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Gene Ellis

The Eurocrisis Can Easily Flare Up Again - Seeking Alpha - 0 views

seekingalpha.com/...isis-can-easily-flare-up-again

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • It is clear for all that they will also have to swallow cuts, but for this to take place, politicians have to break promises, the ECB has to break the law, and the IMF has to do something rather unprecedented. None of this is easy, to put it mildly.
  • Recently, there was a new EU/IMF/ECB 'agreement' that won't fare any better.
  • Basically, we're lending Greece more in order for it to keep the appearance that it is servicing and paying of the debt.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The International Monetary Fund will not disburse Greece's next bailout tranche until the country completes a voluntary buy back of its debt, an IMF spokesman said
  • Who will actually sell the debt at a 70% discount?
  • Most private Greek debt holders just want to hold to maturity, they've already been subjected to two haircuts.
  • Two thirds of the private holders of Greek debt are Greek banks (22 billion euro). These are certainly not going to sell because doing so forces them to realize losses on the debt,
  • There is a simple and obvious solution, which will then force itself. The official creditors should take really substantial losses on Greek debt.
  • The simple truth is that as long as Greece's economy is moribund and its debt/GDP trajectory spiraling out of control, nobody is going to invest in Greece, capital and educated people will leave in a vicious cycle, and Greece's capacity for paying back its debt shrinks by the day. Something has to give.
  • The only real alternative is Greece leaving the euro
  • This situation is basically a slow asphyxiation.
  • Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12
     
    Exc. piece...  Eurocrisis as of Dec. 3, 2012
Gene Ellis

Treat debt with caution: SARB - Times LIVE - 0 views

www.timeslive.co.za/...treat-debt-with-caution-sarb

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • "Be extremely cautious that you don't take more than you can service. Try to issue liabilities that involve an element of risk sharing between the creditor and the debtor," he said.
  • "As for international contracts, be very careful that you treat the business cycle symmetrically. If you stimulate and borrow when the economy goes down then you must tighten... when the economy grows."
  • He said governments of developing nations needed to be innovative in borrowing contracts they devised to grow their infrastructure.
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  • "Give, for instance, a 50 percent equity stake in some infrastructure project so that you share the risks as well as the returns. There you don't have the bankruptcy threats and the default threats which come with debt contracts."
  • Buiter urged South Africans and the rest of the continent to "wear helmets for the rest of the decade". "The world is going to be a very dangerous place for the next 10 years, with advanced economies still needing about a decade, if you count the US and Japan, to get out of the debt problem that they got into," he said.
  • "So there is going to be a fallout for developing economies like South Africa."
Gene Ellis

The Electric Car's Short Circuit by Bjørn Lomborg - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...electric-cars-by-bj-rn-lomborg

electric car

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Recent research indicates that electric cars may reach break-even price with hybrids only in 2026, and with conventional cars in 2032, after governments spend €100-150 billion in subsidies.
  • A life-cycle analysis shows that almost half of an electric car’s entire CO2 emissions result from its production, more than double the emissions resulting from the production of a gasoline-powered car.
  • Proponents proudly proclaim that if an electric car is driven about 300,000 kilometers (180,000 miles), it will have emitted less than half the CO2 of a gasoline-powered car. But its battery will likely need to be replaced long before it reaches this target, implying many more tons of CO2 emissions.
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  • Even if driven much farther, 150,000 kilometers, an electric car’s CO2 emissions will be only 28% less than those of a gasoline-powered car. During the car’s lifetime, this will prevent 11 tons of CO2 emissions, or about €44 of climate damage.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphGiven the size of the subsidies on offer, this is extremely poor value. Denmark’s subsidies, for example, pay almost €6,000 to avoid one ton of CO2 emissions. Purchasing a similar amount in the European Emissions Trading System would cost about €5. For the same money, Denmark could have reduced CO2 emissions more than a thousand-fold.
Gene Ellis

The Morning Ledger: Europe Prepares for Nightmare Scenario - The CFO Report - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...repares-for-nightmare-scenario

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 May 12 - No Cached
  • But euro-zone members would probably have to take a big hit on loans to the country and banks could face heavy losses on their exposure to the Greek economy.
  • Contingency planning is ramping up on the corporate side, too. One European supermarket group has been looking closely at its suppliers’ financing requirements. “The key thing for them is how their working capital cycle is funded and whether they can get access to the banks that they normally would use, which may themselves be in a liquidity squeeze,” a treasury official at the company tells CFO European Briefing. “Our job is to ensure the channels of liquidity are open. If we can keep that going, a lot of the disruption can be minimized relatively quickly.”
  • Meanwhile, some portfolio managers are dumping debt of southern European countries, while others are piling into U.S. and German issues,
Gene Ellis

The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309166

insourcing manufacturing industry

shared by Gene Ellis on 26 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The Insourcing Boom
  • But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday.
  • By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week,
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  • On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.
  • In the 1960s, as the consumer-product world we now live in was booming, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon laid out his theory of the life cycle of these products,
  • Amana, for instance, introduced the first countertop microwave—the Radarange, made in Amana, Iowa—in 1967, priced at $495. Today you can buy a microwave at Walmart for $49 (the equivalent of a $7 price tag on a 1967 microwave)—and almost all the ones you’ll see there, a variety of brands and models, will have been shipped in from someplace where hourly wages have historically been measured in cents rather than dollars.
  • Even as recently as 2000, a typical Chinese factory worker made 52 cents an hour.
Gene Ellis

IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson via the Internet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-watson-via-the-internet.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 14 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server. The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago.
  • “It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”
  • This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.
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  • This year, Google and a corporation associated with NASA acquired for study an experimental computer that appears to make use of quantum properties to deliver results sometimes 3,600 times faster than traditional supercomputers. The maker of the quantum computer, D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia, counts Mr. Bezos as an investor.
Gene Ellis

Productivity: Technology isn't working | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...higher-productivity-and-better

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Technology isn’t working
  • Technology isn’t working
  • n the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation.
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  • Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries.
  • Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all.
  • And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.
  • A second explanation for the Solow paradox, put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.
  • John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.
  • Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost.
  • For example, new techniques and technologies in medical care appear to be slowing the rise in health-care costs in America. Machine intelligence could aid diagnosis, allowing a given doctor or nurse to diagnose more patients more effectively at lower cost. The use of mobile technology to monitor chronically ill patients at home could also produce huge savings.
  • Health care and education are expensive, in large part, because expansion involves putting up new buildings and filling them with costly employees. Rising productivity in those sectors would probably cut employment.
  • The integration of large emerging markets into the global economy added a large pool of relatively low-skilled labour which many workers in rich countries had to compete with. That meant firms were able to keep workers’ pay low.
  • By creating a labour glut, new technologies have trapped rich economies in a cycle of self-limiting productivity growth.
  • Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labour. In 1900 some 40% of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural employment in most rich countries to below 5%,
  • A new paper by Peter Cappelli, of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that in recent years over-education has been a consistent problem in most developed economies, which do not produce enough suitable jobs to absorb the growing number of college-educated workers.
Gene Ellis

The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The magic is in that head: GE has put a small heat pump up there, and the GeoSpring pulls ambient heat from the air to help heat water. As a result, the GeoSpring uses some 60 percent less electricity than a typical water heater. (You can also control it using your iPhone.)
  • The GeoSpring is an innovative product in a mature category
  • We really had zero communications into the assembly line there.”
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  • The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent.
  • the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.
  • Time-to-market has also improved, greatly.
  • four weeks on the boat from China and one week dockside to clear customs.
  • Total time from factory to warehouse: 30 minutes.
  • there is an inherent understanding that moves out when you move the manufacturing out. And you never get it back.”
  • At the end of the day, they say, ‘If we were doing this for the U.S. market, we should never have gone to China in the first place.’ ”
  • But the logic of onshoring today goes even further—and is driven, in part, by the newfound impatience of the product cycle itself.
  • Just a few years ago, the design of a new range or refrigerator was assumed to last seven years. Now, says Lou Lenzi, GE’s managers figure no model will be good for more than two or three years.
  • Products that once seemed mature—from stoves to greeting cards—are being reinvigorated with cheap computing technology.
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