Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Group items tagged erik

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
7More

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last year, funding corresponding to 4% of the region’s GDP – and, in some countries, as much as 15% of GDP – has been withdrawn.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.
5More

Cross-Border Banking in the Balance by Erik Berglof - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-border-banking-in-the-balance banking balance erik project syndicate
shared by Gene Ellis on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • No region of the world has benefited more from cross-border banking, yet these achievements are now at risk
  • The threat to cross-border banks comes not only from their deteriorating balance sheets in the face of lower sovereign-debt quality and weaker growth prospects, but also from the policy response itself.
  • a European solution must take account of the network of foreign subsidiaries across Europe.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • cross-border banking through foreign subsidiaries has been beneficial for investors, and for home and host countries alike – nowhere more so than in emerging Central and Eastern Europe, still the most important export market for the eurozone.
  • Along with institutional reforms at the European level – particularly the creation of the European Systemic Risk Board and the European Banking Authority – regulation and supervision have been reinforced in subsidiaries’ host countries.
1More

Charting technology's new directions: A conversation with MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson | McK... - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...on_with_mits_erik_brynjolfsson
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Charting technology’s new directions: A conversation with MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson
8More

As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rkers-struggle-to-keep-up.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 16 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up
  • Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T., said, “This is the biggest challenge of our society for the next decade.”
  • 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.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.”
15More

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.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 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.
6More

Dani Rodrik on the promise and peril of social-science models. - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...peril-of-social-science-models
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • We have neither the mental capacity nor the understanding to decipher the full web of cause-and-effect relations in our social existence. So our daily behavior and reactions must be based on incomplete, and occasionally misleading, mental models.
  • Social scientists – and economists in particular – analyze the world using simple conceptual frameworks that they call “models.”
  • Useful social-science models are invariably simplifications. They leave out many details to focus on the most relevant aspect of a specific context.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But, as inevitable as simplification is for explanation, it is also a trap
  • Unfortunately, economists and other social scientists get virtually no training in how to choose among alternative models. Neither is such an aptitude professionally rewarded. Developing new theories and empirical tests is regarded as science, while the exercise of good judgment is clearly a craft.
  • The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two styles of thinking, which he identified with the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog is captivated by a single big idea, which he applies unremittingly. The fox, by contrast, lacks a grand vision and holds many different views about the world – some of them even contradictory.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page