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How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed
  • The pipeline, known as South Stream, was Mr. Putin’s most important European project, a tool of economic and geopolitical power critical to twin goals: keeping Europe hooked on Russian gas, and further entrenching Russian influence in fragile former Soviet satellite states as part of a broader effort to undermine European unity.
  • The bill that Parliament took up on April 4 was arcane. But it swept aside a host of European regulations — rules that Mr. Putin did not want to abide by — for a pipeline that would deliver gas throughout southern Europe. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage In Diplomatic Defeat, Putin Diverts Pipeline to TurkeyDEC. 1, 2014
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  • In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.
  • Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.
  • Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.
  • On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.
  • “If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.
  • The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.
  • When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.
  • In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.
  • While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”
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The tragedy of Argentina: A century of decline | The Economist - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The tragedy of Argentina A century of decline
  • In the 43 years leading up to 1914, GDP had grown at an annual rate of 6%, the fastest recorded in the world.
  • The country ranked among the ten richest in the world, after the likes of Australia, Britain and the United States, but ahead of France, Germany and Italy.
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  • Its income per head was 92% of the average of 16 rich economies
  • Its income per head is now 43% of those same 16 rich economies; it trails Chile and Uruguay in its own back yard.
  • The election of 1989 marked the first time in more than 60 years that a civilian president had handed power to an elected successor.
  • the repeated recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the hyperinflation of 1989-90, the economic crisis of 2001 and now the possibility of another crisis to come.
  • But three deep-lying explanations help to illuminate the country’s diminishment. Firstly, Argentina may have been rich 100 years ago but it was not modern. That made adjustment hard when external shocks hit. The second theory stresses the role of trade policy. Third, when it needed to change, Argentina lacked the institutions to create successful policies.
  • Railways transformed the economics of agriculture and refrigerated shipping made it possible to export meat on an unprecedented scale: between 1900 and 1916 Argentine exports of frozen beef rose from 26,000 tonnes to 411,000 tonnes a year. But Argentina mainly consumed technology from abroad rather than inventing its own.
  • External shocks duly materialised, which leads to the second theory for Argentine decline: trade policy.
  • Argentina raised import tariffs from an average of 16.7% in 1930 to 28.7% in 1933. Reliance on Britain, another country in decline, backfired as Argentina’s favoured export market signed preferential deals with Commonwealth countries.
  • an existing policy of import substitution deepened; the share of trade as a percentage of GDP continued to fall.
  • High food prices meant big profits for farmers but empty stomachs for ordinary Argentines. Open borders increased farmers’ takings but sharpened competition from abroad for domestic industry.
  • “One-third of the country—the commodities industry, engineers and regional industries like wine and tourism—is ready to compete,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst. “Two-thirds are not.”
  • Property rights are insecure
  • Statistics cannot be trusted: Argentina was due this week to unveil new inflation data in a bid to avoid censure from the IMF for its wildly undercooked previous estimates.
  • hort-termism is embedded in the system
  • “We have spent 50 years thinking about maintaining government spending, not about investing to grow,” says Fernando de la Rúa, a former president who resigned during the 2001 crisis.
  • The country’s Vaca Muerta (“Dead Cow”) shale-oil and gasfield is estimated to be the world’s third-largest. If Argentina can attract foreign capital, the money could start flowing within a decade.
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum
  • These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story
  • Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.
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  • chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.
  • At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,
  • The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025
  • United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.
  • Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.
  • For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony
  • Steel makers argue that they still have advantages in price — aluminum can cost as much as three times more — and flexibility, both for the manufacturer and the mechanic who will be fixing the car.“When you build a mass-produced vehicle, you really need to think about the consequences of the supply chain and repair and insurance costs,” Mr. Dey said.
  • new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.
  • “Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.
  • What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.
  • Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.
  • Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story
  • “Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”
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As Boardroom Struggle Ends, Volkswagen Looks to the Future - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 30 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • As Boardroom Struggle Ends, Volkswagen Looks to the Future
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Perils in Trade Deals When Factories Close and Towns Struggle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 18 May 15 - No Cached
  • Perils in Trade Deals When Factories Close and Towns Struggle
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Piles of Overseas Profits Investors Can See but Not Touch - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 24 May 15 - No Cached
  • Piles of Overseas Profits Investors Can See but Not Touch
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Globalization That Works for Workers at Home - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Globalization That Works for Workers at Home
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For Chinese Economy, Strengths Are Now Weaknesses - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • For Chinese Economy, Strengths Are Now Weaknesses
  • For Chinese Economy, Strengths Are Now Weaknesses
  • Around 60 percent of all rail freight traffic in China comes from transporting coal.
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Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds
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Pollution Around the World: A Matter of Choices - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Pollution Around the World: A Matter of Choices
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Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Once Celebrated in Russia, the Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile
  • Mr. Putin’s big challenge is falling oil prices, which Mr. Durov calls “the only chance” for economic and political reform.“When the petrol prices are high, there is no incentive for those reforms,” he said. “It can stay like this forever; nobody really cares.”
  • Mr. Durov has also described himself, with tongue in cheek, as a Pastafarian, a quirky atheistic “faith” that can involve wearing a colander on your head.
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We Can't Blame a Few Rich People for Global Poverty - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • We Can’t Blame a Few Rich People for Global Poverty
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Europe's Young Entrepreneurs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Europe's Young Entrepreneurs
  • Mr. D’Aloisio was still a 17-year-old British student in 2013 when he sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo for what some reports said was as much as $30 million.
  • Jan Koum, the Ukrainian-born American who was a co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application.The company was acquired by Facebook a few months later. “I turned down his offer, but since his company then got sold for $19 billion and every employee held some options, it’s a bit painful to think about that decision,” Mr. Cuende said.
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  • The American tech sector has started thinking likewise. In some parts of Google, for instance, as many as 14 percent of employees do not have college degrees.
  • Eiso Kant, a 24-year-old Dutch entrepreneur — a veteran, by the conference’s standards — has settled in Madrid. He initially came to study at its IE University, but then started Tyba, an online job recruitment platform focused on start-up companies.
  • Aya Jaff, a 19-year-old, Iraqi-born German, set up an association to teach coding to young people, while herself completing a degree in computer sciences.
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Greece's Request for Loan Extension Is Rejected by Germany - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Greece’s Request for Loan Extension Is Rejected by Germany
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With New Nonstick Coating, the Wait, and Waste, Is Over - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • With New Nonstick Coating, the Wait, and Waste, Is Over
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The Cost of Protecting Greece's Public Sector - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • So today, for every seven private employees who have been laid off, only one has left the public sector.
  • 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.
  • 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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  • 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.
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Some thoughts on German politics and the saver's tax in Cyprus | Credit Writedowns - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • “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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  • The bottom line is that none of the major political parties in Germany are going to vote for bailouts for other euro zone countries unless massive strings are attached, since these bailouts are political losers.
  • The anti-bailout part of the FDP platform is the one part of their rhetoric which could successfully take them over the 5% hurdle. The FDP’s complicity in using German taxpayer money to bail out the so-called profligate periphery is a one-way ticket out of Parliament.
  • “First, the Greek reports come via statements made by Michael Fuchs, CDU deputy Bundestag head and a senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party. Fuchs warned earlier today that Germany would veto further aid to Greece if the country has not met the conditions of its previous bailouts.
  • “Second, all along Germany has indicated that it is resistant to increasing funding of the ESM and EFSF bailout facilities. This presents a problem in the case of Spain and Italy because of the size of those economies.
  • 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%.
  • The long and short of it was that the Germans had reached the end of their ability to support bailouts.
  • All evidence is that this levy has created panic in Cyprus. After all, what is the use of having a deposit guarantee if government can arbitrarily circumvent it to impose losses on your deposits anyway?
  • One can't just blame Cyprus for this fiasco. The ECB, EC and European Union finance ministers signed off on the insured deposit grab too]
  • My view? It was inevitable that we would be in crisis again. The austerity world view of crisis resolution is completely at odds with the capacity of the euro zone’s institutional architecture to handle a crisis.
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