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German Study Finds GM Crops Good for Farmers and the Environment | Food Safety News - 0 views

www.foodsafetynews.com/...or-farmers-and-the-environment
shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • German Study Finds GM Crops Good for Farmers and the Environment
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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...
  • If one of five competing labs is alone in finding an effect, that result is the one likely to be published.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Nouriel Roubini explains why many previously fast-growing economies suddenly find thems... - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...selves-facing-strong-headwinds
shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Nonetheless, the threat of a full-fledged currency, sovereign-debt, and banking crisis remains low, even in the Fragile Five, for several reasons
  • All have flexible exchange rates,
  • a large war chest of reserves
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • and fewer currency mismatches
  • Many also have sounder banking systems, while their public and private debt ratios, though rising, are still low
  • But the short-run policy tradeoffs that many of these countries face – damned if they tighten monetary and fiscal policy fast enough, and damned if they do not – remain ugly.
  • As it is widely known, transfer pricing is the major tool for corporate tax avoidance, and it creates current account deficit when a multinational company receives from its own branch
  • abroad, the previously transferred own profit, as a debt.
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Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds
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Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds
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Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ss-wider-area-study-warns.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Malaria in Widening Area Resists Drug, Study Finds
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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.
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  • 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.
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Apple's Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Apple’s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds
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Hot Money Blues - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-hot-money-blues.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • for the time being, and probably for years to come, the island nation will have to maintain fairly draconian controls on the movement of capital in and out of the country.
  • It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked.
  • To some extent this reflected the fact that capital controls have potential costs: they impose extra burdens of paperwork, they make business operations more difficult, and conventional economic analysis says that they should have a negative impact on growth (although this effect is hard to find in the numbers). But it also reflected the rise of free-market ideology,
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  • It’s hard to imagine now, but for more than three decades after World War II financial crises of the kind we’ve lately become so familiar with hardly ever happened.
  • But the best predictor of crisis is large inflows of foreign money: in all but a couple of the cases I just mentioned, the foundation for crisis was laid by a rush of foreign investors into a country, followed by a sudden rush out.
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Cyprus adds to Europe's confusion - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...4a-11e2-a4fa-00144feabdc0.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • First, the eurozone does indeed have the capacity to do the right thing in the end, though not before first exhausting all the alternatives.
  • It protects the small deposits and imposes a rational resolution process.
  • Second, a euro is indeed not a euro everywhere.
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  • A consensus on the principle that creditors, not taxpayers, should pay if a bank becomes insolvent does not yet exist across the eurozone. Does anybody imagine the German government would not rescue Deutsche Bank if it were in trouble? Of course it would.
  • Yet, as Guntram Wolff of Bruegel notes, a currency union with internal exchange controls is a contradiction in terms. Only the willingness of the European Central Bank to finance Cypriot banks without limit could end these controls in the near future. Will it be willing to act soon?
  • The outcome in Cyprus underlines the fact that the value of a euro of bank liabilities depends on the solvency of the bank itself and the solvency of the government standing behind the bank. If both bank and state are insolvent, lenders are likely not only to lose a big proportion of their money outright, but to find that the rest is frozen behind controls,
  • The ideal conclusion from the Cypriot imbroglio would be that all eurozone banks should have more capital.
  • A final lesson of this crisis is that what I have called the “bad marriage” that binds the eurozone members together has become worse.
  • Thus the eurozone limps on through crisis after crisis. Can – or will – this continue indefinitely? I do not know.
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Car Factories Offer Hope for Spanish Industry and Workers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nish-industry-and-workers.html car offer hope spanish industry workers
shared by Gene Ellis on 28 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Four years of economic turmoil and the euro zone’s highest jobless rate have made the Spanish labor market so inviting — an estimated 40 percent less expensive than those of Europe’s other biggest car-making countries, Germany and France — that Ford and Renault recently announced plans to expand their production in Spain.
  • Some experts say such gains in competitiveness and investment are exactly what Spain needs for its economy to recover and to remove any doubts about whether the country can remain in the euro union.
  • Because Spain no longer has its own currency to devalue as a way to lower the price of its exports, it is having to find its competitive advantage in lower labor costs. Many economists have argued that societies cannot survive such painful downward adjustments.
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  • That is the lowest level since 1972.
  • Its trade deficit has been shrinking — down 28 percent for the first 10 months of this year,
  • “From 2008, we suddenly realized that we had lost a lot of competitiveness and needed to work very hard to improve things, particularly in terms of labor issues and logistics,
  • Over all, Spain’s unit labor costs — a measure of productivity — are down 4 percent since 2008, according to Eurostat, the European statistics agency.
  • In a related measurement, the most recent Eurostat data put Spain’s average hourly labor cost at 20.60 euros which was well below Germany’s 30.10 euros and France’s 34.20 euros.
  • Unlike most other Spanish industries, car manufacturing has no sectorwide collective bargaining agreement with unions. As a result, each carmaker has been able to adjust working hours with its own employees, in response to changing demand.
  • In return, the companies have promised workers that they will not be subjected to the huge layoffs made in other parts of the economy,
  • I don’t want to give lessons to anybody. But at such a delicate moment for Spain, showing that we believe in flexibility and consensus has certainly been highly valued by the carmakers.”
  • The car sector employs 280,000 people in Spain, including parts suppliers, and accounts for a tenth of the country’s economic output. About 85 percent of the industry’s workers are on long-term contracts.
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David Ignatius: Mervyn King's hard lessons in Keynesian economics - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-b6fd-ba6f5f26d70e_story.html king lessons economics
shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • As King struggled with the crisis, he concluded that the biggest vulnerability was the solvency of the banking system itself. The crash wasn’t just a liquidity squeeze caused by toxic assets; the problem was that big banks around the world were undercapitalized and, in many cases, insolvent.
  • King pushed the banks to recapitalize and, later, to accept more regulation. This upset a financial elite that, as King says, was the only sector of the British economy that had escaped the market revolution of the Margaret Thatcher years.
  • For King, the past decade reinforced the lessons Keynes drew from the 1930s: One is the psychological quirkiness of investors, which Keynes described as “animal spirits” on the upside and “extreme liquidity preference” on the down.
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  • Then and now, monetary policy could not persuade frightened people to spend and invest.
  • The second Keynesian lesson was the need for some international structure to balance surplus and deficit nations.
  • Those global institutions are weak, but the real crisis has been within the euro zone, which has no effective internal balancing mechanism: It lacks a federal structure to transfer money from surplus Germany to deficit Greece, and it lacks flexible internal exchange rates that could allow a Greece or Spain to devalue its currency and find its own equilibrium.
  • Europe has responded to the crisis with the very British approach of muddling through, but King predicts it won’t work. Creating a true federal union, while an admirable goal, will be the work of a hundred years; the only quick way for countries to adjust is the breakup of the euro zone. King thinks the euro zone must confront the basic choice between accepting a transfer union or changing the membership of the monetary union. “Muddling through” isn’t a serious option.
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Tomato Imports Deal Reached by U.S. and Mexico - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ch-deal-on-tomato-imports.html tomato imports deal u s mexico
shared by Gene Ellis on 04 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The agreement, reached late Saturday, raises the minimum sales price for Mexican tomatoes in the United States, aims to strengthen compliance and enforcement, and increases the types of tomatoes governed by the bilateral pact to four from one.
  • “The draft agreement raises reference prices substantially, in some cases more than double the current reference price for certain products,
  • Florida growers contended it set the minimum price of Mexican tomatoes so low that the Florida growers could not compete.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Even though no dumping or injury to the U.S. industry was demonstrated by our competitors,
  • The new agreement covers all fresh and chilled tomatoes, excluding those intended for use in processing like canning and dehydrating, and in juices, sauces and purées.
  • It raises the basic floor price for winter tomatoes to 31 cents a pound from 21.69 cents — higher than the price the Mexicans were proposing in October — and establishes even higher prices for specialty tomatoes and tomatoes grown in controlled environments. The Mexicans have invested billions in greenhouses to grow tomatoes, while Florida tomatoes are largely picked green and treated with a gas to change their color.
  • The dispute unfolded in the heated politics surrounding the presidential election, with Mexican growers charging that the Commerce Department was courting voters in the important swing state of Florida. Instead, the timing of the negotiations ensured that the government could win those votes and bring the controversy to a conclusion satisfactory to the Mexicans after the election was over.
  • The Mexicans enlisted roughly 370 American businesses, including Wal-Mart Stores and meat and vegetable producers, to argue their cause.
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Tunisia enters 'phase of absurdity' - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...da-11e2-8189-00144feab49a.html tunisia phase absurdity com
shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • “No development model will be able to find a solution to unemployment,” he says bluntly, citing the grim reality that at about 800,000 are already unemployed and another 100,000 enter the labour force every year. “The best we can do is create 100,000 jobs a year but you still have the 800,000. The solution should be immigration. There’s no other way.”
  • But to where?
  • The government also has raised with European partners the prospect of absorbing some of the highly skilled graduates. But while immigration could alleviate some of the pressure, surely it cannot be the solution.
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Germany May Not Offer Best Lessons for Weaker Euro-Zone States - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4543904577396391401884860.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 11 May 12 - No Cached
  • In fact, some economists view the German reform narrative as a myth
  • Wage restraint was instead a function of weak demand after the collapse of the reunification-fueled construction boom in the mid-1990s.
  • Even if one accepts the story, economists also point out that Germany undertook its labor-market reforms when the winds of the world economy were extremely favorable. The global economy was growing, and China and other emerging economies were sucking in machine tools and other capital goods in which German manufacturers excelled.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • While German interest rates remained little changed, rates in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy tumbled, fueling consumption and swelling their imports of German cars and other products.
  • Now, budget stringency is being accompanied by labor-market reforms across Southern Europe.
  • At best, these adjustments yield benefits only after several years,
  • "The ECB was created with the mission to avoid the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s, when there was global inflation. Now we have global deflationary pressure, we need a different point of view," he says.
  • They say it's arithmetically impossible for every economy in the world to build growth on the German model of export success; and if every country in the euro zone is to do it, they need to find others willing to run big deficits in the rest of the world.
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Bringer of Prosperity or Bottomless Pit? 'Putting the Virtuous in the Dock Rather than ... - 0 views

www.spiegel.de/...ebate-the-euro-a-685018-2.html
shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • You should look at it more holistically. We wouldn't have been able to increase our exports if the other countries had behaved like us and had not increased their demand for an entire decade.
  • Excluding Greece from the union would be the completely wrong approach. Greece's problem is its inefficiency in terms of public finances. That can be corrected.
  • Starbatty: In my experience, speculators are only successful when political promises diverge from economic reality, as has become clear in Greece.
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  • In the German Council of Economic Experts, we proposed a consolidation pact, under which each country would be required to specify a fully verifiable path that it will follow as it puts its financial house in order. It wouldn't just be a solution for Greece; it would be for everyone.
  • And you seriously believe that would help? Following that approach, the Greeks would save themselves to death, just as the Germans did in the early 1930s under then-Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. What you expect the Greeks to do is Brüning squared. The real problem is that Greece shouldn't have been accepted into the monetary union in the first place.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 09 Jul 12
       
      An important point:  the role of German policy in allowing 1.3 million short-term workers into the labor market, and its role in lowering the tax on labor.
  • But such a pact would be circumscribed to helping countries help themselves.
  • But government debt is still growing considerably. Doesn't this also increase the risk of inflation? Starbatty: That's what I assume. Inflation would be an elegant means of reducing debt, and many academics are discussing this scenario. But it becomes truly problematic when government bonds eventually lose their status as a safe haven. If China or Japan arrive at this conclusion and sell their bonds, a bubble could burst that is far more dangerous than any other bubble. If that happens, markets will plunge, and interest rates will shoot up.
  • Likewise, when it comes to assistance, I think we have a clear legal framework, according to which neither any member state nor the entire Union can be held liable for the debt of another member state.
  • its 1.3 million short-time workers do not find regular employment again,
  • The European Central Bank would never, ever contemplate using inflation to eliminate debt.
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