The agreement, reached late Saturday, raises the minimum sales price for Mexican tomatoes in the United States, aims to strengthen compliance and enforcement, and increases the types of tomatoes governed by the bilateral pact to four from one.
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Tomato Imports Deal Reached by U.S. and Mexico - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“The draft agreement raises reference prices substantially, in some cases more than double the current reference price for certain products,
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Florida growers contended it set the minimum price of Mexican tomatoes so low that the Florida growers could not compete.
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“Even though no dumping or injury to the U.S. industry was demonstrated by our competitors,
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The new agreement covers all fresh and chilled tomatoes, excluding those intended for use in processing like canning and dehydrating, and in juices, sauces and purées.
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It raises the basic floor price for winter tomatoes to 31 cents a pound from 21.69 cents — higher than the price the Mexicans were proposing in October — and establishes even higher prices for specialty tomatoes and tomatoes grown in controlled environments. The Mexicans have invested billions in greenhouses to grow tomatoes, while Florida tomatoes are largely picked green and treated with a gas to change their color.
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The dispute unfolded in the heated politics surrounding the presidential election, with Mexican growers charging that the Commerce Department was courting voters in the important swing state of Florida. Instead, the timing of the negotiations ensured that the government could win those votes and bring the controversy to a conclusion satisfactory to the Mexicans after the election was over.
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The Mexicans enlisted roughly 370 American businesses, including Wal-Mart Stores and meat and vegetable producers, to argue their cause.
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Analysis: Euro zone fragmenting faster than EU can act - 0 views
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Deposit flight from Spanish banks has been gaining pace and it is not clear a euro zone agreement to lend Madrid up to 100 billion euros in rescue funds will reverse the flows if investors fear Spain may face a full sovereign bailout.
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Many banks are reorganising, or being forced to reorganise, along national lines, accentuating a deepening north-south divide within the currency bloc.
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Since government credit ratings and bond yields effectively set a floor for the borrowing costs of banks and businesses in their jurisdiction, the best-managed Spanish or Italian banks or companies have to pay far more for loans, if they can get them, than their worst-managed German or Dutch peers.
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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi acknowledged as he cut interest rates last week that the north-south disconnect was making it more difficult to run a single monetary policy.
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Two huge injections of cheap three-year loans into the euro zone banking system this year, amounting to 1 trillion euros, bought only a few months' respite.
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Conservative German economists led by Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the Ifo institute, are warning of dire consequences for Germany from ballooning claims via the ECB's system for settling payments among national central banks, known as TARGET2.
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If a southern country were to default or leave the euro, they contend, Germany would be left with an astronomical bill, far beyond its theoretical limit of 211 billion euros liability for euro zone bailout funds.
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As long as European monetary union is permanent and irreversible, such cross-border claims and capital flows within the currency area should not matter any more than money moving between Texas and California does.But even the faintest prospect of a Day of Reckoning changes that calculus radically.In that case, money would flood into German assets considered "safe" and out of securities and deposits in countries seen as at risk of leaving the monetary union. Some pessimists reckon we are already witnessing the early signs of such a process.
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Either member governments would always be willing to let their national central banks give unlimited credit to each other, in which case a collapse would be impossible, or they might be unwilling to provide boundless credit, "and this will set the parameters for the dynamics of collapse", Garber warned.
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"The problem is that at the time of a sovereign debt crisis, large portions of a national balance sheet may suddenly flee to the ECB's books, possibly overwhelming the capacity of a bailout fund to absorb the entire hit," he wrote in 2010,
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national regulators in some EU countries are moving quietly to try to reduce their home banks' exposure to such an eventuality. The ECB itself last week set a limit on the amount of state-backed bank bonds that banks could use as collateral in its lending operations.
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In one high-profile case, Germany's financial regulator Bafin ordered HypoVereinsbank (HVB), the German subsidiary of UniCredit, to curb transfers to its parent bank in Italy last year, people familiar with the case said.
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In any case, common supervision without joint deposit insurance may be insufficient to reverse capital flight.
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Merkel's good politics and bad economics - FT.com - 0 views
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the ECB gears up to go full throttle into a business that, according to its statutes, is verboten: buying the debt of member states.
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Of course, Mr Draghi mumbles about conditionality: cheap cash only in exchange for deficit-slashing and market reforms. Sure. And when Mr Monti and Mariano Rajoy, Spanish prime minister, instead bend to the wishes of their electorates, what then? Will Mr Draghi stop buying and let their bonds go through the floor? Of course not. You do not have to be a central banker to predict the obvious: no market pressure, no reform.
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The ECB is about to turn into a money machine, into a lender of last resort, and damn the treaties that mandate an inflation-fighting commitment to “price stability”. The magic phrase now is “capping bond yields”, meaning the ECB buys up the debt of Italy and others in order to depress their borrowing costs.
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Look beyond the debt crisis and take the longer view. European growth has been slowing for 40 years. During this period its share of global gross domestic product has shrunk by 10 percentage points; that of the US has held steady.
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Otmar Issing, the ECB’s former chief economist, recalls how, before 1981, “the Italian Treasury set yields for government debt. All the bonds that couldn’t be sold at that price had to be bought up by the Banca d’Italia.” Hence easy money, exploding debt, double-digit inflation – and no change in the country’s frozen politics. Why reform when you can always devalue?
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, chancellor Helmut Kohl offered the D-Mark to President François Mitterrand in exchange for French acceptance of German reunification. This noble gesture of self-containment was not, of course, an entirely selfless act. As part of a hard-headed bargain in return for giving up the symbol of German economic primacy, Europe’s monetary and fiscal policy would be “Germanised”.
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Mr Weidmann is right to fear the moral hazard contemplated by the ECB and its lackadaisical allies from Madrid to Berlin.
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U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.
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Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.
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In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.
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Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
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yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.
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But he was frustrated with the quality, and the lengthy process.
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“We just avoid so many big and small stumbles that invariably happen when you try to do things from far away,” he said. “We would never be where we are today if we were overseas. Nowhere close.”
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Time was foremost among them. The Indian mill needed too much time — three to five months — to perfect its designs, send samples, schedule production, ship the fabric to the United States and get it through customs. Mr. Winthrop was hesitant to predict demand that far in advance.
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There were also communication issues.
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like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.
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The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico.
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Work Like a German - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Work Like a German
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In the German job-share model (known as “Kurzarbeit”), if an employer cuts an employee’s hours so that income is reduced by more than 10 percent, the government compensates workers for a large portion of wages lost. This enables companies to cut costs during downturns without having to lay workers off.
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For the long-term unemployed who take significantly lower-paying jobs (typically, at minimum-wage levels), the unemployment benefits could offer stop-loss insurance to put a floor under their losses.
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The new program should also subsidize employers to provide paid sick days, family leave and child care support — measures that are especially important for disadvantaged women in the work force.
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Taking another page from the German system — this time, its apprenticeship program — training should include both internships and postgraduate job placements.
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Once workers go on the Disability Insurance rolls, it has proved very hard to get them off; all the while, their skills and contacts in the workplace atrophy. In the fiscal year 2013, the program is estimated to have cost a record $144 billion.