One of the things I wanted to try here is to post bits of significant economic data that would scroll off the page on the great orange satan in about 10 minutes. One of those items was yesterday's retail sales number. For about the last 6 months, most economic data has been deteriorating steadily, but two of the holdouts were retail sales and jobs data. A couple of weeks ago the December nonfarm payroll number finally went negative.
This is the name of a low-budget movie which is billed as a romantic comedy. I did not find it either romantic or funny.
The "romance" occurs between Naveen who comes to the NY-NJ area on an H-1B visa and an Indian-American woman who is the friend of Bobby, the guy who owns the body shop that is his "employer". The drama, romance and comedy - such as they are - result from the cultural divide between the FOB (fresh of the boat) and ABCD (American-Born Confused/Compassionate Desi).
I urge everyone to watch it (it is available on Netflix), if only to see the business practices of body shops that bring hordes of H-1B visa holders to these shores. On the very first day, Bobby tells Naveen the rules:
Warren Buffet's Kiss of Death on Minyanville is a most interesting analysis of Buffet's offer to give $800M to the bond issuers. The offer was presented as help and this article says more it's just Buffer smells a fire sale and will bottom feed, grabbing any debt that's actually good.
1. An op-ed by Robert Reich in today's NYT titled "Totally Spent". He writes:
The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle- and lower-income Americans more buying power — and not just temporarily.
The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway.
The government is at it again and as usual, they are bowing to industries whim. First they wanted to give us 'tax rebate' checks that will assist with either making a car payment or buying a few Chinese-made goods (hold the lead, please). Now they want to put a moratorium on home foreclosures.
While I like 'free' money as much as the next person, this cash-back plan is flawed. Theoretically, pumping a whole bunch of money into the economy should prop the economy up. The reality is that our society is mostly based on debt. House payments, car payments, credit card payments, second mortgages, student loans, personal loans, and any other payment made to pay off a debt consume a vast amount of most people's income. So when you get your check, are you going to pay down a debt or buy a big-ticket item? If you buy something, will it be American made? Or are the profits leaving our shores?
In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore
Will the programs reflect American values and culture, or the host country’s? Will American taxpayers end up footing part of the bill for overseas students? What happens if relations between the United States and the host country deteriorate? And will foreign branches that spread American know-how hurt American competitiveness?
GM offers buyouts to 74,000
Auto giant aims to replace much of U.S. workforce with lower-paid new hires, dangling $140,000 buyouts to UAW members to stem North American losses
In an effort to shave ongoing losses, General Motors offered lucrative buyouts Tuesday to 74,000 employees - its entire U.S. hourly workforce.
The nation's largest automaker announced the latest round of buyouts as it reported another loss on its core auto operations in the fourth quarter, which combined with charges taken earlier in the year left GM (GM, Fortune 500) with a company-record $38.7 billion net loss for 2007.
To try to stem automotive losses that have dogged the company since 2005, the company is making a range of offers, up to cash payments of $140,000 to the remaining 74,000 GM workers represented by the United Auto Workers union.
While the political rhetoric spews and folks decide their religion, some of us are looking at the policy beneath. People, it ain't pretty. It appears we have more of the talkin' the talk instead of walkin' the walk rhetoric and the keyword change is now redefined to mean status quo
Obama's Economic Advisers
Austan Goolsbee: U. of Chicago neoclassicist and “single payer universal health care critic claiming "it doesn't follow free market principles"
David Cutler: Harvard economist who believes that high health costs are good for the economy
Jeffrey Liebman: another Harvard economist and former Clinton adviser who favors privatizing social security
Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition." America's 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; neither do auto mechanics, dentists and many others
So is that to imply that 40% to 30% Americans being negatively affected by globalization is ok? and yes we are offshore outsourcing state and government jobs. Remember Alan Blinder projects that 40M US jobs are vulnerable to global labor arbitrage (offshore outsourcing). I'll assume wage stagnation is being ignored as well in this above quote.
Gulf-based analysts point out that most of the currencies of the GCC are undervalued against the dollar, based on their current-account balances, inflation and costs of goods and services. The UAE dirham was undervalued by 10-15 per cent and the Saudi riyal by 25-30 per cent, according to a report by Deutsche Bank AG.
"The dollar peg prevents nominal appreciation. Since the dollar itself has been falling, the result is rising domestic inflation. Some Gulf economies now have inflation rates of around 10 per cent," analysts said. Markets piled pressure on Gulf currencies last year as speculation mounted that more GCC countries would follow Kuwait and abandon links to the weak dollar partly to curb imported inflation.
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