Group items tagged

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.

Central banks that buy sovereign debt issued by fiscal authorities offset market-imposed discipline on borrowing costs, effectively subsidizing public-sector profligacy.

Zombie-like companies were kept on artificial life-support in the false hope that time alone would revive them. It was not until late in the decade, when the banking sector was reorganized and corporate restructuring was encouraged,

Like Japan, America’s post-bubble healing has been limited – even in the face of the Fed’s outsize liquidity injections. Household debt stood at 112% of income in the third quarter of 2012 – down from record highs in 2006, but still nearly 40 percentage points above the 75% norm of the last three decades of the twentieth century. Similarly, the personal-saving rate, at just 3.5% in the four months ending in November 2012, was less than half the 7.9% average of 1970-99.

Crisis-torn peripheral European economies still suffer from unsustainable debt loads and serious productivity and competitiveness problems. And a fragmented European banking system remains one of the weakest links in the regional daisy chain.

That leaves a huge sum of excess liquidity sloshing around in global asset markets. Where it goes, the next crisis is inevitably doomed to follow.

It’s hard to imagine now, but for more than three decades after World War II financial crises of the kind we’ve lately become so familiar with hardly ever happened.

But the best predictor of crisis is large inflows of foreign money: in all but a couple of the cases I just mentioned, the foundation for crisis was laid by a rush of foreign investors into a country, followed by a sudden rush out.

The relocation of some production to Spain has already created 1,300 new jobs in a region that is in far worse economic shape than the area around Genk, although Ford said labor costs in Valencia are not significantly lower.

Like many in Genk, Mr. Maurina and his wife, Sabrina Gattanella, who have two young boys, are descendants of Italians who migrated to the region decades ago to work in the coal mines. But the last mine closed in the 1980s.

Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents.

Ad sales agents and pilots are two jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will decline in number over the next decade. Flying a plane is largely automated today and will become more so.

Telemarketers are among those most at risk

More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.

“The answer is surely not to try to stop technical change,” Mr. Summers said, “but the answer is not to just suppose that everything’s going to be O.K. because the magic of the market will assure that’s true.”

After adjusting for multiple sources of bias and differences in sample construction, we establish that (1) the U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points; (2) the actual high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the 88 percent official estimate; (3) about 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics leave school with a high school diploma and minority graduation rates are still substantially below the rates for non-Hispanic whites.

These trends are for persons born in the United States and exclude immigrants. The recent growth in unskilled migration to the U.S. further increases the proportion of unskilled Americans in the workforce apart from the growth due to a rising high school dropout rate.

The most significant source of bias in the official statistics comes from including GED (General Educational Development) recipients as high school graduates.

A substantial body of scholarship summarised in Heckman and LaFontaine (2008) shows that the GED program does not benefit most participants, and that GEDs perform at the level of dropouts in the U.S. labour market.

Men now graduate from high school at significantly lower rates than women

Evidence suggests a powerful role of the family in shaping educational and adult outcomes. A growing proportion of American children are being raised in disadvantaged families.

As US coal demand declines, more US coal is going to Europe, where low CO2 prices and high gas prices are increasing the competitiveness of coal in the power generation system.

NATO asks member states to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their armed forces, yet only a handful of them actually do. Estonia, the small Baltic state at the alliance’s far eastern edge, is one of them, and Poland, by far the largest and richest country on that flank, is at 1.95 percent.

Latvia and Lithuania are spending less than 1 percent, though both have indicated they intend to ratchet up to 2 percent by 2020

But it will be a decade before the full impact of this modernization is felt in the field, he said.

The plan NATO has agreed on — to set up forward supply bases on the alliance’s eastern front in which 4,000 or so troops could be deployed within 48 hours — might be useful in combating a small, stealth insurgency, like the masked gunmen who arrived in Ukraine to set off that crisis, but would be useless in the face of an invasion. “What is required is to be able to hold off any aggression for at least a couple of weeks, to buy some time and provide some sort of sanctuary for reinforcements”

In recent years, Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops for exercises just across their borders.

When the Baltic states entered NATO a decade ago, they were urged not to spend their limited resources on building large standing armies, but to depend on others in the alliance to come to their aid in an emergency. Instead, the Baltic countries and other former Soviet satellite states focused their military spending on building specialties that they could offer the alliance, such as Estonia’s focus on cybersecurity

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in some government agencies overstaffing was considered to be around 50 percent. Yet so bloated were the managerial ranks that one in five departments did not have any employees apart from the department head, and less than one in 10 had over 20 employees.

Wages in the public sector were on average almost one and half times higher than in the private sector.

Public sector wages account for some 27 percent of the government’s total expenditures.

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.

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.

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.”

Willem Buiter, Chief Economist at Citigroup, has been most vocal in predicting that these facilities will be inadequate when Spain and Italy hit the wall and that more extreme measures will have to be taken.

The basic dilemma here is that almost all of the eurozone governments including Germany carry high debt burdens in excess of the Maastricht Treaty. For example, Germany has been in breach of Maastricht Treaty in 8 of 10 years since 2002, has been over the Maastricht 60% hurdle in each of those ten years, and now carries a debt to GDP burden above 80%.

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.

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.

Where prices were rigid, as in goods and labour markets, fewer euros meant slow disinflation but rapid contraction in output and a big rise in unemployment.

If there had been no single currency, the northward capital flight would have depreciated peripheral currencies. Had the periphery borrowed in its own currency, that would have imposed losses on its foreign creditors while also boosting its export industry. Had peripheral economies instead borrowed in dollars or deutschmarks their debt burdens would have ballooned with depreciation, potentially pushing banks and sovereigns into default—but the depreciation boost to competitiveness would have remained. Either way, the depreciation of the currency would effectively shrink the value of wealth in the periphery.

The crisis is almost entirely self-inflicted. It has the quality of a nightmare.

My interpretation of the euro crisis is very different from the views prevailing in Germany. I hope that by offering you a different perspective I may get you to reconsider your position before more damage is done. That is my goal in coming here.

For instance, the Maastricht Treaty took it for granted that only the public sector could produce chronic deficits because the private sector would always correct its own excesses. The financial crisis of 2007-8 proved that wrong.

Only at the end of 2009, when the extent of the Greek deficit was revealed, did the financial markets realize that a member country could actually default. But then the markets raised the risk premiums on the weaker countries with a vengeance.

Then the IMF and the international banking authorities saved the international banking system by lending just enough money to the heavily indebted countries to enable them to avoid default but at the cost of pushing them into a lasting depression. Latin America suffered a lost decade.

In effect, however, the euro had turned their government bonds into bonds of third world countries that carry the risk of default.

he fact that Greece blatantly broke the rules has helped to support this attitude. But other countries like Spain and Ireland had played by the rules;

As soon as the pressure from the financial markets abated, Germany started to whittle down the promises it had made at the height of the crisis.

Losing the privilege of issuing eurobonds and having to pay stiff risk premiums would be a powerful inducement to stay in compliance.

There are also widespread fears that eurobonds would ruin Germany's credit rating. eurobonds are often compared with the Marshall Plan.

They would survive on limited support from European Structural Funds and remittances

Then and now, monetary policy could not persuade frightened people to spend and invest.

The second Keynesian lesson was the need for some international structure to balance surplus and deficit nations.

Europe has responded to the crisis with the very British approach of muddling through, but King predicts it won’t work. Creating a true federal union, while an admirable goal, will be the work of a hundred years; the only quick way for countries to adjust is the breakup of the euro zone. King thinks the euro zone must confront the basic choice between accepting a transfer union or changing the membership of the monetary union. “Muddling through” isn’t a serious option.

in 2009, more than 240,000 Chinese students went abroad to study at all levels — high school, undergraduate and graduate degrees, a tenfold increase over 2004.

Most important, it must weaken the power of academic and scientific administrators.

Similarly, in many institutions, promotion depends on your relationship with the dean or senior faculty and not your academic pedigree.

Returnees, or those who hesitate to return, often say that in China, “personal relationships are too complex” – a code for the backstabbing and petty jealousies and the need to cultivate ties with leaders in your own field.