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Russia's message to the E.U.: Money talks - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    Anne Applebaum
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Revisiting the pain in Spain | vox - 0 views

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  • The fundamental reason why this was possible was the ECB’s announcement in 2012 that it would perform the role of lender of last resort in the government bond markets. This took the fear factor out of the market, and allowed yields in the Spanish (and other) government bond markets to decline without fundamentals showing much – if any – improvement.
  • This was made possible by the fact that in the UK – a stand-alone country – the adjustment mechanism included a large currency depreciation that led to a significantly higher nominal growth rate than in Spain, where currency depreciation was not possible and where intense austerity measures were imposed.
  • This in a way can be said to be the price Spain paid for being in a monetary union.
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  • The ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions programme was instrumental in reducing Spanish government bond yields. This alleviated the Spanish fiscal position, but did not make it sustainable. The continuing unsustainability of the Spanish government debt has to do with two factors: First while r (the interest rate) declined, g (nominal growth) remained much lower in Spain than in the UK. The latter was due to the deflationary forces in the Eurozone – themselves a result of excessive austerity and the absence of currency depreciation (which was made possible in the UK thanks to the expansionary monetary policies of the Bank of England).
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Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Italy Falls Back Into Recession, Raising Concern for Eurozone Economy
  • Some economists argue that the region is already well into a so-called lost decade.
  • Analysts surmised that the strained relations with Russia as well as turmoil in the Middle East had undercut demand for Italian exports, in particular fashion and other luxury goods.
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  • “I definitely expect that things will get worse,” he said.
  • The European Union exported agricultural goods worth 11.8 billion euros, or $15.8 billion, to Russia last year, and sales have been rising at a rate of almost 15 percent a year.
  • The economic data and news that Russia was massing troops and military equipment on the Ukrainian border caused stock prices to fall across Europe on Wednesday.
  • Separately, the German Federal Statistical Office reported on Wednesday that new industrial orders in Germany fell 3.2 percent in June compared with May. Analysts had expected orders to increase.
  • For Italy, the deteriorating economy puts greater pressure on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who less than a week ago promised not to impose any more government budget cuts and to invest in improving the country’s roads and other infrastructure. Such promises will be difficult to keep if slower growth, which usually translates into higher unemployment and lower corporate profits, limits tax receipts.A slower economy also endangers Italy’s ability to comply with eurozone rules on budget deficits.
  • Italy’s 2.1 trillion euro government debt equals 136 percent of its annual gross domestic product, the second-highest debt ratio in the eurozone, after Greece.
  • They said Italy’s problems stemmed more from its failure make changes needed to improve the performance of its economy.
  • The slow pace of structural reforms is worrisome,” said Paolo Manasse, a professor of macroeconomics at Bologna University. He said there was no sign of progress on necessary steps like selling off state-owned assets or overhauling the labor market or public pension system.
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Flammkuchen mit Bacon Recipe - 0 views

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  • Flammkuchen Recipe - Alsatian Pizza
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Aboard a Cargo Colossus - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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  • Aboard a Cargo Colossus
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Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds - 0 views

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  • Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds
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The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • 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
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  • 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.
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The third great wave | The Economist - 0 views

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  • The third great wave
  • A third great wave of invention and economic disruption, set off by advances in computing and information and communication technology (ICT) in the late 20th century, promises to deliver a similar mixture of social stress and economic transformation
  • Powerful, ubiquitous computing was made possible by the development of the integrated circuit in the 1950s
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  • Evidence of this is all around. Until recently machines have found it difficult to “understand” written or spoken language, or to deal with complex visual images, but now they seem to be getting to grips with such things.
  • concluded that 47% of employment in America is at high risk of being automated away over the next decade or two.
  • Now technology is empowering talented individuals as never before and opening up yawning gaps between the earnings of the skilled and the unskilled, capital-owners and labour.
  • The effect of technological change on trade is also changing the basis of tried-and-true methods of economic development in poorer economies.
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Productivity: Technology isn't working | The Economist - 0 views

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  • Technology isn’t working
  • Technology isn’t working
  • n the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation.
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  • Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries.
  • Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all.
  • And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.
  • A second explanation for the Solow paradox, put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (as well as plenty of techno-optimists in Silicon Valley), is that technological advances increase productivity only after a long lag.
  • John Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and perhaps the foremost authority on American productivity figures, earlier this year published a study of productivity growth over the past decade. He found that its slowness had nothing to do with the housing boom and bust, the financial crisis or the recession. Instead, it was concentrated in ICT industries and those that use ICT intensively.
  • Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost.
  • For example, new techniques and technologies in medical care appear to be slowing the rise in health-care costs in America. Machine intelligence could aid diagnosis, allowing a given doctor or nurse to diagnose more patients more effectively at lower cost. The use of mobile technology to monitor chronically ill patients at home could also produce huge savings.
  • Health care and education are expensive, in large part, because expansion involves putting up new buildings and filling them with costly employees. Rising productivity in those sectors would probably cut employment.
  • The integration of large emerging markets into the global economy added a large pool of relatively low-skilled labour which many workers in rich countries had to compete with. That meant firms were able to keep workers’ pay low.
  • By creating a labour glut, new technologies have trapped rich economies in a cycle of self-limiting productivity growth.
  • Productivity growth has always meant cutting down on labour. In 1900 some 40% of Americans worked in agriculture, and just over 40% of the typical household budget was spent on food. Over the next century automation reduced agricultural employment in most rich countries to below 5%,
  • A new paper by Peter Cappelli, of the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that in recent years over-education has been a consistent problem in most developed economies, which do not produce enough suitable jobs to absorb the growing number of college-educated workers.
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VGK Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF ETF VGK Quote Price News - 0 views

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  • Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF  VGK
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UPDATE: European stocks might enter the sweet spot in 2015 - 0 views

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  • UPDATE: European stocks might enter the sweet spot in 2015
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Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels
  • In Texas, Austin Energy signed a deal this spring for 20 years of output from a solar farm at less than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour.
  • Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.
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  • Mr. Mir noted there were hidden costs that needed to be taken into account for both renewable energy and fossil fuels. Solar and wind farms, for example, produce power intermittently — when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — and that requires utilities to have power available on call from other sources that can respond to fluctuations in demand.
  • “Renewables had two issues: One, they were too expensive, and they weren’t dispatchable. They’re not too expensive anymore.”
  • Especially in the interior region of the country, from North Dakota down to Texas, where wind energy is particularly robust, utilities were able to lock in long contracts at 2.1 cents a kilowatt-hour, on average, she said. That is down from prices closer to 5 cents five years ago.
  • Already, solar executives are looking to extend a 30 percent federal tax credit that is set to fall to 10 percent at the end of 2016.
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The Debate About GMO Safety Is Over, Thanks To A New Trillion-Meal Study - 0 views

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  • The Debate About GMO Safety Is Over, Thanks To A New Trillion-Meal Study
  • The Debate About GMO Safety Is Over, Thanks To A New Trillion-Meal Study
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How Putin Forged a Pipeline Deal That Derailed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • 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
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  • In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.
  • Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.
  • Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.
  • On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.
  • “If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.
  • The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.
  • When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.
  • In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.
  • While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”
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The Year in Charts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • The Year in Charts
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Tax Credit in Doubt, Wind Power Industry Is Withering - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Tax Credit in Doubt, Wind Power Industry Is Withering
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Solar Rises in Malaysia During Trade Wars Over Panels - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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  • Solar Rises in Malaysia During Trade Wars Over Panels
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