Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Gene Ellis

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Gene Ellis

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
Gene Ellis

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Webe... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-ECB-strongman-Axel-Weber.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 24 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber
  • Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.
  • "People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Mr Rogoff said Europe is squandering the "scarce resource" of its youth, badly needed to fortify an ageing society as the demographic crunch sets in.
  • "If these latent technologies are not realised, Europe will wake up like Rip Van Winkel from a long Japan-like slumber to find itself a much smaller part of the world economy, and a lot less important."
  • Mr Rogoff said debt write-downs across the EMU periphery "will eventually happen" but the longer leaders let the crisis fester with half-measures, the worse damage this will do to European society in the end.
  • Mr Weber, who resigned from the Bundesbank and the ECB in a dispute over euro debt crisis strategy, said new "bail-in" rules for bond-holders of eurozone banks will cause investors to act pre-emptively, aiming to avoid large losses before the ECB issues its test verdicts. "We may see that speculators do not wait until November, but bet on winners and losers before that," he said.
  • Sir Martin said the eurozone is pursuing a reverse "Phillips Curve" - the trade off between jobs and inflation - as if it were testing "what level of unemployment it is prepared to tolerate for zero inflation".
  • Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive officer of Accenture, said Europe is losing the great battle for competitiveness, and risks a perma-slump where debt burdens of 100pc of GDP prevent governments breaking free by investing in skills and technology.
  • He said Europe is falling further behind as the US basks in cheap energy and pours funds into cutting-edge technology. "A lot is at stake. If in 12 to 24 months no radical steps are taken to break the curse, we might have not just five, ten, but twenty years of a low-growth sluggish situation in Europe," he said.
  • "People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said
Gene Ellis

Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tions-on-renewable-energy.html

climate change

shared by Gene Ellis on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Europe, Facing Economic Pain, May Ease Climate Rules
  • On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.
  • 14 executives at large companies called for “one single, realistic target” and warned that “the high-cost of noncompetitive technologies to decarbonise the power sector” will strain businesses already hit by Europe’s high energy prices, particularly for electricity, which costs twice what it does in the United States.
Gene Ellis

Investors Seek Yields in Europe, but Analysts Warn of Risk - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-its-economies-languish.html

investors europe analysts

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Investors Seek Yields in Europe, but Analysts Warn of Risk
  • Once again, foreign investors are piling into the government bonds of Ireland, Spain and Portugal — countries that got into such debt trouble that they required bailouts. Now these countries are able to sell their bonds at lower interest rates than they have seen in years, renewing hope that Europe has turned a corner.
  • Despite the suddenly easier terms under which Ireland and other recovering euro zone countries can borrow, the fact remains: These countries are still mired in stagnation.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Claus Vistesen, the head of research at Variant Perception, a London-based economic research group, sees the ratio of debt to economic output as a continuing threat to a euro zone recovery.“People think growth is coming back,” Mr. Vistesen said, “but at the end of the day, debt is still going up.”
  • For the euro zone at large, though, a step back often follows each step forward. France and Italy, the bloc’s second- and third-largest economies, are increasingly seen as the latest sick men of the Continent. Even Germany, the bloc’s powerhouse, grew only feebly last year, by 0.4 percent.
  • “Sixteen hundred jobs a week were being lost before we took office; we’re now in a position where 1,200 jobs a week are being created, and our consumer confidence numbers have been steadily growing.”
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14
       
      Do the maths here:  1600 a week jobs being lost equals, what, just over 80,000 jobs a year?  1200 jobs a week now being created, that's what, a little over 60,000 a year?  We've had 5-6 years of recession, so how many years to get back to where we were?  And, of course, the population was growing...
  • In Ireland, more than 80 percent of the investment came from abroad, with banks and pension funds making up 37 percent of the offering and fund managers about half.
  • Mr. Kirkegaard cited “the hunt for yield.”
Gene Ellis

China Exports Pollution to U.S., Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-western-us-study-finds.html

China exports pollution u s input_output

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • “We’re focusing on the trade impact,” said Mr. Lin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Peking University’s School of Physics. “Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”
  • “Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, the statement said. Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.
  • The study’s scientists also looked at the impact of China’s export industries on its own air quality. They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The scholars who gave emissions estimates for China’s export industries, a significant part of the country’s economy, looked at data from 42 sectors that are direct or indirect contributors to emissions. They included steel and cement production, power generation and transportation. Coal-burning factories were the biggest sources of pollutants and greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14
       
      Note:  here they have used input-output coefficients of sectors to calculate the effects...
  • In Japan, for instance, an environmental engineer has attributed a mysterious pestilence that is killing trees on Yakushima Island to pollutants from China.
  • Exports accounted for 24.1 percent of China’s entire economic output last year, down sharply from a peak of 35 percent in 2007, before the global financial crisis began to weaken overseas demand even as China’s domestic economy continued to grow.
  • But the proportion of China’s exports that are made in China has risen steadily in recent years as many companies move more of their supply chains, instead of just having final assembly work done here.
Gene Ellis

New Truths That Only One Can See - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ths-that-only-one-can-see.html

methodology

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • New Truths That Only One Can See
  • Given the desire for ambitious scientists to break from the pack with a striking new finding, Dr. Ioannidis reasoned, many hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong
  • Taking into account the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The effect is amplified by competition for a shrinking pool of grant money and also by the design of so many experiments — with small sample sizes (cells in a lab dish or people in an epidemiological pool) and weak standards for what passes as statistically significant.
  • If one of five competing labs is alone in finding an effect, that result is the one likely to be published.
  • Among them is a paper in which C. Glenn Begley, who is chief scientific officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, described an experience he had while at Amgen, another drug company. He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer. Some of the results could not be reproduced even with the help of the original scientists working in their own labs.
  • Scientists talk about “tacit knowledge,” the years of mastery it can take to perform a technique. The image they convey is of an experiment as unique as a Rembrandt.
  • The problem stands to get worse. It has been estimated that the corpus of scientific knowledge has doubled in size every 10 to 15 years since the days of Isaac Newton.
Gene Ellis

Davos view: Don't get too confident about Eurozone prospects | The World - 0 views

blogs.ft.com/...ident-about-eurozone-prospects

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Davos view: Don’t get too confident about Eurozone prospects
  • One was the danger that European elections could show a growing mood of political protest – and volatility. Secondly, the ECB’s stress tests could spark new market alarm about the banks – which would impact sovereigns too.
Gene Ellis

A Scramble for Tin in Congo - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/15/world/africa/20081115-congo/index.html?scp=2&sq=CONGO TIN&st=cse

TIN CONGO

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - Cached
  • Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14
     
    good slide show
« First ‹ Previous 401 - 420 of 1247 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page