Category: Economy

Analysis of the global economy

Posted on

French Industrial Policies Are Aiding Rapid Decline of Peugeot – SPIEGEL ONLINE

By Dietmar Hawranek and Isabell Hülsen:

When Helping Is Hurting
Ironically, the victims of these two developments — focusing on production in France and high wage increases — are those whose cause is being championed by governments and labor representatives: the autoworkers themselves. Workers at the [Peugeot] Aulnay plant had to look on as their company went into gradual decline. Aulnay was once one of the most modern plants in the country, annually producing more than 400,000 cars. Today, fewer than 140,000 vehicles roll off its assembly lines each year. An auto plant that produces so few vehicles can hardly be profitable. If President Hollande and the unions compel Peugeot to keep the plant in operation, they will only accelerate the company’s demise.

via French Industrial Policies Are Aiding Rapid Decline of Peugeot – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Posted on

New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry – NYTimes.com

The cost of automated assembly lines is falling and at some point will become cheaper than their labor-intensive equivalent. The result could be a tectonic shift in manufacturing but where will the redundant assembly workers find jobs? JOHN MARKOFF of the NYTimes writes:

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”

In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today.

via New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry – NYTimes.com.

Posted on

Friedman’s Japanese lessons for the ECB « The Market Monetarist

Milton Friedman, December 1997:

Defenders of the Bank of Japan will say, “How? The bank has already cut its discount rate to 0.5 percent. What more can it do to increase the quantity of money?”

The answer is straightforward: The Bank of Japan can buy government bonds on the open market, paying for them with either currency or deposits at the Bank of Japan, what economists call high-powered money. Most of the proceeds will end up in commercial banks, adding to their reserves and enabling them to expand their liabilities by loans and open market purchases. But whether they do so or not, the money supply will increase.

There is no limit to the extent to which the Bank of Japan can increase the money supply if it wishes to do so. Higher monetary growth will have the same effect as always. After a year or so, the economy will expand more rapidly; output will grow, and after another delay, inflation will increase moderately. A return to the conditions of the late 1980s would rejuvenate Japan and help shore up the rest of Asia.

via Friedman’s Japanese lessons for the ECB « The Market Monetarist.

Friedman was suggesting that the BOJ implement QE to boost the money supply and create inflation. Inflation would rescue the banks and real-estate-owners with underwater mortgages.

Posted on

Gary Shilling: Global Slowdown, Only Time Can Heal the Economy

Gary Shilling: If we have a consumer-led recession it will be very different to previous post-WWII recessions which were always led by the Fed.

[gigya width=”576″ height=”324″ allowFullScreen=”true” src=”http://d.yimg.com/nl/techticker/site/player.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” flashvars=”vid=30263203&”]

Posted on

The Ascent of Money: Niall Ferguson | Episode 4

Final episode — PLANET FINANCE — of a four-part series THE ASCENT OF MONEY. Economist and historian Niall Ferguson documents the evolution of money and banking through the ages.

[gigya src=”http://dgjigvacl6ipj.cloudfront.net/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf” flashvars=”video=2247463708&player=viral&end=0&lr_admap=in:warnings:0;in:pbs:0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” wmode=”transparent” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”512″ height=”328″ bgcolor=”#000000″]

Powered by WordPress / WordPress Maintenance By WPSmart