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How to Get a Job at Google

noted that Google had determined that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything.”

“Good grades certainly don’t hurt.” Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage.

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

Russia Responds to Western Sanctions With Import Bans of Its Own

With the dexterity of thieves stripping a vehicle for parts, they remove each van’s engine, bumpers, tires, drive shaft, fuel tank and the exhaust system.

Next, the crews pack everything into steel freight containers, which begin a journey by river barge and cargo ship to Ladson, S.C., near the port of Charleston. There, American teams put the vans back together again.

It would be more efficient to ship the vans in one piece, of course. But with current trade rules, efficiency is seldom the goal.

July 23, 2014 6:40 pm EU energy saving plan targets Russian gas links

According to EU estimates, a 25 per cent target would cut EU gas imports by about 9 per cent, while a 35 per cent target would slash gas imports by 33 per cent by 2030.

Eastern European nations fear they will shoulder a disproportionate burden in reaching tough targets because of how costly it would be to overhaul inefficient Soviet-era central heating systems that dominate their cities.

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas

European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.

Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.

June 23, 2014 4:42 pm Q&A: The US Export-Import Bank

A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine

Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.

“This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”

Energy production and imports

Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis?

more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.

While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary

Tullock’s insight was that expenditures on lobbying for privileges are costly and that these expenditures, therefore, dissipate some of the gains to the beneficiaries and cause inefficiency. If, for example, a steel firm spends one million dollars lobbying and advertising for restrictions on steel imports, whatever money it gains by succeeding, presumably more than one million, is not a net gain. From this gain must be subtracted the one-million-dollar cost of seeking the restrictions. Although such an expenditure is rational from the narrow viewpoint of the firm that spends it, it represents a use of real resources to get a transfer from others and is therefore a pure loss to the economy as a whole.

For India in 1964, for example, Krueger estimated that government regulation created rents equal to 7.3 percent of national income; for Turkey in 1968, she estimated that rents from import licenses alone were about 15 percent of Turkey’s gross national product.

At the inception of the euro, it was thought possible to have a centralised monetary authority and decentralised bank supervision, but the inability to separate sovereign-debt problems from those of bank stability has led the leaders of the member states of the EU to agree to centralise supervision in the Single Supervisory Mechanism.

For starters, the European Central Bank’s “outright monetary transactions” program has been incredibly effective: interest-rate spreads for Spain and Italy have fallen by about 250 basis points, even before a single euro has been spent to purchase government bonds.

But, perhaps most important, Germany’s attitude toward the eurozone in general, and Greece in particular, has changed. German officials now understand that, given extensive trade and financial links, a disorderly eurozone hurts not just the periphery but the core.

No region of the world has benefited more from cross-border banking, yet these achievements are now at risk

The threat to cross-border banks comes not only from their deteriorating balance sheets in the face of lower sovereign-debt quality and weaker growth prospects, but also from the policy response itself.

a European solution must take account of the network of foreign subsidiaries across Europe.

Mystery mostly solved, then; the rich periphery's riches relative to Germany were largely a short-run phenomenon driven by a dramatic short-run divergence in house price trends.

Investors who bet that productivity growth would be much faster in the south were wrong.* All the prices and wages set on the basis of the expectation of faster productivity growth were correspondingly wrong and needed to adjust. Real effective exchange rates were badly out of alignment.

Two things began happening in the euro zone in 2007. Growth in the number of euros spent every year began slowing, and the distribution of euro spending within the euro area began shifting back northward.

Bear in mind that the implosion of the 1990s stock bubble, while nasty — households took a $5 trillion hit — didn’t provoke a financial crisis. So what was different about the housing bubble that followed?

The short answer is that while the stock bubble created a lot of risk, that risk was fairly widely diffused across the economy. By contrast, the risks created by the housing bubble were strongly concentrated in the financial sector. As a result, the collapse of the housing bubble threatened to bring down the nation’s banks. And banks play a special role in the economy. If they can’t function, the wheels of commerce as a whole grind to a halt.

But the debate about austerity and the cost of high public-debt levels misses a key point: Public debt owed to foreigners is different from debt owed to residents.

If foreign debt matters more than public debt, the key variable requiring adjustment is the external deficit, not the fiscal deficit. A country that has a balanced current account does not need any additional foreign capital. That is why risk premiums are continuing to fall in the eurozone, despite high political uncertainty in Italy and continuing large fiscal deficits elsewhere. The peripheral countries’ external deficits are falling rapidly, thus diminishing the need for foreign financing.

And the evidence confirms that the euro crisis is not really about sovereign debt, but about foreign debt.