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Gene Ellis

House Votes To Extend Export-Import Bank's Authority For Three Years | Fox Business - 0 views

www.foxbusiness.com/...bank-authority-for-three-years

house votes bank authority fox business

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gene Ellis on 10 May 12
     
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Gene Ellis

Let Greece take a eurozone 'holiday' - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...30-11df-953f-00144feab49a.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • If Greece still had its own currency, it could, in parallel, devalue the drachma to reduce imports and raise exports, cutting the 15 per cent of GDP trade deficit. The level of Greek GDP and employment might then actually increase if the rise in exports and decline in imports added more to domestic employment and output than was lost through raising taxes and cutting government spending. But since Greece no longer has its own currency, it is not free to follow this strategy.
  • Bank balances and obligations would remain in euros. Wages and prices would be set in drachma.
  • Gene Ellis on 30 May 12
     
    Excellent FT piece by Martin Feldstein
Gene Ellis

Optimism about an end to the euro crisis is wrong - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...9a-11e3-86ef-00144feab7de.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Adjustment is the key to ending the eurozone crisis. The optimists are saying that this process of regaining competitiveness is now taking place.
  • This judgment is profoundly wrong.
  • In other words, the eurozone is adjusting at the expense of the rest of the world.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But while the eurozone is a fixed-currency regime internally, it is nothing of the sort externally. The currency does exactly what textbooks say it should: it keeps on rising, thus offsetting the improvements in the current account. Last week the euro rose to more than $1.38 against the dollar.
  • The main problem with the rise in the euro’s external value is that it makes the internal adjustment harder. The crisis countries need to lower their export prices but the higher value of the euro raises the prices of exports to outside the eurozone.
  • It essentially says internal adjustment is not really happening.
  • Second, the prices of Spanish tradeable goods would have to fall against those of non-Spanish tradeable goods elsewhere in the eurozone.
  • Put bluntly: the scale of necessary adjustment is absolutely enormous. The IMF does not believe that this is going to happen.
  • In a monetary union adjustment is hard without any transfers and without a fiscal union.
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

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Since its first pickup truck rolled off the line here on June 16, 1983, Nissan has produced more than seven million vehicles in the United States. It now employs 15,000 people in this country. It makes more than a half-million cars, trucks and S.U.V.’s a year, with the plant in Smyrna building six models, including the soon-to-be-produced, all-electric Nissan Leaf.
  • Could the Japanese car companies achieve the same quality using American workers?
  • including currency fluctuations that made exporting more expensive. The final push came from American anger as imports grabbed one-fourth of the United States market.
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  • “The pressure put on the Japanese was absolutely critical for them to agree to export restraints,”
Gene Ellis

Reversing the Flow of Oil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eversing-the-flow-of-oil-.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Reversing the Flow of Oil
  • “Economically, it means that money that was flowing out of the United States into sovereign wealth funds and treasuries around the world will now stay in the U.S. and be invested in the U.S., creating jobs. It doesn’t change everything, but it certainly provides a new dimension to U.S. influence in the world.”
  • The oil bounty is thanks to modern production techniques including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves injecting water and chemicals into the ground to crack oil-saturated shale.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Domestic oil production has rocketed by roughly 70 percent over the last six years to 8.7 million barrels a day, and imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have already been cut roughly by half.
  • many oil experts predict that the country’s output will rise to as much as 12 million barrels a day over the nex
  • Shale oil is predominately light, sweet oil, meaning it is low in sulfur content and flows freely at room temperature.
  • United States exports of oil could reach three million to four million barrels a day in a few years, more than most OPEC producers currently provide world markets.
Gene Ellis

Intel to downsize Costa Rica operations, several media sources report - The Tico Times - 0 views

www.ticotimes.net/...ions-say-several-media-reports

shared by Gene Ellis on 28 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Intel to downsize Costa Rica operations, several media sources report
  • Intel reportedly plans to move its manufacturing operation to Asia and lay off 1,500 employees, according to “well-placed” sources in the company, reported the newspaper El Financiero.
  • Microprocessors are Costa Rica’s primary export. Over 20 percent of Costa Rica’s exports in 2013 were microprocessors, worth some $2.4 billion, according to statistics from the Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in January that financial pressures would push the company to downsize
  • Intel has been in Costa Rica since 1997 and has invested $800 million in Costa Rica between then and 2010, according to COMEX, the online daily CRHoy.com reported. Intel employs nearly 2,700 people in Costa Rica.
Gene Ellis

Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cern-for-eurozone-economy.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy
  • Some economists argue that the region is already well into a so-called lost decade.
  • Analysts surmised that the strained relations with Russia as well as turmoil in the Middle East had undercut demand for Italian exports, in particular fashion and other luxury goods.
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  • “I definitely expect that things will get worse,” he said.
  • The European Union exported agricultural goods worth 11.8 billion euros, or $15.8 billion, to Russia last year, and sales have been rising at a rate of almost 15 percent a year.
  • The economic data and news that Russia was massing troops and military equipment on the Ukrainian border caused stock prices to fall across Europe on Wednesday.
  • Separately, the German Federal Statistical Office reported on Wednesday that new industrial orders in Germany fell 3.2 percent in June compared with May. Analysts had expected orders to increase.
  • For Italy, the deteriorating economy puts greater pressure on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who less than a week ago promised not to impose any more government budget cuts and to invest in improving the country’s roads and other infrastructure. Such promises will be difficult to keep if slower growth, which usually translates into higher unemployment and lower corporate profits, limits tax receipts.A slower economy also endangers Italy’s ability to comply with eurozone rules on budget deficits.
  • Italy’s 2.1 trillion euro government debt equals 136 percent of its annual gross domestic product, the second-highest debt ratio in the eurozone, after Greece.
  • They said Italy’s problems stemmed more from its failure make changes needed to improve the performance of its economy.
  • The slow pace of structural reforms is worrisome,” said Paolo Manasse, a professor of macroeconomics at Bologna University. He said there was no sign of progress on necessary steps like selling off state-owned assets or overhauling the labor market or public pension system.
Gene Ellis

Russia aims to choke off gas re-exports to Ukraine - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...64-11e4-8472-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Russia aims to choke off gas re-exports to Ukraine
Gene Ellis

Reforming Greek Reform by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-reform-by-dani-rodrik-2015-02

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • In the short to medium run, increasing Greek competitiveness requires remedies targeted at specific binding constraints faced by exporters. A Greek program that identifies these constraints and proposes remedies would be much better economics than blind adherence to the troika's laundry list of structural reforms.
Gene Ellis

Q&A: The US Export-Import Bank - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...a4-11e3-8993-00144feab7de.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • June 23, 2014 4:42 pm Q&A: The US Export-Import Bank
Gene Ellis

Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...raine-crisis-russsia-pipelines

shared by Gene Ellis on 04 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis?
  • more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.
  • While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary
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  • But three years later, the same row erupted again: Gazprom demanded a price hike to $400-plus from $250, Kiev flatly refused, and on New Year's day 2009, Gazprom began pumping only enough gas to meet the needs of its customers beyond Ukraine.
  • Again, the consequences were marked. Inevitably, Russia accused Ukraine of siphoning off supplies meant for European customers to meet its own needs, and cut supplies completely
  • several countries – particularly in south-eastern Europe, almost completely dependent on supplies from Ukraine – simply ran out of gas.
  • Bulgaria shut down production in its main industrial plants; Slovakia declared a state of emergency
  • Many industry experts, though, point out that the world has changed since 2009, and that there are any number of reasons why Moscow's natural gas supplies may not prove quite the potent economic and diplomatic weapon they once were.
  • higher than normal temperatures are forecast to continue for several weeks yet, significantly reducing demand for gas and leaving prices at their lowest for two years
  • since the first "gas war" of 2006, many European countries have made huge efforts to increase their gas storage capacity and stocks are high. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Moldova, which lack large storage capacity and depend heavily on gas supplies via Ukraine, would certainly suffer from any disruption in supplies
  • New Gazprom pipelines via Belarus and the Baltic Sea to Germany (Nord Stream) have cut the proportion of Gazprom's Europe-bound exports that transit via Ukraine to around half the total, meaning only about 15% of Europe's gas now relies on Ukraine's pipelines. Gazprom is also planning a Black Sea pipeline (South Stream), expected in 2015, meaning its exports to Europe will bypass Ukraine completely. Ukraine itself has cut its domestic gas consumption by nearly 40% over the past few years, halving its imports from Russia in the process.
  • Europe is increasingly installing specialist terminals that will allow gas to be imported from countries such as Qatar in the form of liquefied natural gas – while Norway's Statoil sold more gas to European countries in 2012 than Gazprom did. "Since the Russian supply cuts of 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned," Anders åslund, an energy advisor to both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, told the Washington Post.
  • Europe accounts for around a third of Gazprom's total gas sales, and around half of Russia's total budget revenue comes from oil and gas. Moscow needs that source of revenue, and whatever Vladimir Putin's geo-political ambitions, most energy analysts seem to agree he will think twice about jeopardising it.
Gene Ellis

Kerry promotes U.S.-European trade deal - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 27 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • France wants to slow down consideration of the proposed transatlantic free-trade zone encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s trade. Germany and Britain are in favor of the plan and want to move fast.
  • The Obama administration says a comprehensive deal would further open European markets and expand exports to the euro zone of U.S. goods and services, currently worth $459 billion a year. Backers say the deal would add more than 13 million jobs in the United States and Europe.
  • But supporters also fear that trade talks will bog down or collapse over parochial concerns, and must be streamlined to succeed.
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  • one of the objections that France is expected to raise over what it calls cultural exceptions to free trade on products with a specific geographic or national significance, such as Champagne wine.
Gene Ellis

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

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

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 May 13 - No Cached
  • Dozens of impoverished countries make T-shirts and other very basic clothing. But only a few countries — really just China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and to some extent Cambodia and Pakistan — have developed highly complex systems for producing and shipping tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of identical, high-quality shirts, blouses or trousers to a global retailer within several weeks of receiving an order.
  • The clothing needs to be labeled correctly so that it travels smoothly through a large retailer’s distribution centers
  • The process requires formidable numbers of skilled workers who can oversee quality control as well as labeling and shipping of garments.
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  • Big retailers and fashion companies have repeatedly tried and failed to develop alternatives, experimenting in India, Africa and Latin America, only to run into infrastructure bottlenecks and shortages of skilled managers or workers.
  • India was not organized for large-scale, timely production,
  • Africa did not have enough workers with the right skills for high-volume labeling and shipping,
  • and Latin America did not have enough workers interested in operating sewing machines.
  • What may save Bangladesh from a sharp, immediate drop in export orders is simply that most Southeast Asian factories are already fully booked with orders from multinationals fleeing China’s ever-rising costs.
  • In Guatemala, the quality was excellent, he said, but, “They can’t handle big orders and they’re slow on delivery.”
  • “For this year, it’s impossible — we’re already full,”
  • Indonesia’s national training center for seamstresses — women make up 98 percent of the students — is here in Semarang, producing 12,000 graduates a year. But even that isn’t enough. Four factories with a combined employment of 30,000 are to open in the next year in Semarang, and many more factories are being built nearby.
  • “It’s going to take time, but it’s going to eventually filter out all over the place,” he said. “It’ll take two or three years.”
  • Newly opened factories have started competing for scarce seamstresses by offering free meals and free health insurance
  • Dozens of impoverished countries make T-shirts and other very basic clothing. But only a few countries — really just China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and to some extent Cambodia and Pakistan — have developed highly complex systems for producing and shipping tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of identical, high-quality shirts, blouses or trousers to a global retailer within several weeks of receiving an order.
  • He said that he and a couple of other suppliers of elite retail chains always worried about Bangladesh’s reliance on high-rise factories,
Gene Ellis

Car Factories Offer Hope for Spanish Industry and Workers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nish-industry-and-workers.html

car offer hope spanish industry workers

shared by Gene Ellis on 28 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Four years of economic turmoil and the euro zone’s highest jobless rate have made the Spanish labor market so inviting — an estimated 40 percent less expensive than those of Europe’s other biggest car-making countries, Germany and France — that Ford and Renault recently announced plans to expand their production in Spain.
  • Some experts say such gains in competitiveness and investment are exactly what Spain needs for its economy to recover and to remove any doubts about whether the country can remain in the euro union.
  • Because Spain no longer has its own currency to devalue as a way to lower the price of its exports, it is having to find its competitive advantage in lower labor costs. Many economists have argued that societies cannot survive such painful downward adjustments.
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  • That is the lowest level since 1972.
  • Its trade deficit has been shrinking — down 28 percent for the first 10 months of this year,
  • “From 2008, we suddenly realized that we had lost a lot of competitiveness and needed to work very hard to improve things, particularly in terms of labor issues and logistics,
  • Over all, Spain’s unit labor costs — a measure of productivity — are down 4 percent since 2008, according to Eurostat, the European statistics agency.
  • In a related measurement, the most recent Eurostat data put Spain’s average hourly labor cost at 20.60 euros which was well below Germany’s 30.10 euros and France’s 34.20 euros.
  • Unlike most other Spanish industries, car manufacturing has no sectorwide collective bargaining agreement with unions. As a result, each carmaker has been able to adjust working hours with its own employees, in response to changing demand.
  • In return, the companies have promised workers that they will not be subjected to the huge layoffs made in other parts of the economy,
  • I don’t want to give lessons to anybody. But at such a delicate moment for Spain, showing that we believe in flexibility and consensus has certainly been highly valued by the carmakers.”
  • The car sector employs 280,000 people in Spain, including parts suppliers, and accounts for a tenth of the country’s economic output. About 85 percent of the industry’s workers are on long-term contracts.
Gene Ellis

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.
Gene Ellis

Fear of Fracking by Jeffrey Frankel - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...o-shale-gas-by-jeffrey-frankel

fracking

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • CAMBRIDGE – Against all expectations, US emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since peaking in 2007, have fallen by 12% as of 2012, back to 1995 levels. The primary reason, in a word, is “fracking.”
  • Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.
  • Natural gas emits only half as much CO2 as coal, and occupies a rapidly increasing share of electricity generation – up 37% since 2007, while coal’s share has plummeted by 25%.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, the share of coal – the dirtiest fuel – has been rising, not falling, in the rest of the world’s energy mix.
  • Moving beyond economics, America’s reduction in net energy imports – which have already fallen by one-half since 2007 – means that its foreign policy will be less constrained by events in the Middle East. In Europe, the new technology could similarly break Russia’s politically troublesome stranglehold on natural-gas supplies.
  • Put differently, if the world continues to build coal-fired power plants at the current rate, those plants will still be around in 2050, regardless of what other technologies become viable in the meantime.
  • Even a serious fracking mishap would be unlikely to cause as much damage as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011, or coal-mining tragedies that play out dramatically in frequent explosions and collapses (and more insidiously in the form of lung disease, water pollution, and soil erosion).
Gene Ellis

Op-Ed Columnist - The Making of a Euromess - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15krugman.html

Krugman Euro Spain Greece economics

shared by Gene Ellis on 24 Apr 13 - Cached
  • No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.
  • Consider the case of Spain, which on the eve of the crisis appeared to be a model fiscal citizen.
  • But with its warm weather and beaches, Spain was also the Florida of Europe — and like Florida, it experienced a huge housing boom. The financing for this boom came largely from outside the country: there were giant inflows of capital from the rest of Europe, Germany in particular.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The result was rapid growth combined with significant inflation: between 2000 and 2008, the prices of goods and services produced in Spain rose by 35 percent, compared with a rise of only 10 percent in Germany. Thanks to rising costs, Spanish exports became increasingly uncompetitive, but job growth stayed strong thanks to the housing boom.
  • Then the bubble burst.
  • But the flood of red ink
  • was a result, not a cause, of Spain’s problems.
  • The nation’s core economic problem is that costs and prices have gotten out of line with those in the rest of Europe. If Spain still had its old currency, the peseta, it could remedy that problem quickly through devaluation — by, say, reducing the value of a peseta by 20 percent against other European currencies. But Spain no longer has its own money, which means that it can regain competitiveness only through a slow, grinding process of deflation.
  • Now, if Spain were an American state rather than a European country, things wouldn’t be so bad. For one thing, costs and prices wouldn’t have gotten so far out of line: Florida, which among other things was freely able to attract workers from other states and keep labor costs down, never experienced anything like Spain’s relative inflation. For another, Spain would be receiving a lot of automatic support in the crisis: Florida’s housing boom has gone bust, but Washington keeps sending the Social Security and Medicare checks. But Spain isn’t an American state, and as a result it’s in deep trouble.
  • None of this should come as a big surprise. Long before the euro came into being, economists warned that Europe wasn’t ready for a single currency.
  • What we’ll probably see over the next few years is a painful process of muddling through: bailouts accompanied by demands for savage austerity, all against a background of very high unemployment, perpetuated by the grinding deflation I already mentioned.
  • Yes, some governments were irresponsible; but the fundamental problem was hubris, the arrogant belief that Europe could make a single currency work despite strong reasons to believe that it wasn’t ready. More Articles in Opinion »
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