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Gene Ellis

Michael Spence explores the causes of partial and stalled economic recoveries. - Projec... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...nd-stalled-economic-recoveries

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Indeed, recent data suggest that more than half of the acceleration in US growth is occurring on the tradable side, even though it accounts for only about one-third of the economy. And that contribution is probably an underestimate, because income generated on the tradable supply side produces income that becomes demand on the non-tradable side – a multiplier effect that crosses the tradable/non-tradable boundary.
  • the main problem is that public-sector investment remains well below growth-sustaining levels. The hard part of fully realizing potential growth is shifting the composition of domestic demand from consumption to investment without adding leverage. That means paying for it on the public-sector side, via taxes and a reduction in household consumption (and in wealth accumulation).
  • But such adjustments cannot happen in a monetary union, so unit labor costs are slowly re-converging via a protracted process of flat nominal wage growth and slowly declining real wages (a process that would be quicker with higher inflation in Germany and Northern Europe).
Gene Ellis

How Jean Tirole's Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lain-the-internet-economy.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy
  • He also said that industries should be regulated differently depending on their distinct characteristics.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      excellent point!
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many Internet companies, for instance, give their products away free, which means that antitrust law built on pricing is irrelevant. But a result is they grow so fast that they can quickly become monopolies.
  • “He’s helping us think about what is one of the greatest challenges of our time, how to deal with what feel like friendly monopolists,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who studies Internet policy and antitrust. “Amazon, Google and the others give us all this stuff for free or lower prices, so we love them, but are they dangerous in ways we don’t always see?”
  • In the 2002 paper with Jean-Charles Rochet, Mr. Tirole defined two-sided markets, or markets that “get both sides on board” by charging more to one set of customers in order to increase demand by others.
  • In the tech industry, it explains why Google, Facebook and Twitter offer their services free – the more people who use them, the more advertisers they can attract. Likewise, Amazon lowered the price of its new phone to 99 cents in part because smartphones succeed when they have a lot of apps – and developers won’t want to build apps for Amazon’s phone unless a lot of people are using it.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 15 Oct 14
       
      nice example...
  • For regulators, tech companies have been a riddle in part because they do not follow the behavior of typical monopolies: Many do not charge for their products, and companies that offer entirely different products are nonetheless competitors. For instance, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, argued in a speech on Monday that Google’s biggest competitor in search is Amazon and in mobile is Facebook — even though neither one is a search engine.
  • “Inspired by him and others like him, our effort was to try to move beyond the traditional understanding of something like an aluminum cartel who just raised their prices on aluminum and everything got more expensive,” said Mr. Wu, who was a senior adviser to the Federal Trade Commission on antitrust matters.
  • For consumers, the costs include absorbing advertisers’ ad spending by paying more for their products, being tracked and shown personalized ads, and giving up privacy.
  • our end-users do not internalize the impact of their purchase on the other side of the market.”
Gene Ellis

Op-Ed Contributor - The Greek crisis shows why Germany should leave the European Moneta... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...29Starbatty.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jul 12 - Cached
  • THE European Monetary Union, the basis of the euro, began with a grand illusion. On one side were countries — Austria, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands — whose currencies had persistently appreciated, both within Europe and worldwide; the countries on the other side — Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain — had persistently depreciating currencies.
  • Rather than pulling the lagging countries forward, the low interest rates of the European Central Bank have lured governments and households, especially in the southern part of the euro zone, into frivolous budgetary policies and excessive consumption.
  • the solution is clear: the only way to avoid further harm to the global economy is for Germany to lead its fellow stable states out of the euro and into a new and stronger currency bloc.
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  • Unlike their northern neighbors, the countries in the zone’s southern half have difficulty placing bonds — issued to finance their national deficits — with international capital investors. Nor are these countries competitive in the global economy, as shown by their high trade deficits.
  • If Greece were outside the euro zone, for example, it could devalue its currency
  • Instead, the fiscal strictures of the euro zone are forcing the country to curtail public expenditures, raise taxes and cut government employees’ salaries, actions that may push Greece into a deep depression and further undermine its already weak international credit standing.
  • In short, th
  • e euro is headed toward collapse.
  • hat opportunity and pull out of the euro, it wouldn’t be alone. The same calculus would probably lure Austria, Finland and the Netherlands — and perhaps France — to leave behind the high-debt states and join Germany in a new, stable bloc, perhaps even with a new common currency.
  • If Germany were to take t
  • A strong-currency bloc could fulfill the euro’s original purpose. Without having to worry about laggard states, the bloc would be able to follow a reliable and consistent monetary policy that would force the member governments to gradually reduce their national debt. The entire European economy would prosper. And the United States would gain an ally in any future reorganization of the world currency system and the global economy.
Gene Ellis

IMF's Olivier Blanchard says global recovery is still 'weak' - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...05-11e4-bfda-00144feab7de.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • IMF’s Olivier Blanchard says global recovery is still ‘weak’
  • “There is a strong case to be made for more public investment, for demand-side reasons in the short term, and supply-side reasons in the longer run,” says Mr Blanchard. The US and Germany are prime examples, Mr Blanchard said, of countries where there is a backlog of high-return infrastructure projects. He added that their governments should make the most of record-low borrowing costs and reap the large macroeconomic benefits that come from increasing demand.
Gene Ellis

U.S. Ports Seek to Lure Big Ships After Panama Canal Expands - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fter-panama-canal-expands.html

panamax

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The big ships — known as “Post-Panamax” and even “Super-Post-Panamax” — are already in heavy use worldwide, making up 16 percent of the container fleet but accounting for 45 percent of its capacity, according to a July report by the Army Corps of Engineers.
  • The Port of Virginia, in Norfolk, is ready to receive the big ships today. And New York is also prepared, thanks to a massive dredging project that began 13 years ago.
  • But nearly every port in the game still faces major challenges and expenses —
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Baltimore, which already has a 50-foot channel, has a bottleneck on the land side: the Howard Street tunnel, through which trains have to pass to reach the port, and which is too small to accommodate the double-stacked container cars that are increasingly the standard for rail shipping. The rail line CSX has announced a workaround that could cost hundreds of millions, involving a new yard beyond the tunnel filled with containers brought by truck; the port will load the trains with a single container to get through the tunnel, and the trains can be completed at the yard.
  • The big ships will also come via places beyond Panama: many are expected to come from Southeast Asia through the Suez Canal, and from South America’s eastern ports.
Gene Ellis

The Morning Ledger: Europe Prepares for Nightmare Scenario - The CFO Report - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...repares-for-nightmare-scenario

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 May 12 - No Cached
  • But euro-zone members would probably have to take a big hit on loans to the country and banks could face heavy losses on their exposure to the Greek economy.
  • Contingency planning is ramping up on the corporate side, too. One European supermarket group has been looking closely at its suppliers’ financing requirements. “The key thing for them is how their working capital cycle is funded and whether they can get access to the banks that they normally would use, which may themselves be in a liquidity squeeze,” a treasury official at the company tells CFO European Briefing. “Our job is to ensure the channels of liquidity are open. If we can keep that going, a lot of the disruption can be minimized relatively quickly.”
  • Meanwhile, some portfolio managers are dumping debt of southern European countries, while others are piling into U.S. and German issues,
Gene Ellis

Euro Crisis: Italy 'To Dump Public Holidays' - Yahoo! Eurosport UK - 0 views

uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/...lidays-121903420--finance.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • As a result, technocrat prime minister Mario Monti is considering cutting back on public holidays in a bid to increase growth after officials said even slashing days off by a working week would boost growth and raise GDP by as much as 1%.
  • Italy has a total of 11 recognised public holidays a year but unlike Britain these remain fixed and if they fall mid-week people traditionally take the days off either side as well in order to ''make a bridge'' until the weekend, which has drastic consequences on industrial output.
  • Sources say the Government will keep the ''main religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas'' but are looking at scrapping some of the secondary ones such as Boxing Day, Epiphany on January 6th and the Immaculate Conception on December 8th.
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  • One idea drawn up by ministers Antonio Catricala and Antonio Polillo, from the Finance ministry, is to move them and the military holidays to the nearest Sunday so they will in effect still be celebrated but not on the specific date itself.
  • 'These holidays represent the best of our past, the values on which our Republic was founded on, they are in a word history and they should not be touched. You cannot tell us that there are no other ways of boosting productivity and increasing growth. ''The country should be left its history and it should be allowed to conserve its values, values that the majority of the country are fully supportive of, that is what we are asking the government to remember.''
Gene Ellis

Greek Credit-Default Swaps Are Activated - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...it-default-swaps-are-activated

greek

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The decision by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association ends months of speculation that a Greek default might not set off the swaps, a result that could have undermined their role as insurance against debt defaults.
  • Still, doubts about the instruments’ effectiveness may linger. European officials initially shaped the Greek debt restructuring to avoid activating them. The concern is that future restructurings could be arranged to stop swaps from paying out.
  • Since then, banks and regulators have taken steps to strengthen the market, mostly by making sure that investors can pay out the money they owe on swaps.
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  • The Greek government chose to apply so-called collective action clauses, which it had earlier inserted into its bonds registered under Greek law. The deal maximized total debt relief for the country,
  • but it also forced losses on bondholders — a credit event, and therefore a trigger, for the swaps.
  • the restructuring activated the swaps only after the country made a legal move on Friday.
  • Nearly $70 billion of swaps are currently outstanding on Greek debt. But after both sides settle their accounts, the amount that will need to be paid out should be no more than $3.2 billion.
  • Some investors entered swaps on Greece as a way of effectively insuring themselves against losses on their Greek bonds, while others used them as a way to bet on a default happening.
  • Before investors doubted Greece’s solvency, the swaps offered insurance at what turned out to be an extremely cheap price. At the start of 2008, an investor buying protection on Greek debt had to pay only $22,000 annually to insure against default on $10 million of Greek bonds over five years, according to Markit, a data provider. Now, the protection would cost about $7.6 million.
  • Investors will most likely continue to want default swaps to protect against losses on Greece’s new bonds. These bonds, to be issued Monday, are expected to have yields of well over 15 percent, according to advance pricing. This suggests investors have strong doubts about Greece’s creditworthiness even after its restructuring. Fitch Ratings said on Friday that it would probably give Greece’s new bonds a low, junk-bond rating.
  • Gene Ellis on 17 Jun 12
     
    Global
Gene Ellis

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ret-to-success-is-failure.html

Duckworth

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
  • Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
  • Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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  • According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.
  • As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
  • “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”
  • Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s.
  • People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”
  • Last winter, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grades took the 24-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The results were discussed by teachers and administrators, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled a “report card.”
  • Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
  • She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.
  • The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, while the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin have chosen for their schools lean much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
  • The topic for the assembly was heroes, and a half-dozen students stood up in front of their classmates — about 350 kids, in all — and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen:
  • I came to Witter’s class to observe something that Levin was calling “dual-purpose instruction,” the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.
  • It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can.
  • The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
Gene Ellis

Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...detroits-aluminum-diet.html

steel industry stress aluminum feeling

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.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 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.”
  • Gene Ellis on 25 Feb 14
     
    "said"
Gene Ellis

Germany's strange parallel universe - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...89-11e3-8905-00144feab7de.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Germany experienced a mild recession in 2003; today’s vulnerable countries are suffering depressions.
  • today’s vulnerable countries are pursuing adjustment in a period of chronically weak demand.
  • They have to improve their competitiveness. But the only one in which nominal wages have fallen substantially is Greece. Elsewhere, it is rising productivity that has improved competitiveness. But that is the other side of the coin from the unemployment.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • All these countries are going to end up with gross public debt at more than 100 per cent of GDP. This will be hard to manage.
  • Ongoing fiscal transfers seem neither desirable nor feasible.
  • But better insurance mechanisms for sovereigns and banks are needed in the long run. Yet all this will be academic if the eurozone does not allow its members to return to economic health over a reasonable time period.
  • Meanwhile, Germany is redirecting its surpluses outside the eurozone.
  • But it also will not work, for two reasons: first, the eurozone is far too big to achieve export-led growth, as Germany has done; and, second, the currency is likely to appreciate still further, thereby squeezing the less competitive economies all over again.
Gene Ellis

Those Depressing Germans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-those-depressing-germans.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Last year Germany, not China, ran the world’s biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany’s surplus was more than twice as large as China’s.
  • Now, it’s true that Germany has been running big surpluses for almost a decade. At first, however, these surpluses were matched by large deficits in southern Europe, financed by large inflows of German capital. Europe as a whole continued to have roughly balanced trade.
  • Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • a country that runs a trade surplus is, to use the old phrase, beggaring its neighbors.
  • It shares a currency with its neighbors, greatly benefiting German exporters, who get to price their goods in a weak euro instead of what would surely have been a soaring Deutsche mark. Yet Germany has failed to deliver on its side of the bargain: To avoid a European depression, it needed to spend more as its neighbors were forced to spend less, and it hasn’t done that.
  • They consider their country a shining role model, to be emulated by all, and the awkward fact that we can’t all run gigantic trade surpluses simply doesn’t register.
Gene Ellis

The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wdown-of-the-21st-century.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 08 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • You can think of Mr. Obama’s argument as falling into two categories (even if he didn’t say so): the reasons that overall economic growth may accelerate, and the reasons that middle- and low-income workers may benefit more from that growth than they have lately.
  • On the growth side of the ledger, both energy and education have been problems.
  • And the number of high-school and college graduates is rising. The financial crisis deserves some perverse credit, because it sent people fleeing back to school, much as the Great Depression did
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Yet educational attainment has slowed so much that the United States has lost its once-enormous global lead.
  • the biggest reason to think economic growth may translate more directly into wage gains is the turnabout in health costs. After years of rapid increases, they have slowed sharply in the last three years. Mr. Obama likes to give more credit to the 2010 health care law than most observers do, but he’s not wrong about the trend’s significance.
  • It’s also possible that the forces behind the great wage slowdown – from globalization to our often-sclerotic government to (at least for many workers) technological change – are still more powerful than the positive forces.
Gene Ellis

Four rescue measures for stagnant eurozone - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...81-11e4-a882-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Four rescue measures for stagnant eurozone
  • The EBA has a long record of stress tests that grotesquely underestimate the capital holes in EU banks.
  • Both the AQR and the stress test relied heavily on national regulators and supervisors – the very entities on whose watch the excesses that led to the financial crisis were allowed to fester and compound.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • They were in charge of the regulatory leniency that permitted the banks in their jurisdictions to engage in lender forbearance (extend and pretend/delay and pray) and to overstate the fair value of their assets.
  • To avoid the cyclical stagnation in the eurozone turning into secular stagnation, four policies are required.
  • he first is a proper AQR and stress test followed by a speedy recapitalisation of the capital-deficient banks and a wave of consolidation in the eurozone banking sector to bring higher profitability
  • The second measure is a temporary fiscal stimulus (say 1 per cent of eurozone GDP per year for two years, concentrated in the countries with the largest output gaps, that is, in the periphery), which is permanently funded and monetised by the ECB.
  • this will be a reminder that the most important asset of central banks – the present value of future seigniorage profits – is off-balance sheet.
  • Finally, to achieve debt sustainability for the eurozone sovereigns, radical supply side reforms are required that boost the growth rate of potential output to at least 1.5 per cent in Italy, Portugal and other sclerotic countries.
Gene Ellis

Suspension Bridges - Inca - Andes - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...08bridg.html

General inca suspension bridges

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - Cached
  • “Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”
  • Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building.
  • The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Similar bridges existed in other mountainous regions of the world, most notably in the Himalayas and in ancient China, where iron chain suspension bridges existed in the third century B.C.”
  • The last existing Inca suspension bridge, at Huinchiri, near Cuzco, is virtually rebuilt each year. People from the villages on either side hold a three-day festival and gather stiff grasses for producing more than 50,000 feet of cord. Finally, the cord is braided into 150-foot replacement cables.
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