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Gene Ellis

Europe's Eyes on the Prize by Robert Cooper - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...l-peace-prize-by-robert-cooper

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Gene Ellis on 19 Dec 12
     
    Three of the main players behind the beginnings of the EU
Gene Ellis

With Restructuring Done, EADS Faces New Challenges - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eads-faces-new-challenges.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • One of the big arguments being made by the economic ministry is, ‘We give you lots of defense business, so you have got to provide a lot of high-tech jobs in Germany.’
  • EADS’s future in the United States, meanwhile, poses different challenges.
  • Those attempts have included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for a $35 billion aerial refueling tanker contract with the U.S. Air Force as well as the failed attempt last year to merge with BAE, one of the Pentagon’s top 10 contractors.
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  • But with major U.S. players like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman almost certainly out of reach for national security reasons,
  • “I have no illusions about how difficult it is to sell non-American products on the American market,” Mr. Enders said. “We should not even dream about trying to sell a product to a U.S. defense customer if it is not really superior to what our American peers are offering.” Analysts tended to agree.
Gene Ellis

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

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

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 May 13 - No Cached
  • Bennett Model helped pioneer the exporting of garments from China in 1975, the year before Mao Zedong died,
  • Buying from Bangladesh, said Mr. Model, “has been politically incorrect ever since problems started there, so a lot of major players had already been looking for alternatives.”
  • Western executives are checking on potential new suppliers in southern Vietnam, central Cambodia and the hinterlands of Java in Indonesia.
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  • “Right now, the name of Bangladesh just gives a bad rep to a company,”
  • Bangladesh, which is the world’s second-largest garment manufacturer after China
  • Garment manufacturing makes up a fifth of the economy in Bangladesh and four-fifths of its exports,
  • “People are on the one hand looking at contingency plans in case the unrest gets worse,” said Bruce Rockowitz, the group president and chief executive of Hong Kong-based Li & Fung, one of the world’s largest sourcing companies.
Gene Ellis

Europe Can't Handle the Euro - 0 views

www.nber.org/...wj020800.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 31 May 12 - No Cached
  • When leaders of the 11 nations that agreed to combine their currencies gathered in January 1999, they predicted great things: the single currency would shift global portfolios to euro assets, depressing the value of the dollar relative to the euro, and the new eurozone would be a strong player in the global economy, reflecting the size of an integrated European market. Instead the euro plummeted, Europes economy remains weak, and unemployment is more than twice the U.S. level.
  • The ECB will eventually be judged not by its words but by whether it achieves low inflation and does so without increasing cyclical unemployment. I am not optimistic about either part of this goal.
  • The ECB must make monetary policy for "Europe as a whole," which in practice means doing what is appropriate for Germany, France and Italy, the eurozones three largest countries. Last year demand conditions in those countries were relatively weak, while demand conditions in Spain and Ireland were very strong. That meant a monetary policy that was too expansionary for Spain and Ireland, causing a substantial acceleration of their inflation and threatening their competitiveness.
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  • Such disparities of demand conditions will undoubtedly persist in the future because European countries differ substantially in industrial composition and in a variety of economic policies.
  • the time will come when the ECB will set a policy that is too tight for the outliers, leading to substantially higher unemployment than if they were free to set their own monetary policies. Even without discretionary monetary policies, the interest rates in countries with weak demand would naturally decline, and the external values of their currencies would fall, both acting as offsetting stabilizers of the countries weak demand. But this will not be possible within the EMU, where a single interest rate and a single exchange rate prevail. Result: higher average cyclical unemployment.
  • In the U.S., a fall in regional demand leads to lower wages, which help to maintain employment; to movements of labor to regions where demand is stronger; and to a net fiscal transfer from Washington (because lower regional income means lower federal tax liability). None of this happens in Europe, where wages are inflexible, mobility is severely limited by language and custom, and there are no significant fiscal transfers.
  • Politicians can now blame the ECB for high unemployment and complain that it is a powerful force beyond national control. Instead of seeking to make labor markets more flexible, European governments are talking more about "social wages," about mandatory 35-hour workweeks, and about rolling back even the small reductions in social benefits Germany achieved under Helmut Kohls government. Worse yet, there are attempts to eliminate differences in labor practices and even differences in wages among the EMU countries.
  • Moreover, these policies reduce the international competitiveness of many European industries and encourage the adoption of protectionist policies to keep out non-European products.
  • Forcing a single monetary policy on all of Europe will cause the countries that suffer what they regard as unnecessarily high unemployment to resent the actions of others. Attempts to force a Europewide tax system, especially if taxes are used to redistribute incomes among European countries, will compound the potential for conflict.
  • EMU is meant to be a marriage made in heaven with no possibility of divorce.
Gene Ellis

American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-nobel-prize-in-physics.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • American and 2 Japanese Physicists Share Nobel for Work on LED Lights
  • In Africa, millions of diode lamps that run on solar power have been handed out to replace polluting kerosene lamps.
  • For the same amount of energy consumption, LED bulbs produce four times the light of a fluorescent bulb and nearly 20 times the light of an incandescent bulb.
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  • ED bulbs are also more durable, lasting 10 times as long as a fluorescent bulb and 100 times as long as an incandescent bulb.
  • In 2006 he was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize of one million euros (about $1.3 million) for inventing the first efficient blue-light laser, opening the way for things like Blu-ray players.
Gene Ellis

Ukraine crisis: Russian retaliation could hit Western mulitinationals - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/101614522

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "There no doubt would be Russian retaliation," said Justin Logan, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. "Companies with money tied up in Russia would have a tough time getting it back out."
  • The White House said Friday that President Barack Obama and the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy agreed after a conference call that they're ready to inflict targeted sanctions against Russia if Moscow es
  • The lion's share of foreign money in Russia is from major energy sector players like Shell, Exxon, and BP, said Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer
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  • Shell is working with Gazprom on natural gas extraction in Russia; Exxon has a multibillion dollar exploration partnership with Rosneft, a major oil producer controlled by the Russian government, and BP owns nearly 20 percent of Rosneft.
  • "Shell and Exxon have physical assets in Russia," said Gheit. "But pound-for-pound, BP has the biggest exposure in Russia." Although BP may have the most to lose from an economic tug-of-war between Moscow and the West, tough lessons that BP learned in Russia—through a defunct partnership with Rosneft called TNK-BP—also make BP best equipped for any future fallout, said Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy.
  • Spiro said that several German firms have also steeled themselves for possible fallout from friction between the Russia and the West. "German companies are huge here," said Spiro, naming BASF, energy firm RWE, and Siemens as companies with operations in Russia. BASF is working to finalize a deal with Gazprom that would give it a stake in Siberian oil fields; RWE has reached a preliminary deal to sell its natural gas subsidiary to Russian billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, and Siemens has a partnership with state-run railroad monopoly Russian Railways. Late last month, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser made a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his residence and voice support for a "trusting relationship" with Russian companies.
  • We know that if the West's resolve starts to crumble, it will almost certainly start in Germany,
  • "That's the canary in the coal mine."
  • "It starts with Germany and works its way down," said Hogan. "They have the most trade back-and-forth, and Germany gets the highest percentage of its energy from Russia."
  • Alcoa owns aluminum fabrication facilities in Russia, and Boeing has a design center in Moscow, as well as a joint venture with VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest titanium producer.
  • Members of the Russian parliament have also proposed charging international payments companies like Visa and Mastercard with pre-emptive "security fees," with the stated aim of preparing for future financial disruptions.
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