U.S. influence in the world.”

The oil bounty is thanks to modern production techniques including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves injecting water and chemicals into the ground to crack oil-saturated shale.

Changing Course, Russia Will Sell Rubles Instead of Buying

Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid Risking Blackout: Energy

Still, some say legislators have lost touch with the poor districts they represent. Per capita income is about $463 a year, which nobody here would expect a lawmaker to survive on. Minimum wage is $924 a year, still far too little, in most Kenyans' view, for someone taking care of the nation's business. But the base compensation that legislators earn is about $81,000 a year, tax free, plus a variety of allowances and perks, which can effectively double their take-home pay. That means those public servants earn more than most Kenyan corporate executives and outstrip the salaries of many of their counterparts in the developed world.