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Gene Ellis

The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lessons-for-tech-industry.html

nissan u s offers lessons tech

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.
  • The United States gained these jobs through a combination of public and Congressional pressure on Japan, “voluntary” quotas on car exports from Japan and incentives like tax breaks that encouraged Japanese automakers to build factories in America.
  • The government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to build everything overseas,” he said. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the valuable parts of the iPhone in America, it wouldn’t be hard.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Last year, Brazilian politicians used subsidies and the threat of continued high tariffs on imports to persuade Foxconn — which makes smartphones and computers in Asia for dozens of technology companies — to start producing iPhones, iPads and other devices in a factory north of São Paulo.
  • “Closing our border is a 20th-century thought, and it will only weaken the economy over the long term,”
Gene Ellis

How Jean Tirole's Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lain-the-internet-economy.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy
  • He also said that industries should be regulated differently depending on their distinct characteristics.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      excellent point!
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many Internet companies, for instance, give their products away free, which means that antitrust law built on pricing is irrelevant. But a result is they grow so fast that they can quickly become monopolies.
  • “He’s helping us think about what is one of the greatest challenges of our time, how to deal with what feel like friendly monopolists,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who studies Internet policy and antitrust. “Amazon, Google and the others give us all this stuff for free or lower prices, so we love them, but are they dangerous in ways we don’t always see?”
  • In the 2002 paper with Jean-Charles Rochet, Mr. Tirole defined two-sided markets, or markets that “get both sides on board” by charging more to one set of customers in order to increase demand by others.
  • In the tech industry, it explains why Google, Facebook and Twitter offer their services free – the more people who use them, the more advertisers they can attract. Likewise, Amazon lowered the price of its new phone to 99 cents in part because smartphones succeed when they have a lot of apps – and developers won’t want to build apps for Amazon’s phone unless a lot of people are using it.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      nice example...
  • For regulators, tech companies have been a riddle in part because they do not follow the behavior of typical monopolies: Many do not charge for their products, and companies that offer entirely different products are nonetheless competitors. For instance, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, argued in a speech on Monday that Google’s biggest competitor in search is Amazon and in mobile is Facebook — even though neither one is a search engine.
  • “Inspired by him and others like him, our effort was to try to move beyond the traditional understanding of something like an aluminum cartel who just raised their prices on aluminum and everything got more expensive,” said Mr. Wu, who was a senior adviser to the Federal Trade Commission on antitrust matters.
  • For consumers, the costs include absorbing advertisers’ ad spending by paying more for their products, being tracked and shown personalized ads, and giving up privacy.
  • our end-users do not internalize the impact of their purchase on the other side of the market.”
Gene Ellis

Oversize Expectations for the Airbus A380 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-for-the-airbus-a380.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • this aircraft, which can hold more than 500 passengers. The plane dwarfs every commercial jet in the skies.
  • Its two full-length decks total 6,000 square feet, 50 percent more than the original jumbo jet, the Boeing 747.
  • The A380 was also Airbus’s answer to a problematic trend: More and more passengers meant more flights and increasingly congested tarmacs. Airbus figured that the future of air travel belonged to big planes flying between major hubs.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Airbus has struggled to sell the planes. Orders have been slow, and not a single buyer has been found in the United States, South America, Africa or India.
  • While the A380 program has been a boon for the European aerospace industry, Airbus is unlikely to recover its research and development costs. The best it can now expect is to break even on production costs, according to analysts, provided that it can keep orders going.
  • Airbus made the wrong prediction about travel preferences. People would rather take direct flights on smaller airplanes, he said, than get on big airplanes — no matter their feats of engineering — that make connections through huge hubs.
  • “It’s a commercial disaster,” Mr. Aboulafia says. “Every conceivably bad idea that anyone’s ever had about the aviation industry is embodied in this airplane.”
  • Airline executives were wary of expanding their fleets aggressively, especially for a costly, four-engine fuel hog.
  • And there are a fair number of those routes. Around 15 of the 20 largest long-haul routes by passenger volume in the world today are slot-constrained,
  • “The A380 is not made for every route, but it is ideal for high-traffic routes, high-volume routes that are congested, or where there are flying constraints,”
  • A little more than a decade ago, the two dominant airplane makers, Boeing and Airbus, looked at where their businesses were headed and saw similar facts: air traffic doubling every 15 years, estimates that the number of travelers would hit four billion by 2030 — and came to radically different conclusions about what those numbers meant for their future.
  • Boeing, too, is facing lukewarm demand for its latest jumbo jet upgrade, known as the 747-8. The company has received just 51 orders for this big plane, which can seat about 460 passengers and lists at $357 million. By contrast, it has sold more than 1,200 twin-engine 777s, which sell for as much as $320 million.
  • Richard H. Anderson, Delta’s chief executive, has said the A380 is “by definition an uneconomic airplane unless you’re a state-owned enterprise with subsidies.”
  • Bruno Delile, Air France’s senior vice president for fleet management, says that there are a limited number of routes in its network with enough daily traffic to justify the expense of such a big plane. “The forecasts about traffic growth and market saturation haven’t exactly panned out,” he says.
  • Not only do airlines take a big risk on the size and cost of the A380, but they also have to gain the cooperation of airports to modify gates and widen taxiways to make room for the plane.
  • With versions that seat 210 to 330 passengers, and with a range of about 9,000 miles, the 787 allows airlines to fly pretty much anywhere in the world and connect smaller airports without going through a hub.
  • And passengers are willing to pay more to avoid a connection
  • f most airlines appear skeptical of the A380, Emirates is a true believer. It stunned the industry in December when it ordered 50 more of the planes, beyond the 90 it already had on order, throwing Airbus a much needed lifeline
  • The airport handled 66 million passengers last year, rivaling Heathrow as the busiest international hub.
  • for Emirates, the biggest selling point of the A380 is its ability to pack in more business-class seats and create an environment that appeals to big-spending passengers.
Gene Ellis

Alibaba Is Investing Huge Sums in an Array of U.S. Tech Companies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rray-of-us-tech-companies.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Alibaba Is Investing Huge Sums in an Array of U.S. Tech Companies
Gene Ellis

Taiwan's information-technology industry: After the personal computer | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-world-after-personal-computer

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Information and communications technology now makes up one-third of GDP.
  • its companies make 89% of the world’s notebooks, as well as 46% of desktop PCs. These days they make them mainly with Chinese labour: 94% of their hardware, by value, is produced on the mainland.
  • It is moving into retailing and wants to develop its own technology, for which it intends to hire another 5,000-10,000 engineers in Taiwan.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The leading ODMs have realised that they cannot rely on the PC for ever. One option is to go where the growth is: mobile devices.
  • Wistron spread into cloud computing, after-sales service (of which it already did plenty), medical equipment and recycling—which Patrick Lin now runs.
  • Taiwanese companies can adapt in a very short time,” says Chris Hung, an analyst at MIC. They have done so before, such as when they moved production to China to take advantage of its big, cheap labour force. Up against Chinese capital as well as labour, not to mention the South Koreans, they must do so again.
Gene Ellis

BBC - Future - Taiwan's struggle to become an innovation leader - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...iwans-rocky-road-to-innovation

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • You may not have heard of the companies Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, Pegatron, Wistron and Inventec, but together they make more than 90% of the laptops sold worldwide, including those sold by top brands such as Apple and Dell.
  • With a population of a little over 23 million, the island has a relatively small domestic market, and its companies tend to be small and medium in size, rather than the government-backed giants of some of its neighbours.
  • Last year Taiwan’s companies and individuals obtained 11,628 patents from the US Patent and Trade Office, compared to 14,196 for South Korea, despite Taiwan’s much smaller population.
Gene Ellis

Europe's Young Entrepreneurs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ropes-young-entrepreneurs.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Europe's Young Entrepreneurs
  • Mr. D’Aloisio was still a 17-year-old British student in 2013 when he sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo for what some reports said was as much as $30 million.
  • Jan Koum, the Ukrainian-born American who was a co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application.The company was acquired by Facebook a few months later. “I turned down his offer, but since his company then got sold for $19 billion and every employee held some options, it’s a bit painful to think about that decision,” Mr. Cuende said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The American tech sector has started thinking likewise. In some parts of Google, for instance, as many as 14 percent of employees do not have college degrees.
  • Eiso Kant, a 24-year-old Dutch entrepreneur — a veteran, by the conference’s standards — has settled in Madrid. He initially came to study at its IE University, but then started Tyba, an online job recruitment platform focused on start-up companies.
  • Aya Jaff, a 19-year-old, Iraqi-born German, set up an association to teach coding to young people, while herself completing a degree in computer sciences.
Gene Ellis

A European Energy Executive's Delicate Dance Over Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...licate-dance-over-ukraine.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine
  • Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.
  • “This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”
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  • The goal is to be able to ship gas to Ukraine at an annual rate of more than three billion cubic meters by the time the heating season begins in the autumn, increasing the flow to up to 10 billion cubic meters annually by next spring. Last year Ukraine imported nearly 30 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a recent report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
  • Part of his message is that, even though gas demand in Europe has been weak because of sluggish economies, imports from Russia actually rose last year by about 16 percent as other sources of supply including Norway and Algeria declined. Europe, he warned, is simply not prepared to do without gas from Russia.
  • But with the gradual introduction of more competitive pricing in the European markets, the gas business has become much less attractive for ENI and other big gas middlemen. They are stuck with high-priced long-term contracts to a handful of suppliers like Gazprom and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned company, while their customers are able to secure gas at often lower spot market prices — assuming the gas is flowing.
  • The pipeline would be a major new source of Russian gas for energy-hungry Europe. But European Union authorities have become deeply skeptical about the South Stream plan, seeing it as just another way of making Europe more dependent on Russian energy.
  • Given the balance of interests, tighter sanctions by Western governments might more likely aim to stem the technology that Russia needs to increase its future production, rather than to cut off gas supplies to Europe,
  • hose outages in 2006 and 2009 are a top reason that the European Union had already been trying to chip away at Europe’s dependence on Russia even before the Crimea annexation.
  • One of the most acrimonious battles is between the bloc’s antitrust authorities and Gazprom. That standoff began in 2011 when the European Commission carried out surprise raids on natural gas companies across Europe, including Gazprom affiliates, seeking evidence of blocking access to networks, charging excessive prices and raising barriers to diversification of supplies.
  • That is partly because powerful Eastern European countries like Poland argue that such clean-energy policies would impede their ability to reduce Russian dependence by mining more coal or developing their own shale gas resources.
  • nd this month, the European Commission issued rules aimed at reducing the subsidies that governments use to support the wind and solar industries,
Gene Ellis

Wonkbook: Should high schoolers be reading Executive Order 13423? - geneell@gmail.com -... - 0 views

mail.google.com/...0

education reform US

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • More than 25% of U.S. technology companies have at least one foreign-born founder, a majority of Silicon Valley startups have a foreign-born founder, and 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by an immigrant or first-generation American.”
  • Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12
     
    good start on the 'brain drain'
Gene Ellis

Ceiling Collapse at Shoe Factory in Cambodia Kills 2 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ctory-in-cambodia-kills-2.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 May 13 - No Cached
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 16 May 13
       
      Why do you think this is a Hong Kong-based company?
  • “We visually always inspected them, but you need true engineers,” he said.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 16 May 13
       
      Noe that he says that they always visually inspected the sites... are they the owners?  the managers?  To what degree are they responsible?  And to whom?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Multinationals have been looking to Cambodia as one of several countries that could be alternatives to Bangladesh. Cambodia has some of the lowest pay in Asia, with workers earning $120 a month in salary and benefits before overtime. That compares with just $37 in Bangladesh.
  • Bruce Rockowitz, the group president and chief executive at Hong Kong-based Li & Fung, one of the world’s largest sourcing companies,
Gene Ellis

After Bangladesh, Seeking New Sources - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...adesh-seeking-new-sources.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 May 13 - No Cached
  • Bennett Model helped pioneer the exporting of garments from China in 1975, the year before Mao Zedong died,
  • Buying from Bangladesh, said Mr. Model, “has been politically incorrect ever since problems started there, so a lot of major players had already been looking for alternatives.”
  • Western executives are checking on potential new suppliers in southern Vietnam, central Cambodia and the hinterlands of Java in Indonesia.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Right now, the name of Bangladesh just gives a bad rep to a company,”
  • Bangladesh, which is the world’s second-largest garment manufacturer after China
  • Garment manufacturing makes up a fifth of the economy in Bangladesh and four-fifths of its exports,
  • “People are on the one hand looking at contingency plans in case the unrest gets worse,” said Bruce Rockowitz, the group president and chief executive of Hong Kong-based Li & Fung, one of the world’s largest sourcing companies.
Gene Ellis

Sasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Plant in U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gas-to-liquid-plant-in-us.html

betting plant natural gas

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Dec 12 - No Cached
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 17 Dec 12
       
      These are areas with lots of natural gas, and little chance of getting it to market, save for liquefication, but even then lacking access to ports.
  • The process is challenging and complex. First a synthetic gas is made from pure oxygen and methane, the main component of natural gas, which is cleansed of sulfur, metals and other impurities, under intense pressure and heat. Then the synthetic gas is put in giant reactors that make a synthetic crude through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process essentially forces heated synthetic gas to react with a catalyst, typically cobalt, to convert into a liquid hydrocarbon. Finally that liquid is refined into one fuel or another. The process is far more complex than that at a typical refinery, so the plant is much more expensive to build and operate. Alfred Luaces, a refining specialist at the consultancy IHS, said a conventional oil refinery could be built for $50,000 per barrel of capacity, less than half of what Sasol says it is willing to spend on the proposed Louisiana plant.
  • Sasol is building a gas-to-liquids plant in Uzbekistan with the Malaysian oil company Petronas. It is working with Chevron to build another plant in Nigeria.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Rick Manner, a vice president at consultancy KBC Advanced Technologies who has contributed to gas-to-liquids studies for Sasol and other companies, estimated that the projects must keep capital costs at $100,000 for every barrel a day of production capacity to be worthwhile economically at current prices of about $100 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet for natural gas.
  • Mr. Louw, Sasol’s Qatar president, said that the Oryx plant was designed to be profitable with oil at $25 a barrel. That implies a very low long-term price for the natural gas feedstock. He would not specify what Sasol pays its Qatari partner for gas, but he said it was “not zero.”
  • Gene Ellis on 17 Dec 12
     
    The potential, or lack thereof, of natural gas to diesel conversion.
Gene Ellis

Emerging Europe's Deleveraging Dilemma by Erik Berglof and Božidar Đelić - Pr... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-erik-berglof-and-bo-idar--eli

emerging europe dilemma erik project syndicate eli

shared by Gene Ellis on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Expansion was, for lack of other options, financed largely through short-term loans.
  • since the onset of the global financial crisis, eurozone-based banks’ subsidiaries in emerging Europe have been reducing their exposure to the region. In 2009-2010, the European Bank Coordination Initiative – known informally as the “Vienna Initiative” – helped to avert a systemic crisis in developing Europe by stopping foreign-owned parent banks from staging a catastrophic stampede to the exits.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphBut, in the second half of 2011, the eurozone-based parent banks that dominate emerging Europe’s banking sector came under renewed pressure to deleverage. Many are now radically changing their business models to reduce risk.
  • Over the last year, funding corresponding to 4% of the region’s GDP – and, in some countries, as much as 15% of GDP – has been withdrawn. Bank subsidiaries will increasingly have to finance local lending with local deposits and other local funding.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • excessive and chaotic deleveraging by lenders to emerging Europe – and the ensuing credit crunch – would destabilize this economically and institutionally fragile region.
  • View/Create comment on this paragraphFor Tigar, deleveraging has meant that banks that had pursued its business only a couple of years ago have suddenly cut lending – even though the company never missed a debt payment. Previous loans came due, while cash-flow needs grew. Despite its good operating margins, growing markets, and prime international clients, the company experienced a drop in liquidity, requiring serious balance-sheet restructuring.
  • Furthermore, collateral – especially real-estate assets – will continue to be downgraded.
  • Indeed, several Western financial groups are considering partial or complete exits from the region – without any clear strategic replacement in sight.
Gene Ellis

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

www.econlib.org/...rdPncl1.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Apr 13 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Gene Ellis on 26 Apr 13
     
    " 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

How Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ove-profit-to-avoid-taxes.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 May 13 - No Cached
  • There is something ridiculous about a tax system that encourages an American company to invest abroad rather than in the United States. But that is what we have.
  • “The fundamental problem we have in trying to tax corporations is that corporations are global,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “It is very, very hard for national entities to tax entities that are global, particularly when it is hard to know where their income originates.”
  • Some international companies hate that idea, of course. They warn that we would risk making American multinational corporations uncompetitive with other multinationals, and perhaps encourage some of them to change nationality.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The other way is to move to what is called a territorial system, one in which countries tax only profits earned in those countries.
  • In this country, notwithstanding the high rate, the corporate income tax now brings in about 18 percent of all income tax revenue, with individuals paying the rest. That is half the share corporations paid when Dwight Eisenhower was president.
Gene Ellis

A Declining Euro Can't Cure All Ills - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3754904577531032942698056.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • but what would in normal times be a boon for the region may not help as much now, experts say.
  • Before the crisis, actions such as the European Central Bank rate cuts two weeks ago would have had a twofold effect in reviving the economy: Banks would have passed the lower rate on to their clients, while foreign-exchange markets would have marked the currency down, giving exporters better chances to sell their products abroad.
  • In today's polarized euro zone, it isn't that simple. For one thing, tThere is no certainty that euro-zone banks will pass on the cut in borrowing costs.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Even if they did, he explained, the euro zone's problems are now so acute that few companies seem to want to borrow.
  • Mario Boselli, chairman of the Italian Chamber of Fashion, frets that larger emerging economies still account for only 10% of total Italian exports. "This is not enough" to offset the weakness in developed economies, he says.
  • Both Mr. Boselli and Philip Halpin, an adviser to the Irish Exporters' Association, say the euro would have to fall as low as $1.10 (from about $1.23 currently), to produce a robust export-led recovery.
  • Ludovic Subran, chief economist at French trade-credit insurer Euler Hermes, warns that might not be enough. Such a depreciation would have little effect in France because high taxes and rigid labor costs reduce the potential benefits, he says.
  • Any euro-zone economy would benefit from a drop in the euro to the extent that it can redirect more resources to external markets. But the willingness and ability of businesses to do that differs across the region. Nadio Delai, chairman of Italian research and consultancy firm Ermeneia, say a host of smaller, less prestigious Italian shoe and textile companies have started to export to emerging markets, riding the coattails of more famous names.
Gene Ellis

Foxconn Audit Reveals Workweek Still Too Long - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-workweek-still-too-long.html

labor treatment

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Foxconn, part of the Taiwan-based company Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs about 178,000 workers at the three factories inspected. It has about 1.2 million workers at plants making products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and other technology companies.
  • He noted that Foxconn has also overhauled many processes, including using robots instead of people to polish the aluminum backs of iPad cases and water to capture and dispose of the resulting dust.
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