Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Group items tagged service

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Gene Ellis

Postal Service Reports Improved $5 Billion Loss - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-service-trims-its-losses.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Postal Service Reports Improved $5 Billion Loss
  • It attributed the net loss mostly to a 2006 law that requires it to pay $5.5 billion annually into a health fund for its future retirees.
  • As a result of its financial troubles, the agency has defaulted on three annual payments into the fund. It has also exhausted its $15 billion borrowing limit from the Treasury Department. More recently the agency has asked for permission to
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • raise its postage prices to help cover costs.
Gene Ellis

Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-outsourcing-industry.html

outsourcing europe industry poland

shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry
  • Part of Poland’s edge derives from the fact that it has yet to join the euro currency union. Its currency, the zloty, has been relatively stable against the world’s reserve currencies in the last year.
  • (The public sector, employing about a quarter of Poland’s 15.7 million workers, is still the country’s largest source of jobs.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • industry specialists say Poland must move into more sophisticated services, like research and development, to continue attracting investment and corporate clients.
  • “The question for Poland is, ‘How do I move up the value chain?' ” said Peter Schumacher, chief executive of the Value Leadership Group, a management consultancy based in Frankfurt and New York. “How can I go from basic process management work to more sophisticated creative work?”
Gene Ellis

Deutsche Post - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Deutsche_Post

deutsche post wikipedia free encyclopedia

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Mail division inherits most of the traditional mail services formerly offered by the state-owned monopoly, for which it uses the Deutsche Post brand. Its exclusive right to deliver letters under 50 grams in Germany expired on 1 January 2008, following the implementation of European legislation. A number of companies are vying to challenge Deutsche Post's near monopolistic hold on letter deliveries, including Luxembourg-based PIN Group and Dutch-owned TNT Post.[2] In 2002, Deutsche Post was granted a license to deliver mail in the United Kingdom, breaking Royal Mail's long-standing monopoly.
  • Beginning in the early 1990s, Deutsche Post started an e-mail service called ePost. Today, a verified e-mail hosting service is run under this brand which allows customers to send and receive messages with digital signatures according to the De-Mail law.
Gene Ellis

France Says It Will Ban Uber's Low-Cost Service in New Year - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cost-service-in-new-year.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 16 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • France Says It Will Ban Uber’s Low-Cost Service in New Year
Gene Ellis

Global flows in a digital age | McKinsey & Company - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...global_flows_in_a_digital_age

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Global flows in a digital age
  • Now, one in three goods crosses national borders, and more than one-third of financial investments are international transactions. In the next decade, global flows could triple,
  • Exchanges of goods such as aircraft and automobiles, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and microelectronics, as well as professional services and foreign direct investment flows, are growing faster than others.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we find that countries with a larger number of connections in the global network of flows increase their GDP growth by up to 40 percent more than less connected countries do. The penalty for being left behind is rising.
  • Digital technologies, which reduce the cost of production and distribution, are transforming flows in three ways: through the creation of purely digital goods and services, “digital wrappers” that enhance the value of physical flows, and digital platforms that facilitate cross-border production and exchange.
  • Developing economies now account for 38 percent of global flows, nearly triple their share in 1990. S
  • oday, digital technologies enable even the smallest company or solo entrepreneur to be a “micromultinational,” selling and sourcing products, services, and ideas across borders. Individuals can work remotely through online platforms, creating a virtual people flow. Microfinance platforms enable entrepreneurs and social innovators to raise money globally in ever-smaller amounts.
Gene Ellis

Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fter-currency-devaluation.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Profits Vanish in Venezuela After Currency Devaluation
  • The country’s high inflation — currently around 60 percent a year — has also meant that the prices in bolívares that companies charge for many goods and services have risen sharply.
  • Now companies are feeling the pain from a series of currency devaluations over the last year and a half. Photo
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But the rosy outlook changed in late March, when Brink’s started calculating its sales using the recently created exchange rate of about 50 bolívares to the dollar
  • Further complicating the picture, the Venezuelan government has not allowed companies to repatriate profits for the last five years.
  • Companies have ways of chipping away at the locked-up profits, including charging higher fees to Venezuelan subsidiaries for goods and services provided by the parent corporation. But many foreign companies are stuck holding vast troves of bolívares that shrink in value each time there is a devaluation.
  • Procter & Gamble said in April that it had the equivalent of about $900 million in cash in this country and that it was taking a $275 million write-down as a result of applying the government’s intermediate exchange rate to its Venezuelan balance sheet. Colgate-Palmolive wrote down $174 million, while Ford wrote down about $316 million.
  • “All the companies knew there would be a loss because everyone knew there wouldn’t be dollars” available at the fixed exchange rate, said an executive with an American company in Venezuela who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were trapped because the law here did not give you a way out.”
  • The government has also failed to pay companies the hard currency it had promised them for imports bought on credit from suppliers, and in many cases suppliers are now refusing to ship more goods to Venezuela until they receive payment.
  • Stores are often out of basic products such as dish soap or corn flour. DirecTV has stopped taking on new customers because it cannot get the dollars to import more dish antennas.
  • Without dollars, car companies cannot import the parts needed to assemble vehicles; Ford and Toyota were forced to temporarily close their factories.
  • In yet another reflection of the currency restrictions, the government has refused to let airlines operating in Venezuela trade the bolívares they receive for ticket sales and other services here for dollars. The International Air Transport Association says that the airlines have more than $4 billion in revenues held up in the country, based on the government’s base exchange rate at the time the tickets were sold.
  • American Airlines says that it is owed $750 million by the country’s government.
Gene Ellis

Dani Rodrik shows why Sub-Saharan Africa's impressive economic performance is not susta... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...performance-is-not-sustainable

economics africa

shared by Gene Ellis on 27 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Africa’s Structural Transformation Challenge
  • As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”
  • Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As in all developing countries, farmers in Africa are flocking to the cities. And yet, as a recent study from the Groningen Growth and Development Center shows, rural migrants do not end up in modern manufacturing industries, as they did in East Asia, but in services such as retail trade and distribution. Though such services have higher productivity than much of agriculture, they are not technologically dynamic in Africa
  • Xinshen Diao of the International Food Policy Research Institute has shown that this growth was led by non-tradable services, in particular construction, transport, and hotels and restaurants. The public sector dominates investment, and the bulk of public investment is financed by foreign grants. Foreign aid has caused the real exchange rate to appreciate,
  • What Rwanda and other African countries lack are the modern, tradable industries that can turn the potential into reality by acting as the domestic engine of productivity growth.
  • Studies show that very few microenterprises grow beyond informality, just as the bulk of successful established firms do not start out as small, informal enterprises.
Gene Ellis

Robert Samuelson: A dishonest budget debate - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

budget debate washington

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • t’s the math: In fiscal 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and civil service and military retirement cost $1.7 trillion, about half the budget.
  • As a share of national income, defense spending ($670 billion in 2012) is headed toward its lowest level since 1940.
  • States’ Medicaid costs will increase with the number of aged and disabled, which represent two-thirds of Medicaid spending. All this will force higher taxes or reduce traditional state and local spending on schools, police, roads and parks.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Almost everything is being subordinated to protect retirees.
  • “for how long will we continue to sacrifice investments in our nation’s children and youth ... to spend more and more on the aged?”
  • In a Pew poll, 87 percent of respondents favored present or greater Social Security spending; only 10 percent backed cuts. Results were similar for 18 of 19 programs, foreign aid being the exception.
  • an aging America needs a new social compact: one recognizing that longer life expectancies justify gradual increases in Social Security’s and Medicare’s eligibility ages; one accepting that sizable numbers of well-off retirees can afford to pay more for their benefits or receive less; one that improves generational fairness by concentrating help for the elderly more on the needy and poor to lighten the burdens — in higher taxes and fewer public services — on workers; and one that limits health costs.
  • Government is being slowly transformed into a vast old-age home, with everything else devalued and degraded.
Gene Ellis

Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...zation-mining-corruption-66080

Zambia Why so poor?

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
  • For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
  • Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • At its peak, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines company employed more than 65,000 Zambians and carried out services like water delivery and waste collection for five cities in the Copper Belt Province.
  • Mining employment has dropped to just 30,000, half of its glory-days peak, and the job of maintaining all that company housing and infrastructure has reverted back to the government.
  • The stats identify Switzerland as Zambia’s primary export market. This is not an indicator that Zambia hosts a thriving chocolate and suspenders sector, but rather that its copper trades are booked in the jurisdiction where they are least likely to be taxed.
  • Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.
  • And then there’s the Chinese. They arrived like a well-packed picnic, everything in shipping crates ready to be unpacked. Their own materials, their own equipment, their own workers, their own fences. If you were designing a foreign investment not to benefit the host community, this is what it would look like.
  • This is Namwile Uzondile, the director of a rural health education project.
  • Last year Namwile conducted a survey of prostitutes here in Kitwe, and found that at least half of them had education certificates, but couldn’t find work. Most had been married off early, 15 or 16, and since then had either left their husbands or lost them to AIDS.
  • First, you go to the tribal chief. Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief.
  • In Zambia most of the chiefs require a gift just to get a meeting. This might mean taking them lunch at a restaurant in Lusaka, or it could mean buying their daughter a car—it’s up to them.
  • Another reason Zambia lacks skills is that some parts of the workforce operate as cartels. Take lawyers. Zambia only has 1,000 of them, and they’re concentrated where the money is: Lusaka (government), Copper Belt (mining) and Livingstone (safari tourists).
  • Last year, only six lawyers were admitted to the bar out of 164 who took the exam. The year before that, it was 16 out of 145. Keep in mind, these aren’t people coming in off the streets. These are people who have a law degree.
  • More than 60 percent of Zambia’s government revenue comes from the copper mines.
  • Taxing all this informal activity would be costly in both resources and voter goodwill. In 2012, Zambia collected just $2.3 million in income taxes from its citizens.
  • It goes as high up as you want to follow it. Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, appointed his uncle the finance minister, his nephew the deputy finance minister, his niece the local government minister, and cousins as ambassador to Japan and chief justice.
  • Zambia’s cabinet has ballooned to 20 ministers and 47 deputy ministers, the largest in Africa. With salaries three to four times higher than opposition MPs and each ministerial post bundled with perks like a company car, free fuel, house servants, and mobile phone talk-time, you get the feeling politicians aren’t jumping from opposition into government on moral sentiment alone.
  • But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around.
  • In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything.
  • Now she goes all NGO. “Little government capacity,” she says, is the nicest way to put it. “There are simply no systems for routine government services,” she says. Getting a license, a permit, certificates, approvals to start work, visas for expats to fly down here—nothing is in one place, nothing is fast or easy.
  • And that’s just the bureaucracy. Then there are the cops that pull you over to ask for 50 kwacha ($10); the schools with slots reserved for paying parents; the hospitals that swear the earliest appointment, the only available medicine, is six months away until you reach into your pocket.
  • “Sometimes we have to pay for the inspectors to come to our mines,” Jane says.
  • The conversation goes like this: Jane tells the local certification body that she needs an inspector to sign off for a permit. The local certification body tells her that they would be happy to come out to the site, but they don’t have fuel for their cars, or enough petty cash to pay per diems. Jane offers to pay their costs, but only their costs, and the payments aren’t related to clearing the inspection.
  • The company has even paid the police to follow up on complaints or to investigate thefts. “They say, ‘We don’t have this in our budget’ or ‘We’ll need you to pay for it,’” Jane says. So the company fixes the police cars, covers their travel expenses, treats them to lunch.
  • “We tell them, ‘The company I work for, we’re not going to pay up.’ But at the end of the day, they know you’re on a short timeline, and they aren’t.”
  • Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
  • International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure.
Gene Ellis

American trade policy: How to make the world $600 billion poorer | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...pensive-mistake-how-make-world

american trade policy

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • American trade policy How to make the world $600 billion poorer
  • Reasonable estimates say that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could boost the world’s annual output by $600 billion—equivalent to adding another Saudi Arabia. Some $200 billion of that would accrue to America.
  • And the actual gains could be even larger. The agreements would clear the way for freer trade in services, which account for most of rich countries’ GDP but only a small share of trade. Opening up trade in services could help reduce the cost of everything from shipping to banking, education and health care. Exposing professional occupations to the same global competition that factory workers have faced for decades could even strike a blow against the income inequality that Mr Obama so often decries
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Why should Japanese politicians risk infuriating their farmers when any agreement can be torn up on Capitol Hill?
  • Europe’s leaders will now doubt America’s commitment, given how feebly Mr Obama has fought for fast-track. Trade sceptics, such as French farmers, are drooling. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, who is already furious about American spying, may decide that a trade deal is not worth battling for.
  • He seldom mentions, for example, that cheap imports help the poor by cutting their shopping bills, and so reduce inequality of consumption.
Gene Ellis

The Greek Austerity Myth by Daniel Gros - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ty-myth-by-daniel-gros-2015-02

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The Greek Austerity Myth
  • Greece actually spends less on debt service than Italy or Ireland, both of which have much lower (gross) debt-to-GDP ratios. With payments on Greece's official foreign debt amounting to only 1.5% of GDP, debt service is not the country's problem.
  • The new Greek government's argument that this is an unreasonable target fails to withstand scrutiny. After all, when faced with excessively high debt, other European countries – including Belgium (from 1995), Ireland (from 1991), and Norway (from 1999) – maintained similar surpluses for at least ten years each, typically in the aftermath of a financial crisis.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • To be sure, one can reasonably argue that austerity in the eurozone has been excessive, and that fiscal deficits should have been much larger to sustain demand. But only governments with access to market finance can use expansionary fiscal policy to boost demand.
  • Had Greece not received financial support in 2010, it would have had to cut its fiscal deficit from more than 10% of GDP to zero immediately. By financing continued deficits until 2013, the troika actually enabled Greece to delay austerity.
  • Of course, Greece is not the first country to request emergency financing to delay budget cuts, and then complain that the cuts are excessive once the worst is over. This typically happens when the government runs a primary surplus. When the government can finance its current spending through taxes – and might even be able to increase expenditure, if it does not have to pay interest – the temptation to renege on debt intensifies.
  • The practical problem for Greece now is not the sustainability of a debt that matures in 20-30 years and carries very low interest rates; the real issue is the few payments to the IMF and the ECB that fall due this year – payments that the new government has promised to make.
Gene Ellis

Traffic Snarls Expected in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber - NYTimes.com - 0 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...ber-in-europe-to-snarl-traffic

shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Traffic Snarls Expected in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber
  • Several of Europe’s largest cities were snarled by traffic jams on Wednesday when thousands of taxi drivers blocked roads and held rallies in protest of ​an upstart​ American​ service that lets customers book rides through smartphones.
  • Founded in 2009
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Before the protest in London, Uber said on Wednesday that it had opened up its booking platform so that the city’s black taxis, which previously were not included in the start-up’s system, could now take bookings through the smartphone app.
  • Europe’s taxi operators will demand that local lawmakers clamp down on the California-based Uber, which now operates in 100 cities in 36 countries.
  • “In Paris, the number of taxis hasn’t changed since the 1950s,” said Pierre-Dimitry Gore-Coty, Uber’s regional general manager for Northern Europe. “The strikes are an attempt to desperately fight against competition in the market.”
  • France has been one of Uber’s toughest battlegrounds. Faced with protests by the powerful local taxi industry, which has been closed to competition for decades, the government in December sought to curb the rise of Uber and rival upstarts by forcing the car services to wait 15 minutes after receiving a request before picking up a client.
  • They also say the company’s technology, which allows drivers to ​use a smartphone-like device to ​calculate fares based on time and distance, breaks local laws. The city’s authorities have asked a local court to rule on that issue.
  • Partly, London taxi drivers resent the idea of G.P.S.-equipped freelancers presuming to practice their time-honored craft.
Gene Ellis

Sub-Saharan Africa's Subprime Borrowers by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Hamid Rashid - Projec... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...h-e--stiglitz-and-hamid-rashid

Africa subprime borrowers

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Taking the lead in October 2007, when it issued a $750 million Eurobond with an 8.5% coupon rate, Ghana earned the distinction of being the first Sub-Saharan country – other than South Africa – to issue bonds in 30 years.
  • Nine other countries – Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Angola, Nigeria, Namibia, Zambia, and Tanzania – followed suit. By February 2013, these ten African economies had collectively raised $8.1 billion from their maiden sovereign-bond issues, with an average maturity of 11.2 years and an average coupon rate of 6.2%. These countries’ existing foreign debt, by contrast, carried an average interest rate of 1.6% with an average maturity of 28.7 years.
  • So why are an increasing number of developing countries resorting to sovereign-bond issues? And why have lenders suddenly found these countries desirable?
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • recent analyses, carried out in conjunction with the establishment of the new BRICS bank, have demonstrated the woeful inadequacy of official assistance and concessional lending for meeting Africa’s infrastructure needs, let alone for achieving the levels of sustained growth needed to reduce poverty significantly.
  • the conditionality and close monitoring typically associated with the multilateral institutions make them less attractive sources of financing. What politician wouldn’t prefer money that gives him more freedom to do what he likes? It will be years before any problems become manifest – and, then, some future politician will have to resolve them.
  • So, are shortsighted financial markets, working with shortsighted governments, laying the groundwork for the world’s next debt crisis?
  • he risks will undoubtedly grow if sub-national authorities and private-sector entities gain similar access to the international capital markets, which could result in excessive borrowing.
  • Nigerian commercial banks have already issued international bonds; in Zambia, the power utility, railway operator, and road builder are planning to issue as much as $4.5 billion in international bonds.
  • Signs of default stress are already showing. In March 2009 – less than two years after the issue – Congolese bonds were trading for 20 cents on the dollar, pushing the yield to a record high. In January 2011, Côte d’Ivoire became the first country to default on its sovereign debt since Jamaica in January 2010.
  • In June 2012, Gabon delayed the coupon payment on its $1 billion bond, pending the outcome of a legal dispute, and was on the verge of a default. Should oil and copper prices collapse, Angola, Gabon, Congo, and Zambia may encounter difficulties in servicing their sovereign bonds.
  • They need not only to invest the proceeds in the right type of high-return projects, but also to ensure that they do not have to borrow further to service their debt.
  • But borrowing money from international financial markets is a strategy with enormous downside risks, and only limited upside potential – except for the banks, which take their fees up front. Sub-Saharan Africa’s economies, one hopes, will not have to repeat the costly lessons that other developing countries have learned over the past three decades.
Gene Ellis

The Eurocrisis Can Easily Flare Up Again - Seeking Alpha - 0 views

seekingalpha.com/...isis-can-easily-flare-up-again

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • It is clear for all that they will also have to swallow cuts, but for this to take place, politicians have to break promises, the ECB has to break the law, and the IMF has to do something rather unprecedented. None of this is easy, to put it mildly.
  • Recently, there was a new EU/IMF/ECB 'agreement' that won't fare any better.
  • Basically, we're lending Greece more in order for it to keep the appearance that it is servicing and paying of the debt.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The International Monetary Fund will not disburse Greece's next bailout tranche until the country completes a voluntary buy back of its debt, an IMF spokesman said
  • Who will actually sell the debt at a 70% discount?
  • Most private Greek debt holders just want to hold to maturity, they've already been subjected to two haircuts.
  • Two thirds of the private holders of Greek debt are Greek banks (22 billion euro). These are certainly not going to sell because doing so forces them to realize losses on the debt,
  • There is a simple and obvious solution, which will then force itself. The official creditors should take really substantial losses on Greek debt.
  • The simple truth is that as long as Greece's economy is moribund and its debt/GDP trajectory spiraling out of control, nobody is going to invest in Greece, capital and educated people will leave in a vicious cycle, and Greece's capacity for paying back its debt shrinks by the day. Something has to give.
  • The only real alternative is Greece leaving the euro
  • This situation is basically a slow asphyxiation.
  • Gene Ellis on 03 Dec 12
     
    Exc. piece...  Eurocrisis as of Dec. 3, 2012
Gene Ellis

Treat debt with caution: SARB - Times LIVE - 0 views

www.timeslive.co.za/...treat-debt-with-caution-sarb

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • "Be extremely cautious that you don't take more than you can service. Try to issue liabilities that involve an element of risk sharing between the creditor and the debtor," he said.
  • "As for international contracts, be very careful that you treat the business cycle symmetrically. If you stimulate and borrow when the economy goes down then you must tighten... when the economy grows."
  • He said governments of developing nations needed to be innovative in borrowing contracts they devised to grow their infrastructure.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Give, for instance, a 50 percent equity stake in some infrastructure project so that you share the risks as well as the returns. There you don't have the bankruptcy threats and the default threats which come with debt contracts."
  • Buiter urged South Africans and the rest of the continent to "wear helmets for the rest of the decade". "The world is going to be a very dangerous place for the next 10 years, with advanced economies still needing about a decade, if you count the US and Japan, to get out of the debt problem that they got into," he said.
  • "So there is going to be a fallout for developing economies like South Africa."
Gene Ellis

UPDATE 1-Suffering Greece's economy shrank again at end of last year | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...eece-gdp-idUSL6N0C35ZM20130311

update greece economy

shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • ATHENS, March 11 (Reuters) - Greece's economy shrank at an annual 5.7 percent in the last quarter of 2012, combining for a 20 percent slump in real terms since 2008.
  • It would have been worse but for a 17.5 percent drop in the country's fourth quarter trade gap, the country's statistics service ELSTAT said on Monday
1 - 20 of 46 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page