But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides.
The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply.
Treat debt with caution: SARB - Times LIVE - 0 views
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"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.
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"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."
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He said governments of developing nations needed to be innovative in borrowing contracts they devised to grow their infrastructure.
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Shinzo Abe's Monetary-Policy Delusions by Stephen S. Roach - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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The reason is not hard to fathom. Hobbled by severe damage to private and public-sector balance sheets, and with policy interest rates at or near zero, post-bubble economies have been mired in a classic “liquidity trap.” They are more focused on paying down massive debt overhangs built up before the crisis than on assuming new debt and boosting aggregate demand.
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The sad case of the American consumer is a classic example of how this plays out. In the years leading up to the crisis, two bubbles – property and credit – fueled a record-high personal-consumption binge. When the bubbles burst, households understandably became fixated on balance-sheet repair – namely, paying down debt and rebuilding personal savings, rather than resuming excessive spending habits.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
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US consumers have pulled back as never before.
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Hot Money Blues - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country.
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It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.
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To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,
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Ford Pays a High Price for Plant Closing in Belgium - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In Genk, a city of 65,000 people, many of them descendants of Italians, Turks or Moroccans who came decades ago to dig coal, an estimated 10,000 jobs will be lost at the end of next year when Ford closes the factory.
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And Genk was among the European factories with the most excess capacity.
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In 2012, Ford lost $1.8 billion in Europe for the full year.
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As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up
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Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said, “This is the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.”
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Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 are among the most skilled in the world, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Younger Americans are closer to average among the residents of rich countries, and below average by some measures.
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Educated in America: College graduates and high school dropouts | vox - 0 views
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The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
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Throughout the first half of the 20th century, each new cohort of Americans was more likely to graduate high school than the preceding one. This upward trend in secondary education increased worker productivity and fueled American economic growth (Goldin and Katz 2003)
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Contrary to claims based on the official statistics, we find no evidence of convergence in minority-majority graduation rates over the past 35 years. (4) Exclusion of incarcerated populations from the official statistics greatly biases the reported high school graduation rate for blacks.
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Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead | McKinsey & Company - 0 views
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Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead
IEA - December:- Coal's share of global energy mix to continue rising, with coal closin... - 0 views
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Although the growth rate of coal slows from the breakneck pace of the last decade, global coal consumption by 2017 stands at 4.32 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (btoe), versus around 4.40 btoe for oil, based on IEA medium-term projections. The IEA expects that coal demand will increase in every region of the world except in the United States, where coal is being pushed out by natural gas.
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“This report sees that trend continuing. In fact, the world will burn around 1.2 billion more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared to today – equivalent to the current coal consumption of Russia and the United States combined. Coal’s share of the global energy mix continues to grow each year, and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade.”
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The report notes that in the absence of a high carbon price, only fierce competition from low-priced gas can effectively reduce coal demand. “The US experience suggests that a more efficient gas market, marked by flexible pricing and fueled by indigenous unconventional resources that are produced sustainably, can reduce coal use, CO
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Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags
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After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,
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many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.
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The Cost of Protecting Greece's Public Sector - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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So today, for every seven private employees who have been laid off, only one has left the public sector.
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Greece’s creditors — the troika comprised of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have made public-sector layoffs a condition for providing the next tranche of the biggest bailout in history.
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Public employment grew by fivefold from 1970 through 2009 — at an annual growth rate of 4 percent, according to according to a recent academic study by Zafiris Tzannatos and Iannis Monogios.. Over the same four decades, employment in the private sector increased by only 27 percent — an annual rate of less than 1 percent.
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Even Greece Exports Rise in Europe's 11% Jobless Recovery - Bloomberg - 0 views
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“The current- account deficits of countries that have been under stress diminished over the last years considerably.”
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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.
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“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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Some thoughts on German politics and the saver's tax in Cyprus | Credit Writedowns - 0 views
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Now, the large 82.8% German government debt to GDP ratio is a source of shame for many because Germany was a driving force in enshrining the 60% government debt to GDP hurdle into the Maastricht Treaty that set out terms for the euro zone.
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Moreover, the interest rate policy of the ECB, geared as it was to the slow growth core, produced negative real interest rates and credit bubbles in Spain and Ireland during the last decade. German banks piled in to those countries as prospects domestically stagnated.
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“The average German worker feels like a cash cow being sucked dry by a quick succession of reforms and bailouts that take money out of her pocket. First it was for reunification, then for European integration, then to right the economy, then to bail out German banks, and finally to bail out the European periphery. Fatigue has set in.”
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Efforts to Revive the Economy Lead to Worries of a Bubble - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
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In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.
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The euro crisis: The non-puzzle of peripheral pain | The Economist - 0 views
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Mystery mostly solved, then; the rich periphery's riches relative to Germany were largely a short-run phenomenon driven by a dramatic short-run divergence in house price trends.
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Investors who bet that productivity growth would be much faster in the south were wrong.* All the prices and wages set on the basis of the expectation of faster productivity growth were correspondingly wrong and needed to adjust. Real effective exchange rates were badly out of alignment.
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Two things began happening in the euro zone in 2007. Growth in the number of euros spent every year began slowing, and the distribution of euro spending within the euro area began shifting back northward.
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George Soros: how to save the EU from the euro crisis - the speech in full | Business |... - 0 views
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The crisis has also transformed the European Union into something radically different from what was originally intended. The EU was meant to be a voluntary association of equal states but the crisis has turned it into a hierarchy with Germany and other creditors in charge and the heavily indebted countries relegated to second-class status. While in theory Germany cannot dictate policy, in practice no policy can be proposed without obtaining Germany's permission first.
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Italy now has a majority opposed to the euro and the trend is likely to grow. There is now a real danger that the euro crisis may end up destroying the European Union.
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The answer to the first question is extremely complicated because the euro crisis is extremely complex. It has both a political and a financial dimension. And the financial dimension can be divided into at least three components: a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis, as well as divergences in competitiveness
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David Ignatius: Mervyn King's hard lessons in Keynesian economics - The Washington Post - 0 views
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As King struggled with the crisis, he concluded that the biggest vulnerability was the solvency of the banking system itself. The crash wasn’t just a liquidity squeeze caused by toxic assets; the problem was that big banks around the world were undercapitalized and, in many cases, insolvent.
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King pushed the banks to recapitalize and, later, to accept more regulation. This upset a financial elite that, as King says, was the only sector of the British economy that had escaped the market revolution of the Margaret Thatcher years.
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For King, the past decade reinforced the lessons Keynes drew from the 1930s: One is the psychological quirkiness of investors, which Keynes described as “animal spirits” on the upside and “extreme liquidity preference” on the down.
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Luring Back the Chinese Who Study Abroad - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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First, the rate of return has remained approximately 30 percent for decades.
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In late 2008, the Chinese Communist Party began the “1,000 Talents” program, aimed at these supremely talented Chinese. Through a wide variety of terrific incentives — sometimes as much as $1 million — the party has encouraged academic and research institutes, as well as municipal governments, to “bring back the best.”
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Second, the return rate among Chinese who received Ph.D.’s in the United States is shockingly low. Approximately 92 percent of all Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. This rate was well above India’s, which is in second place with 81 percent.
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