ヨーロッパ、限られた選択しか残されてない負債の悪循環
For Europe, Few Options in a Vicious Cycle of Debt
By PETER EAVIS | New York Times – 1 hour 27 minutes ago
Europe has a $1 trillion problem.
As difficult as the last two years have been for Europe, 2012 could be even tougher. Each week, countries will need to sell billions of dollars of bonds - a staggering $1 trillion in total - to replace existing debt and cover their current budget deficits.
At any point, should banks, pensions and other big investors balk, anxiety could course through the markets, making government officials feel like they are stuck in a scary financial remake of "Groundhog Day."
Even if governments attract investors at reasonable interest rates one month, they will have to repeat the process again the next month - and signs of skittish buyers could make each sale harder to manage than the previous one.
"The headline risk is enormous," said Nick Firoozye, chief European rates strategist at Nomura International in London.
Given this vicious cycle, policy makers and investors are closely watching the debt auctions for potential weakness. On Thursday, Spain is set to sell as much as 5 billion euros ($6.3 billion) of government bonds. Italy follows on Friday with an auction of more than $9 billion.
The current challenge for Europe is to keep Italy and Spain from ending up like Greece and Portugal, whose borrowing costs rose so high last year that it signaled real likelihood of default, making it impossible for the governments to find buyers for their debt. Since then, Greece and Portugal have been reliant on the financial backing of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
The intense focus on the sovereign debt auctions - and their importance to the broader economy - starkly underscores the difference between European and American responses to their crises.
Since 2008, there has been almost no private sector interest to buy new United States residential mortgage loans, the financial asset at the root of the country's crisis. To make up for that lack of investor demand, the federal government has bought and guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars of new mortgages.
In Europe, policy makers are still expecting private sector buyers to acquire the majority of government debt. Last month, in perhaps the boldest move of the crisis, the European Central Bank lent $620 billion to banks for up to three years at a rate of 1 percent.
Some officials had hoped that these cheap loans would spur demand for government debt. The idea is that financial institutions would be able to make a tidy profit by borrowing from the central bank at 1 percent and using the money to buy government bonds that have a higher yield, like Spain's 10-year bond at 5.5 percent.
But the sovereign debt markets continue to show signs of stress. Italy's 10-year government bond has fallen in price, lifting its yield to more than 7 percent, a level that shows investors remain worried about the financial strength of Italy's government.
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And European banks appear to be hoarding much of the money they borrowed from the central bank, rather than lending it to governments. Money deposited by banks at the European Central Bank, where it remains idle, stands at $617 billion, up from $425 billion just a month ago.
"It's hard to see why a banker would want to tie up money in a European sovereign for, say, three years," said Phillip L. Swagel at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, who served as assistant secretary for economic policy under Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Italy's troubles highlight how hard it is to generate demand for a deluge of new debt from a dwindling pool of investors. The country needs to issue as much as $305 billion of debt this year, the highest in the euro zone. By comparison, France, with the second highest total, needs to auction $243 billion of new debt, according to estimates by Nomura.
Governments like Italy's are at the mercy of markets because they simply don't have the cash to pay off even some of their bonds that come due. They must issue new bonds to cover their old debts, as well as their budget deficits, at a time when investors are growing scarce.
Banks, traditionally big holders of government bonds, have been selling Italian debt. "We've seen a lot of liquidation by non-European investors," said Laurent Fransolet, head of European interest rate strategy at Barclays Capital in London. For instance, Nomura Holdings in Japan slashed its Italian debt holdings, mostly government bonds, to $467 million on Nov. 24, from $2.8 billion at the end of Sept.
European banks have also been dumping the debt. BNP Paribas, a French bank, cut its exposure to Italian government bonds to $15.5 billion at the end of October, from $26 billion at the end of June.
Italian banks, though large owners of their government's obligations, may not want to take on too much more, to keep their investors happy. Shares in UniCredit have fallen more than 40 percent since last week as the Italian firm has tried to raise capital to comply with new regulations.
There are ways to avoid spectacularly bad debt auctions, at least in the short term.
The central bank can help by buying a country's bonds in the market ahead of a new debt sale. That would help bolster prices at the auction, or at least keep them stable.
There is also some evidence that banks' government-bond selling may have abated at the end of last year, according to Mr. Fransolet. Central bank figures show European financial firms acquired $2.4 billion of Spanish government bonds in November, after selling a monthly average of $4.8 billion in the preceding three months.
Governments may also be able to attract new buyers to their bond markets. Belgium sold $7.2 billion of government bonds to local retail investors last month, in part appealing to their patriotism.
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Opportunistic hedge funds, betting the market is too pessimistic about certain European countries, may also bite. Saba Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund headed by the former Deutsche Bank trader Boaz Weinstein, owns Italian government bonds, though it does so as part of a wider trading strategy that includes bets that could pay off if Europe's problems worsen.
But it is doubtful that Italy and Spain can find enough new buyers this year to bring their bond yields down to sustainable levels. Instead, if their economies slow - and if their governments become unpopular - debt auctions could fail and their cost of borrowing could rise even more.
All eyes would then turn to the central bank for drastic action. It could lend more cheap money to banks, in the hope that some of it might find its way into government bonds. Or it could become a big buyer of government bonds itself, printing euros to finance the purchases.
But that may not be a lasting solution, since the central bank's actions could scare off private investors. Typically, when government-backed organizations like the central bank hold a country's debt, their claims on the debtor rank higher than those of other creditors. For that reason, private investors might think their holdings would fall in value if the central bank became a big owner of Italian debt - and they might retreat.
At the same time, the crisis response in the United States did not depend solely on government-backed entities like the Federal Reserve to buy housing loans. Professor Swagel of the University of Maryland points out that banks and investors also took large losses on existing housing debt. While painful, the mortgage debt proved less of a drag on the financial system.
So far, Europe has been averse to taking permanent losses on government bonds. Except in the case of Greek debt, European policy makers have shied away from any plan that could mean private holders of government debt get hurt.
However, Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, recently argued in a Financial Times editorial that Italy's debt should be reduced to 90 percent of the gross domestic product from 120 percent. In such a situation, investors might suffer a 25 percent hit on the value of their Italian bonds, he said.
Such haircuts might seem like the recipe for more instability right now. But if Europe struggles to find buyers for its debt, more radical options are likely to be considered. Europe's debt problem is huge, and the experience in the United States suggests dealing with it may take several, more drastic approaches.
"If you go halfway, you'll never get to the end," Professor Swagel said. "And that describes European policy-making."
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By MARK SCHREIBER
Take a stroll through home sweet home. You'll almost certainly see an entertainment system, refrigerator, microwave oven, rice cooker, toaster, mixer/blender, vacuum cleaner, heater/air conditioner, hair dryer, electric blanket and so on. From personal hygiene to food preparation to recreation and entertainment, electric appliances are a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.
For the previous half century, the Japanese consumer-electronics industry enjoyed a extraordinarily successful run as both innovator and competitor, capturing dominant market shares of everything from calculators and boom-boxes to microwave ovens and video cassette recorders.
Among its manifold products, certainly none have held the aura of television, referred to in Japanese as kaden no ōsama (the king of appliances). So said not because TV was necessarily the most expensive or essential, but because people spent more hours per day looking at it than everything else combined. "It's like having a billboard to promote your brand right in the customer's living room," a PR spokesman at a manufacturer explained to me years ago.
During the five years leading up to July 2011, practically every household in Japan replaced its analog cathode-ray tube TV for a digital set. Did this result in a major windfall for TV makers? Hardly. In an article titled "The End of Japan's TV Industry," Shukan Diamond (Nov. 12) describes its death throes. Overproduction and oversupply has resulted in a price collapse. At retail a TV now sells for less than \1,000 per inch of display size, i.e., a 32-inch model might go for below \32,000.
Even the majority of Japanese brands sold here are assembled abroad of foreign components. As the result of strategic decisions made well over a decade ago, South Korea and Taiwan came to dominate production of LCD display panels, and now hold a respective 52.7 and 31 percent of the world's output, as opposed to only 15 percent by Japan.
But TV sets are just the tip of the iceberg. Starting with radios (remember radios?), from about 1995, imported goods have successively come to dominate Japan's consumer-appliance markets, gradually surpassing domestically manufactured washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens and others.
"Whereas electronics were once a major earner of foreign exchange," rues Shukan Diamond, "Japan has become a net importer," i.e., with an overall trade deficit.
That turning point came in 2009, a year after the yen's value soared in the wake of the "Lehman Shock." Presently, out of 18 listed product sectors, only in five — storage batteries, dry-cell batteries, light bulbs, digital cameras and the almost defunct sector of video tape recorders — does Japan still maintain a clear edge.
The consequences of this shift are grave. Compared with 1985, when the consumer electronics manufacturing sector employed some 440,000 workers, by 2009 that figure had shrunk to 156,400. The total value of electronics exports, which peaked at \4.54 trillion in 1985, has shrunk to one-third that figure, and this impacts in turn on the nonconsumer sectors of Japan's electronics industry, such as components, devices and industrial-use electronics.
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Nikkei Business (Dec. 26-Jan-2) observed that 2012 might mark a tipping point in the hollowing out of Japanese manufacturing.
In the past, Japanese companies — which made considerable investments to develop their brand image — could always rely on their compatriots' reluctance to stray from the fold. Unfamiliar foreign brands with funny names raised questions. Will it perform reliably? Is it safe for my family? Will I be able to read the user manual?
Now, ominously, a growing body of evidence demonstrates a "Made in Japan" label can no longer be relied upon — not on things consumers purchase to rub on their skin, or plug into the wall, or hold against their ear, or ingest through their mouth.
As one example, reports Nikkei Business, take the "Market O Real Brownie" from South Korea, sold through convenience-store chains in Japan from last September. For 12 straight weeks, according to point of sales data, this American-style chocolate confection was the second-best selling item at 250 Tokyo convenience stores. Its pink, brown and white cardboard display stand and the individual packets carry only English and Korean. The virtual absence of Japanese POP (point of purchase) appears to have been no deterrent to sales.
But why is this happening now? More than irradiation of the environment per se, perhaps trauma over the March 11 nuclear disaster may have served to dash the myth of Japan-made products being safe. And this, compounded by the flooding in Thailand, where many Japanese companies have factories, exposed the fragility of the product supply chain.
The disasters' impact on Japanese consumer psychology will no doubt be studied for years to come. But the magazine concludes the success of foreign products during 2011 is part of a trend that's not about to change anytime soon.
"With the present declining loyalty toward 'Made in Japan,' what direction should Japanese companies take?" the magazine asks rhetorically. "One thing's for sure: We will need to reexamine aspects of product manufacturing up to now, from the bottom up."
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日本の終りの序章か？
****
Sony Ericsson posts big loss in Q4
Reuters – 7 minutes ago
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sony Ericsson on Thursday posted a big loss for the fourth quarter of 2011, blaming tough competition, the global slowdown and restructuring for marring the final quarter before it is rolled into Japanese consumer giant Sony.
The pretax loss was 247 million euros ($316.57 million)versus a forecast for a profit of 41.7 million in a Reuters poll and a profit of 31 million euros in the previous three-month period. ($1 = 0.7802 euros)
コダックが倒産
Kodak files for bankruptcy, secures $950 million lifeline
Reuters – 27 minutes ago
(Reuters) - Eastman Kodak Co, which invented the hand-held camera and helped bring the world the first pictures from the moon, has filed for bankruptcy protection, capping a prolonged plunge for one of America's best-known companies.
The more than 130-year-old photographic film pioneer, which had tried to restructure to become a seller of consumer products like cameras, said it had also obtained a $950 million, 18-month credit facility from Citigroup to keep it going.
The loan and bankruptcy protection from U.S. trade creditors may give Kodak the time it needs to find buyers for some of its 1,100 digital patents, the key to its remaining value, and to reshape its business while continuing to pay its 17,000 workers.
"The board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," Chairman and Chief Executive Antonio Perez said in a statement.
"Now we must complete the transformation by further addressing our cost structure and effectively monetizing non-core intellectual-property assets. We look forward to working with our stakeholders to emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company," he added.
At end September, the group had total assets of $5.1 billion and liabilities of $6.75 billion.
Kodak said it and its U.S. subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 business reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Non-U.S. subsidiaries were not covered by the filing and would continue to honor all obligations to their suppliers, it added.
任天堂の将来がリスク
Nintendo sees profit next year, but shares tumble
Reuters – 7 minutes ago
By Isabel Reynolds
TOKYO (Reuters) - Nintendo President Satoru Iwata dismissed the idea that the age of the dedicated handheld games device was over and said he aimed to return the company to substantial profit in 2012/13, after it warned of its first ever operating loss this year.
Shares in Kyoto-based Nintendo Co Ltd tumbled nearly 8 percent to an 8-year low after it slashed its full-year guidance for the third time in 6 months, and analysts said the potential market for its products was shrinking rapidly.
The creator of the Super Mario franchise reported a sharp drop in quarterly earnings, as its sales of its games devices that have dominated the industry for years were hit by competing gadgets such as Apple Inc's iPhone.
Iwata said he blamed the dismal results on a mixture of strategic errors and the difficult business environment created by the strong yen and European consumer gloom.
"Nintendo is facing its worst results since it entered the games business. What matters now is how Nintendo can make a profit from next year onwards, even under these harsh conditions," he told an analysts' meeting.
The maker of the Wii home console and DS handheld games is struggling to compete as sales of more versatile smartphones and tablets boom, and poor sales forced it to slash the price of its much anticipated 3DS handheld game device in August.
"The profitability of 3DS hardware was the biggest issue for earnings this financial year, but it looks like we'll be able to resolve the problem we've been having with losses on the 3DS during the first half of the next financial year," Iwata said.
"We should be able to generate a large profit by getting rid of losses on the 3DS hardware, if we can substantially lift sales of software."
A Nintendo spokesman said the company expected to stop losing money on each 3DS sold, thanks to economies of scale and changes to the internal design of the device.
But Nintendo shares closed down 4.1 percent at 10,310 yen, after falling to 9,910 yen shortly after the market opened, their lowest since February 2004. It has lost nearly 60 percent of its value since the start of last year.
"The company's core handheld business is under assault from smartphones, iPods and tablets, and we see competition for consumer wallet share continuing," said analyst Michael Pachter of U.S.-based Wedbush Securities in a research note.
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"The fact is that a significant share of Nintendo's market is gone forever, and we don't expect the company to come up with a practical strategy to stem the declines in sales we have forecast," he added. "We do not expect the company's fortunes to turn in FY 13."
NEW HOME CONSOLE BY CHRISTMAS
Nintendo said on Thursday its third-quarter operating profit fell 61 percent to 40.9 billion yen ($529 million) and it forecast an operating loss of 45 billion yen for the financial year to March 31, far worse than analysts' average forecast of a 4.2 billion yen loss.
Sales of its 3DS slumped shortly after launch in February, forcing the company to slash prices just six months later and take a loss on each device, something it had prided itself on avoiding in the past.
Even so, Nintendo cut its full-year 3DS sales forecast to 14 million from 16 million, while sales of its ageing Wii and the previous generation DS have fallen faster than expected.
It also faces stiff competition in the home console market from Sony Corp's Move and Microsoft Corp's Kinect, and some analysts say the console market may dry up over the next several years as cloud gaming takes off.
Nintendo will launch its Wii U console, a successor to the phenomenally successful Wii, in Japan, the United States, Australia and Europe at the year-end, after showing a final version at the E3 games show in June.
But Masayuki Otani, chief market analyst at Securities Japan, said the market was unlikely to have high hopes for the Wii U, although the slide in the share price may be reaching an end.
"The pace of the share price decline is easing and it may be near a floor, but it would be hard to predict a rapid recovery," he said.
Iwata said a leap in 3DS sales after the launch of a raft of software late last year showed that dedicated handheld games gadgets still had a future.
"I believe we have disproved the extreme theory that there is no longer a demand for handheld devices," he said.
($1 = 77.34)
(Additional reporting by Dominic Lau, James Topham, Reiji Murai, Daiki Iga; Editing by Edwina Gibbs, Michael Watson and Alex Richardson)
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日本、30年間以上の歴史で初めて貿易赤字計上。
-産業の空洞化と人口の高齢化が将来に暗い陰−
Japan's first trade deficit since 1980 raises debt doubts
By Kaori Kaneko and Tetsushi Kajimoto、Reuters
TOKYO | Wed Jan 25, 2012 9:41am EST
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's first annual trade deficit in more than 30 years calls into question how much longer the country can rely on exports to help finance a huge public debt without having to turn to fickle foreign investors.
The aftermath of the March earthquake raised fuel import costs while slowing global growth and the yen's strength hit exports, data released on Wednesday showed, swinging the 2011 trade balance into deficit.
Few analysts expect Japan to immediately run a deficit in the current account, which includes trade and returns on the country's huge portfolio of investments abroad. A steady inflow of profits and capital gains from overseas still outweighs the trade deficit.
But the trade figures underscore a broader trend of Japan's declining global competitive edge and a rapidly ageing population, compounding the immediate problem of increased reliance on fuel imports due to the loss of nuclear power.
Only four of the country's 54 nuclear power reactors are running due to public safety fears following the March disaster.
"What it means is that the time when Japan runs out of savings -- 'Sayonara net creditor country' -- that point is coming closer," said Jesper Koll, head of equities research at JPMorgan in Japan.
"It means Japan becomes dependent on global savings to fund its deficit and either the currency weakens or interest rates rise."
That prospect could give added impetus to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's push to double Japan's 5 percent sales tax in two stages by October 2015 to fund the bulging social security costs of a fast-ageing society.
The biggest opposition party, although agreeing with the need for a higher levy, is threatening to block legislation in parliament's upper house in hopes of forcing a general election.
Japan logged a trade deficit of 2.49 trillion yen ($32 billion) for 2011, Ministry of Finance data showed, the first annual deficit since 1980, after the economy was hit by the shock of rising oil prices.
Were Japan to run a current account deficit, it would spell trouble because it would mean the country cannot finance its huge public debt -- already twice the size of its $5 trillion economy -- without overseas funds.
Japanese investors currently hold about 95 percent of Japan's government bonds, which lends some stability to an otherwise unsustainable debt burden.
Domestic buyers are less likely to dump debt at the first whiff of economic trouble, unlike foreign investors, as Europe's debt crisis has shown.
The trade data helped send the yen to a one-month low against the dollar and the euro on Wednesday.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Graphic on 2011 trade data link.reuters.com/mev26s
Dec trade balance link.reuters.com/vyq65s
Exports by destination link.reuters.com/far65s
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Total exports shrank 2.7 percent last year while imports surged 12.0 percent, reflecting reduced earnings from goods and services and higher spending on crude and fuel oil. Annual imports of liquefied natural gas hit a record high.
In a sign of the continuing pain from slowing global growth, exports fell 8.0 percent in December from a year earlier, roughly matching a median market forecast for a 7.9 percent drop, due partly to weak shipments of electronics parts.
Imports rose 8.1 percent in December from a year earlier, in line with a 8.0 percent annual gain expected, bringing the trade balance to a deficit of 205.1 billion yen, against 139.7 billion yen expected. It marked the third straight month of deficits.
Japan managed to sustain annual trade surpluses through the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the post-Lehman Brothers global recession that started in late 2008, which makes the 2011 dip into deficit all the more dramatic.
A generation ago, Japan was the world's export juggernaut, churning out a stream of innovative products from the likes of Sony and Toyota.
Much like China today, Japan's bulging trade surplus became a source of friction with the United States and other advanced economies, who pressed Tokyo to allow the yen to rise more rapidly in order to reduce the imbalance.
A 1985 agreement between Japan, the United States and Europe's big economies -- known as the Plaza Accord after the New York hotel where it was signed -- pushed the yen higher against the U.S. dollar.
Many economists argue that sowed the seeds of Japan's current debt woes. After the Plaza Accord, Japan's economy weakened and its central bank slashed interest rates, which contributed to a credit boom that eventually spawned a financial crisis and led to two decades of economic stagnation.
Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said on Tuesday he did not expect trade deficits to become a pattern, and did not foresee the country's current account balance tipping into the red in the near future.
But Japan's days of logging huge trade surpluses may be over as it relies more on fuel imports and manufacturers move production offshore to cope with rising costs and a strong yen, a trend that may weaken the Japanese currency longer term.
A fast-ageing population also means a growing number of elderly Japanese will be running down their savings.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said the government wants to closely watch the trend of exports and imports.
"There are worries that the yen's strength is driving Japanese industry to go abroad," said Fujimura. "We have to create new industries ... implement comprehensive steps to boost growth. It is important to secure employment within the nation."
($1=77.71 yen)
(Additional writing by Leika Kihara; Editing by Linda Sieg and Emily Kaiser)
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国内外の経済・社会変化とスピードの加速化。その波に乗れない無能なリーダーたちが将来の日本や群馬や高経大を潰す。これは首相や知事や理事長だけを指していない。その周りを囲むイエスマン集団や市区町村の首長や議会議員、それに癒着する役人や官僚。如いてはそんなリーダーを選ぶ縁故や目先の利益ばかりを追い求める選挙投票者の大きな群れを含む。つまり、「従来どおり」で良かった政党政治マシーンの歯車にのって動く日本社会システムが大きく問われている。甘い見通しで東北大震災の津波が防げなかったように、この社会的・経済的大津波が日本を呑み込む日はそう遠くない。
****
Industrial revival claims ring hollow as makers flee Japan
Friday, Feb. 17, 2012 Kyodo
Data released by the government in January showing Japan posted its first trade deficit in 31 years in 2011 has prompted much soul-searching in domestic industries and sparked fears the country might soon lose its status as one of the world's major exporters.
Home electronics, long a cash cow for domestic manufacturers, already are mostly produced at overseas plants, while the strong yen has also pushed carmakers — another major driver of economic growth — to increasingly relocate assembly lines abroad.
The domestic automotive industry is being "gutted," said Toshiyuki Shiga, chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.
Some industry observers warn that with major exporters increasingly shifting production overseas, Japan's trade balance may drastically deteriorate in the near future.
"The automotive industry should earn money abroad to protect (Japanese) workers' jobs (at domestic plants)," said Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda.
"This may sound irrational but I am determined to make it happen, come what may."
Toyoda has vowed that the carmaker will continue to produce around 3 million vehicles a year at domestic plants to assist the broader economy, even though it would be more profitable to increase production at overseas affiliates, as profits from their exports are not slashed by the soaring yen when repatriated.
Last year, domestic auto production ground to a complete standstill for about a month after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but output picked up rapidly and notched an annual trade surplus of around \7 trillion, though the figure was down 13 percent from a year earlier.
The yen's record appreciation against the world's major currencies is also enabling German and South Korean carmakers to capture greater market share, thanks to the weakness of the euro and the won.
"(Toyota) is shying away from carrying out structural reforms of its operations," said Takaki Nakanishi, an analyst with Merrill Lynch Japan Securities Co., referring to the automaker's stubborn continuation of production at domestic sites.
But despite Toyota's best efforts, the hollowing out of Japan's automotive industry continues apace and is raising broader doubts about whether domestic manufacturers will stick to their avowed policy of turning out high-end products at home.
In the automotive sector, Honda Motor Co. is making a hybrid version of its NSX sports car in the United States, while Nissan Motor Co. is building electric vehicles in North America and China.
Even Toyota is aiming to source more parts from South Korea and other overseas suppliers, while its overseas plants are procuring key components locally, including engines and transmissions, instead of importing them from Japan — a severe blow to domestic parts makers.
Consumer electronics makers are also shuttering domestic plants and shifting manufacturing abroad, given the absence of new business opportunities at home.
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Sony Corp. now produces more than 70 percent of its products overseas, turning out TV sets in Malaysia and China and digital cameras in Thailand.
Material and parts makers are following suit.
"Since car and home electronics makers are shifting operations abroad, suppliers of their product materials like us have no choice but to do the same," said Asahi Kasei Corp. President Taketsugu Fujiwara.
JAMA's Shiga warned that it may not be easy to reverse the current trend. "Once we lose our manufacturing base in Japan, there is no turning back even after the yen has weakened," he cautioned.
Infrastructure-related exporters, meanwhile, are facing problems of their own.
In mid-January, East Japan Railway Co. and Central Japan Railway Co. dispatched their top officials to New Delhi to pitch shinkansen technology to India. But the railways are under no illusions about the strength of their global rivals.
"Our competitors used to be American and European companies, but now the Chinese, South Koreans and Russians are trying to win contracts through predatory pricing," said Hitachi Ltd. President Hiroaki Nakanishi, whose company produces railway vehicles.
In addition to established firms such as General Electric Co. and Germany's Siemens AG, manufacturers in other parts of Asia also have started to pose a significant threat.
In response, the government and the private sector have decided to join forces to help Japanese companies land overseas infrastructure development contracts.
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda visited India in December as part of this drive, accompanied by an entourage of a dozen or so Japanese business leaders.
Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano also traveled to Thailand and Myanmar last month with a group of corporate executives to pitch Japan's advanced technologies.
But such efforts may be in vain, as other countries are even more robust in supporting their domestic companies bidding for various infrastructure projects around the world.
The government has identified infrastructure-related exports as one of the main pillars of its strategy for economic growth.
But it has been accused of failing to spell out detailed steps for reviving domestic industry so far.
Hitachi's Nakanishi has also criticized the government for not moving to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement sooner, saying his company's fortunes hinge on Japan's participation in the U.S.-led regional trade initiative.
"The government's inaction is hurting Japanese exporters," said Yukihiko Shimada, a senior analyst with SMBC Nikko Securities Inc.
"The government should revamp the existing framework as soon as possible, so that the state and the private sector can increase joint promotion of infrastructure exports."
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雇用創造の鍵を握る起業家養成とその挑戦。アメリカだからこそ、そのブループリントに現実味がある。今の日本社会に適用しようとしても、中等教育の中身が違うから、過去の試みと同様まったく成果は生まれない。
*****
How Entrepreneurship Can Fix Young America
By Scott Gerber | Time Mag | March 5, 2012
Our government is being strangled by partisan politics. Youth employment is at a 60-year low. Student loan debt is approaching $1 trillion (and default rates are rising quickly).
Yet young Americans are far more optimistic about our country’s future than the pundits would have you believe – and they are demonstrating that optimism through entrepreneurship. According to a 2011 survey, 23% of young people started a business as a result of being unemployed. Fifteen percent started a business in college. And let’s not forget our veterans, who are twice as likely as other Americans to own businesses.
So why are so few pundits and politicians building on that entrepreneurial energy as a solution to joblessness and economic malaise? The fact is, it’s high time we funneled our collective energy toward rebuilding an entrepreneurial America.
This is not an abstract endeavor. My own organization, the Young Entrepreneur Council, and partners like Junior Achievement, Babson College, Codecademy, Venture for America, and College Hunks Hauling Junk, have identified a handful of tried-and-true approaches that are already successfully fostering business creation by young people all over America. I’ve summed up in five broad strategies that we believe need to be adopted to accelerate this vital movement.
1. Integrate Academia and the Real World
In a 2011 survey, 88% of young people said that entrepreneurship education is vitally important given the new economy—and yet 74% of college students had no access to entrepreneurship resources on campus. And when resources were available, most students felt they were woefully inadequate.
This is not acceptable—in the 21st century, entrepreneurial thinking isn’t just for entrepreneurs. Adaptability, creativity and financial literacy are core skills for American employees and so-called intrapreneurs –innovators within larger organizations – as well. They’re also critical assets to our communities: Junior Achievement and the Aspen Institute found that youth-entrepreneurship programs positively impacted dropout rates and community engagement, not to mention the development of risk-taking and opportunity recognition. But most employers today think high school and college graduates are seriously deficient in skills like leadership and innovation, and we face a steep shortfall of graduates majoring in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
If we actually want to change the way Americans work, then parents, K-12 schools, community colleges, four-year colleges and entrepreneurship-focused nonprofits must meet these challenges head-on. Junior Achievement, Babson, Cogswell College, the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), among others, are leading the way.
2. Eliminate Government Barriers
Even our deadlocked Congress has found bi-partisan compromises in entrepreneurship-related legislation, including reforms to the patent process and student loan relief. But gridlock is preventing truly decisive action. From increasing states’ self-employment assistance programs to removing regulations prohibiting startups from openly crowdsourcing capital, we need the U.S. government to do better.
As Americans, we must demand a boldly pro-growth agenda. To start with, let’s pass the Youth Entrepreneurship Act, which would defer or forgive student loan debt for young entrepreneurs using the precedent set by the Income-Based Repayment program. And let’s pass the VET Act of 2011, so our returning vets can use GI benefits to start businesses.
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An overwhelming 88% of young people feel the government does not support them. It is our duty to hold our representatives accountable. We can begin by asking them to stop handicapping the youth-owned startups of tomorrow.
3. Invest in and Mentor Young Entrepreneurs
Initiatives Startup America Partnership and Dell’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence (disclosure: I’ve worked with both organizations) program are models for the private sector. Business leaders can team up with accelerators, venture funds, campus groups, regional leadership and nonprofits to mentor, finance, and train the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Or they can help pave the way for the next public software engineering school, as Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson did in New York. Franchisors can extend special financing to youth and veterans—after all, direct economic output in the franchise sector is projected to grow 5 percent in 2012, and employment, 2.1 percent. And we need to openly encourage our young people to work in startups, which generate all net new jobs—so those companies grow, and young people thrive
Finally, we all need to start creating common-sense avenues for financial support. Microloan financiers like Kiva are easing global unemployment throughout the developing world—why not here? And frankly, improving access to capital doesn’t necessarily start with banks—having non-financial support doubles the likelihood that a young entrepreneur will be approved for a commercial loan.
4. Teach Technology Inside and Outside the Classroom
The Web has revolutionized the way we do business, creating a far more level playing field for young entrepreneurs—provided they have the skill set to take advantage of it.
One study found that small-to-medium businesses with strong Web presences grew twice as fast as those with only a minimal presence (or none at all) and created twice the number of jobs. We need to prepare all young people for this reality through sustainable technology programs that work in tandem with academics. In the classroom, this means teaching hands-on software engineering, not just computing basics—the Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting an employment increase for software engineers of 32 percent by 2018. Outside the classroom, companies like Codecademy can fill gaps in K-12 and college education by creating peer-to-peer platforms where aspiring coders learn by doing.
5. Foster Entrepreneurship at the Regional Level
Not all solutions fit all communities. For example, cities facing economic decline need to create resource-rich networks so young entrepreneurs can cut through red tape at the local level instead of departing en masse. The Idea Village in New Orleans has sustained more than 1,000 jobs and $83 million in revenue by retaining and supporting the city’s entrepreneurs.
Underserved regions must develop ecosystems in which idea exchange, growth, and financial support are readily available. From Silicon Prairie to New Orleans, entrepreneurs are bridging gaps between local government, investors and backyard entrepreneurs. These hyper-local networks provide the momentum Americans need to get new businesses off the ground immediately.
It’s Time to Fix Young America
I am only touching on some of the solutions working right now. There are leaders in every sector—government, education, nonprofit and private—who can add to this list as we approach the 2012 elections. If we really want to shift the national conversation for good, then we need to lay all solutions on the table for our decision makers to see.
Importantly, this is not about making life easier for Millennials. It’s about ensuring that, when they become the 30-, 40- and 50-something leaders of tomorrow, they will have the capacity and ability to lead America forward.
The YEC leads #FixYoungAmerica, a solutions-based movement that aims to end youth unemployment and put young Americans back to work.
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*vyoung
I've been saying this for 16 years especially in the spring when local news stations do pieces on high school students going from fast food chains to the mall to fill out job applications and coming up empty handed.
My response is always the same:"Make a job!"
1) You'll be happier
2) You'll probably make more money
The inability to see entrepreneurial opportunities problem extends to career counselors who especially, on the high school and college level are totally job-centric.
Tell a traditional career counselor that you love dogs, traveling, and cooking and you want to make good money and their eyes will glaze over. Ask them about entrepreneurial options and they'll say, "Oh, the MBA program handles that."
Since 2006 I've trained over 200 people from 16 countries to be "outside the job box" career coaches teaching them how to work with people -- burned out execs to recent retirees to stay at home moms to college students -- and others who need help finding viable ways to profit from their passions.
American colleges need to wake up!
Dr. Valerie Young
ChangingCourse.com
5 days ago
3 Likes
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*Oliver John Drew
This article is bang on.
Entrepreneurship is the answer to a lot of problems.
Don't look for a job, create your own job and hire other people.
It is a lot more work to be a business owner than an employee but the freedom and rewards offset this. It is the government red tape that kills my entrepreneurial drive and spirit (#2).
6 days ago
2 Likes
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*padgettshcom
In response to #5, Detroit, too, has been involved in similar projects. Tech Town, Green Garage, et al. are really churning out some great ideas and opportunities.
6 days ago
2 Likes
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*Areal1
I just retired as the top fed in veteran entrepreneurship, and you are right. The political class in DC needs to wake up and realize that self employed small business ownership is the answer for many Americans young and old, already employed and unemployed. 30% of vets in the labor market right now are self employed. Lets quite subsidizing big business and return to the nation of independent yeomen and women. Bill Elmore
電気自動車の将来。価格低下と高い走行距離が需要の鍵。
Electric car revolution faces increasing headwinds
Wed Mar 21, 2012 7:08am EDT By Ben Klayman
DETROIT (Reuters) - Scott Kluth has a love-hate relationship with his new Fisker Karma luxury electric sedan.
The 34-year-old car lover bought the plug-in hybrid electric Karma in December for $107,850, but five days later the car's battery died as he was driving in downtown Chicago. While the car he affectionately calls a "head turner" was fixed in a recall, Kluth remains uncertain how much he will drive it.
"I just want a car that works," Kluth said. "It's a fun car to drive. It's just that I've lost confidence in it."
The Karma's problems -- one vehicle died during testing by Consumer Reports this month -- follow bad publicity arising from a probe of General Motors Co's Chevrolet Volt and weak sales of the car, and the closure or bankruptcy of several electric vehicle-related start-ups.
The unrelenting bad news has led to questions about the readiness of electric cars and raises fresh doubts about a technology that has been around since the late 1890s but is still struggling to win over the public.
Whether electric vehicles can find an audience beyond policymakers in Washington and Hollywood celebrities depends on lowering vehicle prices without selling cars at a loss, analysts and industry executives say, while extending driving range to make the cars competitive with their gasoline-powered peers.
"It's going to be a slow slog," said John O'Dell, senior green car editor at industry research firm Edmunds.com. "Maybe there's too much expectation of more and quicker success than might realistically be expected of a brand new technology."
He also questioned whether priorities will simply change for whomever is U.S. president after the November election. Electric vehicles could lose tax breaks -- currently worth $7,500 a vehicle for buyers -- particularly if a Republican ends up in the White House.
Edmunds expects pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids to make up only 1.5 percent of the U.S. market in 2017, compared with 0.1 percent last year, and O'Dell said that may be optimistic. Consumers charge all-electric cars by plugging into an outlet, while hybrid versions include a gasoline engine.
President Barack Obama's administration has been a strong proponent of electric vehicles like the Volt and set a goal of getting 1 million battery-powered vehicles on the road by 2015. Lux Research estimates that number will actually be fewer than 200,000. Both the Volt and Karma's development were supported by low-interest federal loans.
That has not dissuaded automakers, many of which plan to launch electric vehicles to join the Volt and Nissan's all-electric Leaf in a bid to meet rising fuel efficiency standards. Toyota has begun selling a plug-in Prius, and EVs from Ford, Honda, BMW and Fiat will join the fray this year, along with cars from start-ups Tesla and Coda Automotive.
HENRY FORD'S WIFE
Electric cars aren't a new concept. Henry Ford bought his wife, Clara, at least two electric cars in the early 1900s offering at best 50 miles driving range and top speeds of about 35 miles per hour, according to the Henry Ford Museum.
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But analysts said automakers have not done a good enough job getting the costs down and explaining the technology to win over anyone beyond early adopters like actor Leonardo DiCaprio, pop idol Justin Bieber, comedian Jay Leno and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"You can do all the advertising and promotion you want, but if people don't buy into the message the needle's not going to move," said George Cook, a marketing professor at the University of Rochester's business school and a former Ford executive.
The Volt, at almost $40,000 before federal subsidies, is seen as too expensive by many critics. Fiat-Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne, a long-time EV skeptic, has said Chrysler will lose more than $10,000 on every battery-powered Fiat 500 it sells.
And even with rising gasoline prices -- topping $4 a gallon in parts of the country -- EVs are just not competitive, according to the Lundberg Survey. Gasoline prices would have to rise to $8.53 a gallon to make the Leaf competitive and hit $12.50 for a Volt to be worth it, based on the cost of gasoline versus electricity, fuel efficiency and depreciation, the survey said.
Obama's vision, which he laid out at a Daimler truck plant in North Carolina this month, includes a car battery that costs half the price of today's versions and can go up to 300 miles on a single charge. The industry is far from achieving that.
Since last fall, there has been a run of bad news for EVs, starting with the late November news that U.S. safety regulators were investigating the Volt for possible battery fires.
While the federal investigation was closed with the conclusion there was no defect and the car did not pose a greater risk of fire than gas-powered vehicles, weak demand led GM to halt production for five weeks and temporarily lay off 1,300 workers at the plant that builds the car. GM, which strengthened the structural protection of the Volt battery, has repeatedly said the car is safe, and some said the safety probe should have never occurred.
The Karma that died during testing by Consumer Reports magazine was another blow following a recall of more than 200 of the cars last year and the halting of sales in January for a software issue. Fisker, which builds the Karma in Finland, also suspended work last month at its U.S. plant scheduled to make another car, the Nina sedan, while it works to renegotiate a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher said problems can arise with new technologies and a new company but added Fisker had gone "beyond the call of duty" in instituting a system to respond to customer issues and had plenty of satisfied owners. CEO Tom LaSorda in a letter to Karma owners last week said Fisker was committed to giving customers "complete peace of mind" and he had created a "SWAT team" of 50 engineers and consultants to identify issues with the car.
'FIRST LAW OF DISNEY'
"The expectations have always been too high for electric cars," said Bill Reinert, Toyota's U.S. manager for advanced technology. "The realities have always been clouded by the dreams. I like to say it's the first law of thermodynamics versus the first law of Disney. Disney is wishing it will be so. It doesn't work." Toyota has always been skeptical EVs would quickly boost its share of the auto market.
Meanwhile, several companies have struggled due to lack of funding or customer troubles.
A123 Systems posted a wider-than-expected fourth-quarter loss this month after Fisker, one of its largest customers, cut battery orders. Bright Automotive, an Indiana electric commercial truck start-up, closed its doors in February after failing to get a federal loan.
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Ener1 Inc, which received a $118.5 million federal grant to make lithium-ion batteries for EVs, filed for bankruptcy in January, and Aptera Motors, a California-based EV start-up, went out of business last December after it couldn't raise $80 million in private funding.
"There will be more companies that fail, but it's no different than Internet companies," said Kristen Helsel, vice president of EV solutions for AeroVironment, which makes EV charging stations for BMW, Mitsubishi and Nissan. "People with the right business model are going to do fine."
A number of top national retail chains, including Kohl's and Walgreen, have begun installing charging stations at their stores, but critics say the U.S. push for electric cars has come before such infrastructure is in place, weakening the case for consumers to be attracted to the technology.
But since the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel maker that received $535 million in U.S. loan guarantees, federal support for advanced vehicle technology programs has ground to a halt. Industry officials and analysts point to tightened U.S. Department of Energy requirements in the face of withering criticism from Republicans about the Obama administration's generosity for anything related to green technology.
"There was certainly a different energy level one year ago, even two years ago," said Oliver Hazimeh, sustainable transportation practice leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This year, it just had a different drumbeat." Hazimeh sees long-term demand for EVs rising to up to 9 percent of the global market by 2022, but he predicts there will be some setbacks along the way.
Obama wants to increase the tax subsidies for buyers of electric vehicles to $10,000 per vehicle from the current $7,500. But critics say the small EV sales totals tell the real story.
Complicating matters, automakers continue to squeeze increased fuel efficiency out of the internal combustion engine. That makes it tougher to make EV sticker prices attractive enough to put a dent in the traditional gasoline-powered vehicles' domination of the market.
The EV's industry's struggles have vindicated the more deliberate approach taken by Toyota, Ford and Chrysler's Marchionne, who killed plans for a Chrysler electric car, analysts said.
Still, proponents say electric-car sales will grow just like Toyota's hybrid Prius rose from about 5,500 in its U.S. debut in 2000 to a peak of more than 180,000 in 2007.
Doug Parks, GM's chief Volt engineer, said the proof is in the large amounts of money automakers are spending on EV technology development.
"Follow the money. People are investing huge in this stuff," he said. "This is a 10- or 20-year discussion and we've been selling the Volt for a year."
GM, which recently launched a new advertising campaign centered on testimonials by adoring Volt owners, has made the car the centerpiece of efforts to seize from Toyota the mantle as the world's greenest automaker. Meanwhile, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has estimated pure electric vehicles like the Leaf will make up 10 percent of industry global sales by 2020.
Time will tell if that's wishful thinking.
"It's been the Kool-Aid that the entire political system has been drinking for a decade," said Bob Martin, a senior consultant with auto product development firm The CarLab. "Electric cars are not ready for prime time. They're really interesting toys for very, very rich people."
(Additional reporting by Braden Reddall in Benecia, California and Bernie Woodall in Geneva; Phil Wahba in New York; Editing by Edward Tobin, Martin Howell and Steve Orlofsky)
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Sony to axe 10,000 jobs in turnaround bid: Nikkei
Mon Apr 9, 2012 8:03am EDT By Chris Gallagher
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Sony Corp is cutting 10,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its global workforce, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday, as new CEO Kazuo Hirai looks to steer the electronics and entertainment giant back to profit after four years in the red.
The job cuts would be the latest downsizing in Japan Inc where companies from cellphone maker NEC Corp to electronics firm Panasonic Corp are trimming costs in the face of a strong yen and competition from rivals like Apple and Samsung Electronics.
TV makers in particular have been hit hard by the tough business climate as well as sharp price falls, with Sony, Panasonic and Sharp expecting to have lost a combined $17 billion in the fiscal year just ended.
Investors will closely monitor a briefing on Thursday by Hirai, who formally took over this month as chief executive from Howard Stringer, for further clues on how Sony plans to revamp its business.
"Under a new CEO, it's easier to cut jobs or go in a new direction," said Yuuki Sakurai, head of fund manager Fukoku Capital, which had around $7 billion worth of assets under management as of end-March 2011.
"One of the things I'd like to see is that they shift their resources to other areas outside TVs ... If they stick to TVs, they may have to fight a war they may not be able to win."
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Sony sees $2.9 bln loss, CEO warns of pain
Hirai to get tough on costs
Sony earnings graphic: r.reuters.com/wah46s
Sony to sell chemical business
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The Nikkei said half of the latest round of job cuts would come from consolidating the firm's chemicals and small and midsize LCD operations.
Sony said last month it was selling a chemical products division, accounting for some 3,000 people, while on April 1 it merged its Sony Mobile display unit, which had about 2,000 workers, with the small LCD panel businesses of Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd into a new firm called Japan Display.
The Nikkei said it was not clear how many of the cuts would take place in Japan or overseas.
As of end-March 2011, Sony had 168,200 employees on a consolidated basis, according to the company's website.
Sony may also ask its seven executive directors who served through the fiscal year to end-March, including Stringer, who is now chairman, to return their bonuses, the Nikkei said.
Sony declined to comment on the report.
Sony announced 16,000 job cuts in December 2008 after the global financial crisis battered demand for its products, but it has not managed to make a profit since then.
The company has forecast a 220 billion yen ($2.7 billion) net loss for the fiscal year just ended, hurt in large part by its ailing TV business.
Sony said last month that Hirai would keep direct charge of the TV business as part of a structural reorganization.
Sony shares closed up 0.6 percent, while the benchmark Nikkei average ended 1.5 percent lower. The stock has dropped more than 10 percent in the past 3 weeks since hitting a 7-month high.
(Reporting by Chris Gallagher; Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Ian Geoghegan)
イギリスの経済不況事情
Britain in recession, intensifying government woes
By David Milliken and Fiona Shaikh
LONDON | Wed Apr 25, 2012 7:58am EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's economy has fallen into its second recession since the financial crisis after an shock contraction at the start of 2012, heaping pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron's government as it reels from a series of political missteps.
Britain's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has seen its support crumble after weeks of criticism over unpopular tax measures in last month's budget, and is under further pressure from revelations about its close links with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
With local elections taking place on May 3, there could hardly be worse timing for Wednesday's news from the Office for National Statistics that Britain's gross domestic product fell 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012 on top of a 0.3 percent decline at the end of 2011.
Most economists had expected Britain's economy to eke out modest growth in early 2012, but these forecasts were upset by the biggest fall in construction output in three years, coupled with a slump in financial services and oil and gas extraction.
Cameron said the figures were "very, very disappointing".
He told parliament: "I don't seek to excuse them. I don't see to try to explain them away. There is no complacency at all in this government in dealing with what is a very tough situation that frankly has just got tougher."
The government desperately needs growth to achieve its overriding goal of eliminating Britain's large budget deficit over the next five years. But this will be a challenge as many of Britain's European trading partners are already in recession.
The figures pose a conundrum for the Bank of England, which had appeared poised to end its second round of quantitative easing asset buying, having said that it was more persuaded by survey evidence that the underlying economy was strengthening.
"This could be something of a game changer for monetary policy," said Investec economist Philip Shaw. "With the weakness in the economy pervasive ... there is a genuine debate to be had over whether it is wise to suspend QE."
Gilt prices rallied and sterling fell more than half a cent against the dollar after the data.
Cameron has had a torrid time since his government's annual budget last month was attacked for cutting taxes at the top end of the income scale while taking from pensioners.
Newspapers and allies who once fell over each other to sing his praises now accuse the expensively educated Conservative Party leader of "speaking for the few" and of "vanity globe-trotting" as the economy sputters and Britons suffer the harshest state spending cuts for a generation.
Things took a turn for the worse on Tuesday when James Murdoch told an inquiry that Jeremy Hunt, Cameron's culture minister and a close ally, had numerous secret contacts with him and his top London lobbyist ahead of a controversial merger. Rupert Murdoch, James's father, was answering questions at the inquiry on Wednesday.
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Britain's economy contracted 7.1 percent during its 2008-2009 recession and has recovered less than half this lost output due to headwinds from the euro zone debt crisis, public spending cuts, high inflation and a damaged banking sector.
Finance minister George Osborne made clear that he saw no scope to loosen the government's purse-strings to boost growth as he tackles a budget deficit that still totals over 8 percent of GDP - higher than most of the embattled economies on the euro zone periphery
"It's taking longer than anyone hoped to recover from the biggest debt crisis of our lifetime," Osborne said after the data. "The one thing that would make the situation even worse would be to abandon our credible plan and deliberately add more borrowing and even more debt."
But the figures brought immediate attack from the opposition Labour Party and trade unions. "The Tory/Lib Dem government ignored warnings that austerity would drag the UK economy back into an unnecessary double dip recession," said the general secretary of the GMB union, Paul Kenny.
Output in Britain's service sector - which makes up more than three quarters of GDP - rose a smaller-than-expected 0.1 percent after a drop in financial services output. Industrial output was 0.4 percent lower after a sharp fall in oil and gas extraction, while construction contracted by 3.0 percent, the biggest fall since the first quarter of 2009.
Britain's Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts growth of 0.8 percent this year. Wednesday's data shows that first quarter output was no higher than a year earlier.
FURTHER CONTRACTION?
The Bank of England has warned that there is a risk of another contraction in the second quarter of 2012, due to an extra public holiday. But unlike during the previous two quarters, it does not appear keen to provide further monetary stimulus, due to sticky, above-target inflation.
Moreover, the BoE and many private-sector economists are likely to stick with their belief that upbeat private-sector survey evidence presents a truer picture than the ONS data.
Reinforcing the divergence between official and private data, the Confederation of British Industry reported the biggest quarterly rise in factory orders for 15 years in data released just after the GDP figures.
(Reporting by David Milliken and Fiona Shaikh; editing by Sven Egenter/Jeremy Gaunt)
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スペインの経済危機
Spanish economy in "huge crisis" after credit downgrade
By Nigel Davies
MADRID | Fri Apr 27, 2012 10:25am EDT
MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's sickly economy faces a "crisis of huge proportions", a minister said on Friday, as unemployment hit its highest level in almost two decades and Standard and Poor's downgraded the government's debt by two notches.
Unemployment shot up to 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the worst jobless figures in the developed world. Retail sales slumped for the twenty-first consecutive month as a recession cuts into consumer spending.
"The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government ... Spain is in a crisis of huge proportions," Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said in a radio interview.
Standard and Poor's cited risks of an increase in bad loans at Spanish banks and called on Europe to take action to encourage growth.
The downgrade spooked financial markets, raising the interest rate fellow euro zone struggler Italy was forced to pay to sell 10-year bonds at auction. The yield was its highest since January as investors worried about the economic outlook in the bloc's indebted states.
Analysts said the 5.95 billion euro Italian auction went well under the circumstances, but Rabobank strategist Richard McGuire said the 5.84 percent 10-year yield "leaves a question mark over how long Italy will be able to finance itself at levels that can be deemed sustainable".
Italy's main banking association said the economy may contract by 1.4 percent this year, more than the government's 1.2 percent forecast.
Spain's country risk, as measured by the spread on yields between Spanish and German benchmark government bonds, spiked before leveling off to around 420 basis points.
Spain has slipped into its second recession in three years and fears that it cannot hit harsh deficit cutting targets this year have put it back in the centre of the debt crisis storm, pushing up its borrowing costs.
Recovery and job creation are still two years off, Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said on Friday in a news conference where he forecast 0.2 percent growth in the gross domestic product next year and 1.4 percent growth in 2014.
De Guindos also said Spain would increase the value-added tax and other indirect taxes next year, but would seek to reduce payroll taxes. Spain has a low VAT compared with other European countries even after raising it in 2010.
The government has already rescued a number of banks that were too exposed to a decade-long construction boom that crashed in 2008, and investors fear vulnerable lenders will be hit by another wave of loan defaults due to the slowing economy.
"It's a very challenging situation. I don't think that the banks are cornered yet, but the government must come out soon to say how they will address them," said Gilles Moec, an economist with Deutsche Bank.
DEFICIT TARGETS DOOMED
S&P's head of European ratings, Moritz Kraemer, told Reuters Insider television that Spanish banks could need state aid and the country faced further downgrades if its debt troubles continue to escalate.
"It is not going to be an easy job for most Spanish banks to find funding in the market. So the state may be called for at some point. But that, for now at least, is something the Spanish government seems to be unwilling to contemplate," he said.
Spain has ruled out any use of European funds to recapitalize its banks, weighed down by bad property loans. Economy Secretary Fernando Jimenez Latorre said Spain had sufficient financial capacity to handle a rescue itself in case of need.
The government is considering whether to create a holding company for the banks' toxic real estate assets after three rounds of forced clean-ups and consolidations in the financial sector have failed to draw a line under the problem.
Conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in office since December, has passed an austerity budget and introduced new laws to try to make the economy more competitive, such as by reducing costs for companies to lay off workers. He has also agreed with Brussels a higher deficit target for this year.
But he has not convinced investors, and Spain's borrowing costs have shot up recently as the effect of a flow of cheap loans from the European Central Bank has worn off.
On Thursday Rajoy said he was determined to stick to austerity measures even though they are aggravating the economic slump and calls for growth measures are mounting around Europe.
The treasury ministry estimated the increase of 365,900 jobless people in the first quarter meant a loss of 953 million euros in tax income, making deficit cutting even harder.
The unemployment rate was up from 22.9 percent in the last quarter of 2011 and was worse than economists had forecast. Half of Spain's youth are out of work, and figures are unlikely to improve for some time as the government slashes spending by 42 billion euros this year, some 4 percent of economic output.
EUROPEAN ACTION NEEDED
S&P now has Spain on a BBB+ rating, which means "adequate payment capacity" and is only a few notches above a junk rating. Fitch and Moody's still rate Spain's sovereign with a "strong payment capacity".
The ratings agency called on euro zone countries to better manage the sovereign debt crisis.
Standard & Poor's said the euro zone should implement growth-promoting structural measures, feeding into the mounting debate in Europe about the self-defeating nature of austerity-only or austerity-first measures.
S&P said steps to restore financial confidence should "include a greater pooling of fiscal resources and obligations, possibly direct bank support mechanisms to weaken the sovereign-bank links, and a consolidation of banking supervision or a greater harmonization of labor and wage policies."
The call for a Europe-wide system to resolve and underpin banks echoed similar comments from the ECB's Executive Board members Joerg Asmussen and Benoit Coeure.
(Additional reporting by Sonya Dowsett, Inmaculada Sanz, Julien Toyer and Andres Gonzalez; Writing by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Peter Graff)
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海外に主要工場が移ることは、国内での関係していた幅広い分野の仕事がなくなることを意味する。つまり仕事が雪だるま式に引き抜かれていくことを意味する。日本の衰退を防ぐために産業創造の必要性がこれほど重要な時代はない。
****
Japan chip maker Renesas 'may cut 14,000 jobs'
26 May 2012
TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese semiconductor maker Renesas Electronics Corp. is considering cutting up to 14,000 jobs or 30 percent of its workforce as part of a major restructuring plan, according to news reports.
The company is also considering selling a major factory to a Taiwanese firm, while closing or scaling down other plants, said the Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspapers as well as Kyodo News.
Renesas, which lost 62.6 billion yen ($785 million) in the year to March, also plans to raise 100 billion yen, mainly from its top shareholders NEC, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric, the Nikkei said.
The company wants to sell its major factory in Yamagata to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the Nikkei said.
The plant, with 1,400 workers, produces semiconductors used in televisions and other digital gadgets. But low domestic demand has forced the company to reduce operations at the factory, the Nikkei said.
In a short statement, Renesas distanced itself from the reports, saying no formal decision had yet been made.
The scope of the newly reported plan is significantly higher than what was reported Tuesday by the Yomiuri Shimbun, which reported 6,000 job cuts and 50 billion yen in fresh capital.
Japanese electronics makers -- from parts makers to producers of the finished products -- have long struggled with the chronically stagnant Japanese economy and a high yen weighing on their earnings.
Japan's Toshiba first-quarter profit jumps 178 percent
By Mari Saito
TOKYO | Tue Jul 31, 2012 2:23am EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba Corp posted a better-than-expected 178 percent rise in quarterly operating profit on Tuesday, boosted by strong overseas earnings in its social infrastructure division despite sluggish chip sales.
Toshiba, Japan's leading chipmaker and the world's No.2 maker of NAND flash memory chips, logged an operating profit of 11.47 billion yen ($147 million) in the April-June quarter, bouncing back from 4.12 billion yen in the same period last year, when Japanese corporate earnings were hit by the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.
The results exceeded an average forecast of a 7.8 billion yen profit estimated by four analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Toshiba's flagship NAND memory chips, the biggest single swing factor in the company's results, are used in Apple Inc's popular iPhones as well as fast-selling tablet devices.
But falling prices of USBs and memory cards, as well as oversupply in the market, have forced the Japanese chipmaker to cut back its NAND memory production by 30 percent.
Fellow flash memory maker SanDisk Corp said this month it expects NAND chip market conditions to improve in the second half of the year.
Toshiba's electronic devices division, home to NAND memory chips, posted sales of 307.7 billion yen, down from 333.1 billion yen in the same period last year.
Toshiba, which manufactures products ranging from light bulbs and escalators to nuclear reactors and is the world's No.2 NAND flash memory chip maker, has scaled back its loss-making television business to focus on large-scale infrastructure projects in emerging economies.
Toshiba, which said in May it aimed to more than double its annual operating profit in three years by expanding its social infrastructure business and boosting sales of electronic devices, held steady its forecast for an operating profit of 300 billion yen for the full year to March 2013.
Shares of Toshiba, which competes with Hynix Semiconductor Inc in semiconductors and with GE and Areva in nuclear reactors, ended up 2.3 percent at 262 yen ahead of the results.
Behind the New View of Globalization
August 29, 2012, 10:00 am
By EDWARD ALDEN
After a recent Economix post (as part of the election-year project called The Agenda) explaining that many economists see globalization as a major cause of the income slowdown in this country, Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations noted on Twitter that this view was a new one. For years, economists argued that increased global trade did not have a large effect on wages or employment in the United States. The editors invited Mr. Alden — the director of the Renewing America initiative at the council, who previously helped run a council task force on trade and investment policy – to send along a more detailed version of his point.
Economy, Planet, Security, World and Health.
For decades, economists resisted the conclusion that trade – for all of its many benefits — has also played a significant role in job loss and the stagnation of middle-class incomes in the United States. As recently as 2008, for instance, Robert Lawrence of Harvard, one of the country’s most respected trade experts, concluded that trade explained only a small share of growing income inequality and labor market displacement in the United States.
Rather than focusing on trade, economists argued that other factors – especially “skill-biased technical change,” technological innovation that puts an added premium on skilled workers – played the biggest role in holding down middle-class wages. But now economists are beginning to change their minds. Responding to The Times’s recent survey about the causes of income stagnation, many top economists have cited globalization as a leading cause.
While the evidence is still not conclusive, it is pretty strong. Trade’s effect on jobs and income, which was probably modest through the 1990’s, now seems to be growing much larger. Among the recent studies:
• In “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,” the Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence looked at job growth from 1990 to 2008 in sectors of the United States economy. He found almost no net job growth in sectors, like manufacturing, in which global trade played a large role. Nearly all of the net gains occurred in sectors in which trade plays a minor role. Government and health care, in which trade plays almost no role, accounted for more than 40 percent of all new jobs.
• David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson looked at regions in the United States where companies are competing most directly with China. From 1990 to 2007, they found that regions that faced growing exposure to Chinese competition had higher unemployment, lower labor-force participation and lower wages than might otherwise be expected. And the effects grew over that period. In 1991, just 2.9 percent of United States manufacturing imports came from low-wage countries; by 2007, that had risen to nearly 12 percent, mostly from China.
• In the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S. Trade and Investment Policy, my colleague Matthew Slaughter looked at employment at multinational companies with headquarters in the United States, companies that account for roughly 60 percent of American exports and imports. From 1989 to 1999, those companies created 4.4 million jobs in the United States and 2.7 million jobs at their foreign affiliates overseas. From 1999 to 2009, however, those same companies eliminated a net of nearly 3 million jobs in the United States while adding another 2.4 million jobs abroad.
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The usual rebuttal to these findings is to argue that they stem mostly from manufacturing. And manufacturing, the argument goes, is facing a long-run, secular decline in employment that is largely technology-driven, not unlike the story of agriculture in the 20th century. The job losses in manufacturing may seem as if they have been caused by trade, according to this view, but they have actually been caused by technological change.
Through the 1990s, that story was largely plausible. But over the last decade it is not. Manufacturing output in the United States is no longer growing as rapidly as it once was (and as you would expect if technology had simply been replacing workers in factories). Real manufacturing output grew just 15 percent in the 2000s, compared with more than 35 percent in each of the 1970s and 1980s and more than 50 percent in the 1990s. And one sector where the statistics are of dubious meaning — computers and electronics – accounts for almost all of the recent gains. In 13 of 19 manufacturing sectors, real output declined over the last decade, in some industries quite sharply. There is no question that over the last decade United States manufacturing has declined, taking away jobs and driving down wages for those who are still employed. Robert Atkinson and colleagues have a useful paper on this topic, showing that the loss of more than five million jobs in manufacturing in a decade was not primarily a technology and productivity story.
The real-world evidence makes it surprising that it has taken economists so long to catch on. The recent strike in Joliet, Ill., at Caterpillar – a true global company — ended with union workers being forced to accept an agreement that includes a six-year wage freeze, even as the company is earning record profits. Elsewhere, two-tier agreements, in which new hires earn wages and benefits roughly half as large as those in the old union contracts, have become standard in many of the manufacturing industries that remain in the United States.
One reason that economists may be uncomfortable talking about trade’s impact on jobs and wages may be concern that it could set off protectionist responses. And economists are right that expanded trade has certainly been good for the United States. It has brought us better and cheaper consumer goods, opened new export markets, lifted up many poor countries and strengthened American alliances around the world.
But I think the fear of protectionism is overblown. One unexpected feature of the great recession was how little protectionism it led to, especially in the advanced economies. The lesson of the Great Depression – that protectionism is counterproductive – seems to have been learned.
Instead, the evidence should produce some soul-searching about the causes of this country’s declining competitiveness. The list is discouragingly long: crumbling infrastructure, inadequate educational performance, stifling regulation and a cumbersome tax system. But it might not take that much to tip the scales in favor of the United States. The Boston Consulting Group, which has looked at the slight uptick in the nation’s manufacturing employment over the last two years, argues that rising wages in China, high transportation costs and falling United States energy costs should bring more manufacturing back home.
With the rapid growth of middle classes abroad, trade should be an opportunity for the United States to sell into growing markets, increasing opportunities and wages for many Americans here at home. But over the last decade, that has not been the story.
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U.S. Companies Brace for an Exit From the Euro by Greece
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Published: September 2, 2012
Even as Greece desperately tries to avoid defaulting on its debt, American companies are preparing for what was once unthinkable: that Greece could soon be forced to leave the euro zone.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has looked into filling trucks with cash and sending them over the Greek border so clients can continue to pay local employees and suppliers in the event money is unavailable. Ford has configured its computer systems so they will be able to immediately handle a new Greek currency.
No one knows just how broad the shock waves from a Greek exit would be, but big American banks and consulting firms have also been doing a brisk business advising their corporate clients on how to prepare for a splintering of the euro zone. That is a striking contrast to the assurances from European politicians that the crisis is manageable and that the currency union can be held together. On Thursday, the European Central Bank will consider measures that would ease pressure on Europe’s cash-starved countries.
JPMorgan Chase, though, is taking no chances. It has already created new accounts for a handful of American giants that are reserved for a new drachma in Greece or whatever currency might succeed the euro in other countries.
Stock markets around the world have rallied this summer on hopes that European leaders will solve the Continent’s debt problems, but the quickening tempo of preparations by big business for a potential Greece exit this summer suggests that investors may be unduly optimistic. Many executives are deeply skeptical that Greece will accede to the austere fiscal policies being demanded by Europe in return for financial assistance.
Greece’s abandonment of the euro would most likely create turmoil in global markets, which have experienced periodic sell-offs whenever Europe’s debt problems have flared up over the last two and a half years. It would also increase the pressure on Italy and Spain, much larger economic powers that are struggling with debt problems of their own. “It’s safe to say most companies are preparing,” said Paul Dennis, a program manager with Corporate Executive Board, a private advisory firm.
In a survey this summer, the firm found that 80 percent of clients polled expected Greece to leave the euro zone, and a fifth of those expected more countries to follow.
“Fifteen months ago when we started looking at this, we said it was unthinkable,” said Heiner Leisten, a partner with the Boston Consulting Group in Cologne, Germany, who heads up its global insurance practice. “It’s not impossible or unthinkable now.”
Mr. Leisten’s firm, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers, has already considered the timing of a Greek withdrawal — for example, the news might hit on a Friday night, when global markets are closed. A bank holiday could quickly follow, with the stock market and most local financial institutions shutting down, while new capital controls make it hard to move money in and out of the country.
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“We’ve had conversations with several dozen companies and we’re doing work for a number of these,” said Peter Frank, who advises corporate treasurers as a principal at Pricewaterhouse. “Almost all of that has come in over the transom in the last 90 days.”
He added: “Companies are asking some very granular questions, like ‘If a news release comes out on a Friday night announcing that Greece has pulled out of the euro, what do we do?’ In some cases, companies have contingency plans in place, such as having someone take a train to Athens with 50,000 euros to pay employees.”
The recent wave of preparations by American companies for a Greek exit from the euro signals a stark switch from their stance in the past, said Carole Berndt, head of global transaction services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“When we started giving advice, they came for the free sandwiches and chocolate cookies,” she said jokingly. “Now that has changed, and contingency planning is focused on three primary scenarios — a single-country exit, a multicountry exit and a breakup of the euro zone in its entirety.”
Banks and consulting firms are reluctant to name clients, and many big companies also declined to discuss their contingency plans, fearing it could anger customers in Europe if it became known they were contemplating the euro’s demise. Central banks, as well as Germany’s finance ministry, have also been considering the implications of a Greek exit but have been even more secretive about specific plans.
But some corporations are beginning to acknowledge they are ready if Greece or even additional countries leave the euro zone, making sure systems can handle a quick transition to a new currency. In Europe, the holding company for Iberia Airlines and British Airways has acknowledged it is preparing plans in the event of a euro exit by Spain.
“We’ve looked at many scenarios, including where one or more countries decides to redenominate,” said Roger Griffith, who oversees global settlement and customer risk for MasterCard. “We have defined operating steps and communications steps to take.” He added: “Practically, we could make a change in a day or two and be prepared in terms of our systems.”
In a statement, Visa said that it too would also be able to make “a swift transition to a new currency with the minimum possible disruption to consumers and retailers.”
Juniper Networks, a provider of networking technology based in California, created a “Euro Zone Crisis Assessment and Contingency Plan,” which company officials liken to the kind of business continuity plans they maintain in the event of an earthquake.
“It’s about having an awareness vs. having to scramble,” said Catherine Portman, vice president for treasury at Juniper. The company has already begun “sweeping” funds in euro zone banks to accounts elsewhere more frequently, while making sure it has adequate money and liquidity in place so employees and suppliers get paid without a disruption.
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FMC, a chemical giant based in Philadelphia, is asking some Greek customers to pay in advance, rather than risk selling to them now and not getting paid later. It has also begun to avoid keeping any excess cash in Greek, Spanish or Italian bank accounts, while carefully monitoring the creditworthiness of customers in those countries.
“It’s been a very hot topic, said Thomas C. Deas Jr., an FMC executive who serves as chairman of the National Association of Corporate Treasurers. Members of his group discussed the issue on a conference call last Tuesday, he added.
American companies have actually been more aggressive about seeking out advice than their European counterparts, according to John Gibbons, head of treasury services in Europe for JPMorgan Chase. He said a handful of the largest American companies had requested the special accounts configured for a currency that did not yet exist.
“We’re planning against the extreme,” he said. “You don’t lose anything by doing it.”
*Comments:
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"Socialism is great -- until you run out of other people's money."
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Eric NY State
Sept. 2, 2012 at 2:47 p.m.
There truly can't be economic unity unless there is political unity. Thus, the euro zone was never going to work in the first place.
FearlessLdr Paradise Valley, AZ
Sept. 2, 2012 at 2:47 p.m.
Will the Greeks accept the austerity measures wanted by other euro zone members? Probably not.
In a country where hairdressers retire at 50 because it's a "stressful" occupation and other occupations are treated similarly, there is no stomach for actually working.Margaret Thatcher was right. Socialism is great -- until you run out of other people's money.
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CNN Fact Check: About those 4.5 million jobs ... By the CNN Wire Staff
12:47 AM EDT, Wed September 5, 2012
(CNN) -- Anyone watching the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night heard the number 4.5 million several times.
"Despite incredible odds and united Republican opposition, our president took action, and now we've seen 4.5 million new jobs," San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the party's keynote speaker, said.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as President Barack Obama's chief of staff, and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who followed Obama's November rival Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts, both cited the same number.
It's a big-sounding number, given the still-sputtering job market. So we're giving it a close eyeballing.
The facts:
The number Castro cites is an accurate description of the growth of private-sector jobs since January 2010, when the long, steep slide in employment finally hit bottom. But while a total of 4.5 million jobs sounds great, it's not the whole picture.
Nonfarm private payrolls hit a post-recession low of 106.8 million that month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure currently stands at 111.3 million as of July.
While that is indeed a gain of 4.5 million, it's only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date. The private jobs figure stood at 111 million in January 2009, the month Obama took office.
And total nonfarm payrolls, including government workers, are down from 133.6 million workers at the beginning of 2009 to 133.2 million in July 2012. There's been a net loss of nearly 1 million public-sector jobs since Obama took office, despite a surge in temporary hiring for the 2010 census.
Meanwhile, the jobs that have come back aren't the same ones that were lost.
According to a study released last week by the liberal-leaning National Employment Law Project, low-wage fields such as retail sales and food service are adding jobs nearly three times as fast as higher-paid occupations.
Conclusion:
The figure of 4.5 million jobs is accurate if you look at the most favorable period and category for the administration. But overall, there are still fewer people working now than when Obama took office at the height of the recession.
大統領選での大きな焦点。アメリカ財政を大幅に悪化させたオバマ大統領の税金の無駄使い。景気回復を見込んだ政府財政投融資の失敗の山。
Analysis: Charlotte company illustrates stimulus ups and downs
By Susan Cornwell and Marcus Stern
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina | Fri Sep 7, 2012 5:37pm EDT
(Reuters) - Few companies in the U.S. South have gotten as much nurturing by President Barack Obama's administration as Charlotte-based Celgard LLC. Obama and two of his Cabinet secretaries visited the plant and praised its successes after it was awarded $48.7 million in stimulus grants.
But as Obama prepared to deliver his speech at the Democratic National Convention just 14 miles away on Thursday night, Celgard stands as an example of how the jobs, industrial development and green energy policies the president has implemented since taking office in January 2009 are no guarantee of success.
It hasn't collapsed like solar panel maker Solyndra and isn't teetering on the verge of bankruptcy like some other stimulus grant recipients that have become political targets for Obama's Republican opponent in the November 6 presidential election.
But challenges in the electric car industry have hampered the company's ability to take off since Obama visited its Charlotte plant in April, 2010. Celgard makes a key component for lithium-ion batteries for electric cars and consumer electronics.
The stock price of Celgard's parent company, Polypore International Inc., which more than doubled in the exciting months after Obama's visit, has returned to earth, and Polypore reported a 6 percent sales decline in the first half of 2012.
Ironically, at least part of the dip in investor confidence was linked to fears that another stimulus recipient, LG Chem, might stop buying product from Celgard and position itself as a competitor - fears that Celgard officials say were overblown.
Electric car sales, meanwhile, have not come close to the Obama administration's goal of having a million vehicles on the road by 2015.
Around 30,000 purely electric vehicles are currently on the road in the United States, according to Environment Georgia, an environmental group.
Electric vehicle and hybrid sales were only 3 percent of total U.S. car sales in the first 7 months of this year, says green-car website Hybridcars.com.
Theodore O'Neill of Litchfield Hills Research said "2011 was a great year for them (Celgard) because the companies that make the batteries for the Chevy Volt ... had to build up inventories to meet the projections for sales that were expected, that never materialized.
"So when 2012 came Celgard sales went flat, because their customers have lots of excess inventory."
The Obama administration says the stimulus investments will be justified in the long term.
"The market for electrified vehicles ... is expected to triple by 2017 ... The investments being made today will help ensure that the jobs that support this rapidly growing industry are created here in the United States," said Department of Energy spokeswoman Jen Stutsman.
Celgard is also looking forward. In a July statement accompanying release of Polypore's second quarter results, CEO Robert Toth said the company expects performance to improve in the second half of the year.
But the "level of improvement will be closely linked to the sales rate of a few high-content Electric Drive Vehicles," Toth said.
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Celgard makes highly specialized membranes called separators, a key component of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars and consumer electronics.
Its $48.7 million economic stimulus award in 2009 was part of $2.4 billion in administration grants intended to jump start U.S. development of the electric car battery industry, which has been dominated by Korean and Japanese manufacturers.
Obama's Charlotte factory visit touched off investor enthusiasm for Celgard's expansion plans, and Polypore's stock price climbed to over $65. On Thursday afternoon it was trading around $34.50.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis visited Celgard, as did Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who in July 2011 cut the ribbon for a gleaming plant in Concord, North Carolina, built with help from stimulus funds.
Since 2009, Celgard has spent over $300 million on expansion, including the stimulus grant. A Celgard spokesman said the company has hired more than 300 people in the Charlotte area since 2009, bringing its employee totals today to 750.
Had it not been for the stimulus grant, the spokesman added, those jobs might have gone elsewhere: the award "helped to tip our decision towards expanding capacity in the U.S. rather than abroad."
Polypore's stock lost nearly a third of its value in a single day, January 31, after South Korea's LG Chem said it would start making its own battery separators, possibly eliminating a key Celgard customer.
Analysts said the drop was due to a market misunderstanding, because in the short term at least, LG Chem is not expected to make the kind of separators that it buys from Polypore.
OTHER STIMULUS GRANTEES STRUGGLING
Obama's stimulus plan has become a key political issue. Democrats have said the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has revitalized U.S. manufacturing.
Republicans criticize it as an unwise government intervention.
Celgard may be in better shape than some stimulus recipients.
Last month, A123 Systems Inc became the second U.S. government-backed battery maker to go overseas this year for a lifeline, turning to Chinese auto parts supplier Wanxiang Group.
Battery maker Ener1 Inc, which received a U.S. green technology grant, emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy under the control of Russian investor Boris Zingarevich.
LG Chem Michigan Inc. used a $151.4 million stimulus award to build a car battery factory in Holland, Michigan, but production has not yet started. A spokesman said the market "has been slower than anyone anticipated."
(Additional reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Fred Barbash and Doina Chiacu)
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仕事を生み出す力は民間にあり、政府主導の無知さを指摘。
****
What Happened to Obama's Jobs Council?
October 18, 2012 Rush Limbaugh in his radio show
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I'm not through with this jobs business, though. I was just sitting here thinking during the break. Do you remember in the first two years of the regime, Obama had all of these work groups, and one of the work groups he had was a jobs council. In fact, the guy that leads that is Jeff Immelt of GE.
I saw the other day that the Obama jobs council hasn't met since January.
So basically ten months. But that's okay because it's a total waste of time. I'll never forget. I think it was the first year, maybe, doesn't matter, but when Obama was doing these workplaces at the White House, they had cameras. The media, you know, was orgasming every day over all of this, and I remember one particular jobs council meeting Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was there, who is their foreign policy columnist at the New York Times.
I'm watching with incredulity the Obama jobs council, and it was a metaphor for exactly what's wrong with socialism, liberalism, Marxism, Central Planning. Here you had a bunch of eggheads who don't know the first thing about job creation, by definition. Obviously. If they're sitting there talking about it, they don't know anything about it! If they think their gathering together in a room to talk about job creation is the solution, they don't know what they're talking about.
That's not how jobs happens.
That's now how an economy happens.
It was even more laughable that you have all these egghead theoreticians, faculty lounge lizard types, all these liberals who sit around and talk to each other about how much better everything would be if they ran it. They have all these eggheads sitting around at the White House theorizing, all these liberals theorizing. If they were in charge, if they were the ones calling the shots, if they were the ones planning everything, then there wouldn't be any economic problems.
There wouldn't be high unemployment. They really believed that the last ten years of George W. Bush destroyed the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth, but it was insulting to my intelligence and laughable at the same time to see people like Thomas Friedman -- a journalist, a columnist at the New York Times and whoever else was there -- sitting around at a two-hour workshop on job creation.
Meanwhile, while these clowns are in the White House theorizing and talking about job creation, people all across the country are sweating and slaving. Small business owners are trying to hold onto their businesses as they face even higher taxes and more onerous regulations coming right out of the White House where all of these silly, ridiculous workshops are taking place.
By people that haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about, who wouldn't know how to start a business and keep it going. They wouldn't put up with the regulations that they foster on everybody else. It's just mind-boggling, the arrogance. Barack Obama doesn't have a week's worth of experience in the private sector. He doesn't have any experience in health care.
No experience in medicine.
No experience in pharmaceuticals.
No experience in jobs.
Yet he knows all! He's got all the answers. Let him run everything! It's one of the things that constantly burns me. They bring in the yokels like Thomas "Loopy" Friedman to sit here and all you have was a bunch of people feeling self-important. They're the smartest people in the room. They know all. What plans could they possibly conceive? Jobs do not get created by commissions in the White House or anywhere else.
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Jobs are created by real people you've never heard of rolling up their sleeves, taking giant risks, borrowing money, and putting that money at risk on a passion for a product or a service that they think will score big, that they think is going to be popular. And if it grows, they hire more people to handle the growth of the business. Not one of these people on one of these job commissions ever been a boss.
Not one of them has ever started a business.
Not one of them.
There weren't any CEOs at this workshop. I mean, this was strictly eggheads. We talk about Apple. You know, look at all of these cell phone companies now who are working hard to build out 4G data networks, LTE. Why is that happening? If it weren't for the iPhone, the build-out of LTE networks by cellular companies would be going at a snail's pace. But the sale of all these iPhones is creating a demand for high-speed data networks that is creating all of this investment by the cellular companies that's resulting in the growth.
There's not one aspect of this taking place that any commission or group of eggheads in Washington conceived, planned, and ordered. The iPhone did not come from any brilliant Obama guy or commission, nor did anything else that Apple makes. The only thing these people do is regulate, often in an injurious way, what others are taking risks on invest in and to accomplish.
The FCC is a regulatory agency that can make or break private sector industry or firm with one decision, and it's political. It always has been. The president gets to name the majority members. AT&T wanted to merge with T Mobile, and the reason they wanted to do that is because Verizon was kicking their butt on the LTE rollout. AT&T couldn't build as fast as they could buy spectrum to roll out LTE.
Well, the FCC disapproved the merger because they didn't like the Bells being put back together after we'd torn 'em apart decades ago. Of course the stupid idiots in the media applaud this. (clapping) "This is wonderful! Big business getting shafted, big business being told it can't make obscene profits." So in the meantime, AT&T is in 55 markets with LTE and Verizon's in over 250.
AT&T would be competitive with Verizon on LTE if the merger had been approved. I'm not arguing for or against the merger. I'm just pointing out that about none of this does Obama have a clue about. He doesn't have the slightest idea. Neither does Thomas "Loopy" Friedman. All they can do is sit there and whine and moan that the iPhone's made in China. They haven't the slightest idea how much of the American economy revolves around the purchase of those damn things, and every other gadget.
Not just Apple's. Now, manufacturing's important, but those jobs were never here. My only point is we're living the moment that we've all predicted. We're living the moment that I predicted in 1992 in the Clinton-Bush campaign. "Folks, if these guys win, we're further down the line to big government socialism. Government's gonna get bigger; the private sector's gonna shrink."
世界の変化に対応して自前で改革できるなら、日本はとうの昔にやっている。
*****
Can Japan Change?
Japanese have watched their economy sink for two decades. Are they finally getting angry?
By Michael Schuman | Time Mag
One of the more frustrating tasks I regularly face in my job as an economics correspondent in Asia is explaining (or attempting to explain) what goes on in the Japanese economy. In many ways the place seems to simply defy logic, or the basic laws of human nature. How can a society watch its economic fortunes deteriorate for two decades and do almost nothing about it?
I’ve explored this subject before and have tossed out a few possible explanations. The bureaucrats who shape economic policy are insular and self-interested, and won’t reform Japan since that would undercut their own power. Corporate managers who rose to the top in a bureaucratic, consensus-based system have no interest in changing it to make their firms more entrepreneurial. Politicians cater to the narrow demands of their constituents, not the greater needs of the nation. Political and business leaders fear globalization and have limited the degree of integration Japan has forged with high-growth developing Asia.
There is another reason, though, that might explain the situation best, which I hear from my friends in South Korea. I covered the Asian financial crisis in 1997 from Seoul, and I can tell you that the Koreans know something about crisis management. At the time, the economy seemed to plunge off a cliff. Koreans truly worried that their three-decade economic miracle had come to a sudden, devastating end. Yet in the aftermath, a stronger, healthier, more innovative economy emerged.
Many Koreans I have spoken to believe that their country’s post-crisis success could never have happened without the crisis itself. The collapse showed everyone just how out-of-date and flawed their economic model had become, and washed away the opposition to change. In fact, the reforms Korea eventually adopted, at both the national and corporate level, broke through many of the same hurdles now blocking Japan’s way. Korea, too, suffered from cozy ties between government and business, too much bureaucratic interference, and a lack of entrepreneurship. Seoul addressed these issues after the Asian crisis (though not completely); Japan never has.
That could be because Japan has never stared into the abyss. Sure, recessions have come with depressing frequency, young people can’t find the solid jobs they used to, corporate Japan is retreating from industries like consumer electronics, which it once dominated. But Japan’s fate has been something more like that story about boiling a frog. If you put the poor amphibian into cold water and turn up the heat, it doesn’t realize it’s being cooked to death. I’ve never actually tried this with a real frog, but if it is true, it explains the situation in Japan. While Korea got tossed directly into hot water, Japan has been poached slowly. If Japan faced a Korea-like crisis, my friends in Seoul say, that would finally force Japan to change.
It would be a tragedy if Japan had to experience such a destructive crisis in order to turn itself around. But perhaps it won’t have to. I just spent some time in Japan (an excursion that resulted in my latest TIME magazine story, which you can read here), and I was surprised to find how much the frustration level of the country has increased. Many people I spoke to have really become fed up with the current system – the inaction of the political elite, the lack of opportunity for young people, the failings of corporate Japan. In the past, Japanese have usually watched the ineptitude of their political and corporate leadership with apparent apathy, but that seems to be changing.
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You can see that in how people are reacting to the debate over the future of nuclear power in the country in the wake of the scary meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear reactors last year. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets to demand the government eliminate nuclear power altogether. Mamoru Yamamoto, one gentleman I spoke to at a protest outside of the Prime Minister’s office, made the point that the anti-nuke movement was different than public campaigns in the past in Japan. Instead of being organized by specific interest groups, the nuclear protests have been driven by individuals, deciding to join on their own. “We are taking action,” Yamamoto told me. “Some change is really going on.”
Another sign of that desire for change is the career of Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto. Here’s a young (by the standards of Japanese politics), blunt-talking lawyer who has never held office outside of Osaka prefecture but is already one of the nation’s most popular political figures. Sure, he’s won himself attention by making some right-wing nationalistic statements that have shocked many. But he’s also followed a directed agenda in Osaka, where he is trying to tackle the government’s perennial deficit problem by cutting state expenditure and taking on powerful public sector workers. Basically, he has an image in Japan of a guy who actually makes decisions and follows through on them, unlike the aimless cast of characters in Tokyo, and that’s been enough to propel him onto the national stage. Now that he’s decided to take his political movement national, we’ll have to see how he competes with the old entrenched parties. He may not have the grassroots organization to do that right away. But with elections around the corner, Hashimoto could win himself a big chunk of protest votes, and that could really shake-up Japanese national politics.
There is change afoot in the business world as well. There are a bunch of people, many of them quite young, who are trying to convince the youth of Japan to ditch the usual career path – into the government bureaucracy or a big company bureaucracy – to start their own firms. One of them, William Saito, started a company himself in the U.S., which he later sold to Microsoft. Now he wears several hats in Tokyo – venture capitalist, college lecturer, government advisor — all of which are aimed at pushing the idea that entrepreneurship is the answer to Japan’s woes. He has spent a lot of time dissecting the hurdles to entrepreneurship in Japan, and has focused on the exam-based education system, which he feels stifles creativity and deprives young people of critical life experience. He also says the way Japanese stigmatize failure prevents people from taking risks and starting up new firms. Still, he feels that there is a growing group of go-getters who are willing to think outside the box and convincing others to follow them. “There is a new perfect storm where we have students, entrepreneurs, even people in their middle age that are saying: I realize that there is a better world outside of this rat race,” he says.
In any country of 128 million people, there will always be pockets of change. The question for Japan is: Are these pockets having any greater impact on the course of Japanese society? Here we run into trouble. Even though the term “salaryman” – those suit-wearing middle managers clogging the subways of Tokyo – have for years had a negative image among many young Japanese, it seems that most of them want to be “salarymen” anyway. A 2011 study showed that the share of start-ups founded by young people has declined since the 1990s. That’s the problem with Japan. Old practices aren’t being reformed even though many can see they aren’t working.
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Yet if Japan is ever going to emerge from its 20 years of malaise, the unusual is going to have to become usual. Otherwise, Japan could well be facing a Korea-style crisis. As Yuka Hayashi of The Wall Street Journal reported, there was concern at IMF meetings in Tokyo earlier this month about Japan’s worsening fiscal situation. The fear is that Japan, with the largest government debt burden (relative to its GDP) in the industrialized world, could end up facing a eurozone-style debt meltdown. “There are worries about the ability of the Japanese policy makers to reduce sufficiently their budget deficit,” IMF economist Olivier Blanchard said at the Tokyo meetings.
This is serious stuff. Japan has the ability to reform and avert a debt crisis, and people willing to lead the way to that change — if, that is, they are allowed to do so. I wish I could be more optimistic.
−−−−Dan O'Brien 1 comment −−−−
55 minutes ago
I was in Japan recently and it was very hard to see the trouble that all of you who report on it refer to. If the United States was anywhere near as safe, clean, or "flush" as Japan I think we'd all be thinking we'd just won the lottery.
I'm not saying that you are wrong, but I simply cannot SEE the problem. Everywhere I went I saw happy people with enough money to afford a nice lifestyle, with recycle shops that were full of nearly brand new merchandise (32in HD Televisions for $25, everyone has healthcare with no waiting in lines, food prices are lower than they are here.)
I just tried as hard as I could to find the great down economy and I could not. I even got a job while I was there, which is something I've yet to be able to do here although I have a 4 year degree in Biology and live in a major metropolitan area.
I would trade whatever problems Japan has for what they are doing right ANY DAY OF THE YEAR.
欧米から見た将来の日本−日本神話の崩壊
−「日本一番」を信奉した外国人学者の目覚め −
******
A declining Japan loses its once-hopeful champions
By Chico Harlan,
The Washington Post Saturday, October 27, 5:06 PM
YURIKO NAKAO/REUTERS - A woman passes a restaurant in Tokyo's Harajuku shopping district on Oct. 26, 2012. Japan remains mired in deflation, price data showed on Friday, piling pressure on the central bank to deliver more stimulus next week to keep the world's third-largest economy from sliding into recession.
TOKYO — Jesper Koll, an economist who’s lived in Japan for 26 years, says it’s not easy for him to keep faith in a country that’s shrinking, aging, stuck in protracted economic gloom and losing fast ground to China as the region’s dominant power.
“I am the last Japan optimist,” Koll said in a recent speech in Tokyo.
Indeed, the once-common species has been virtually wiped out. It was only two decades ago that Japan’s boosters — mainly foreign diplomats and authors, economists and entrepreneurs — touted the tiny nation as a global model for how to attain prosperity and power.
But the group has turned gradually into non­believers, with several of the last hold­outs losing faith only recently, as Japan has failed to carry out meaningful reforms after the March 2011 triple disaster.
The mass turnabout has helped launch an alternative — and increasingly accepted — school of thought about Japan: The country is not just in a prolonged slump but also in an inescapable decline.
There’s frequent evidence for that in economic data, and in the country’s destiny to become ever-smaller, doomed by demographics that will shrink the population from about 127 million today to 47 million in 2100, according to government data.
The current doom is a sharp reversal from several decades ago, when Japanese companies bought up Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center, and Americans argued whether Japan was to be feared or envied.
Like a separate but related group, known as “Japan bashers,” the optimists were bullish about Japan’s future as an economic powerhouse. But unlike the bashers, who viewed Japan as a dangerous challenger to the United States, the optimists saw Japan as a benevolent superpower — rich but peaceful, with a diligence worth emulating.
Now, when Japan is discussed, it’s instead for its unenviable fiscal problems — debt, rising social security costs, flagging trade with China because of an ongoing territorial dispute.
China, not Japan, is mentioned in U.S. presidential debates and described as the next threat to American supremacy. Japan’s government has announced record quarterly trade deficits while some of its iconic companies — Sony and Sharp — have announced staggering losses.
By 2050, Japan “will be the oldest society ever known,” with a median age of 52, according to the recent book “Megachange,” published by the Economist magazine. Even over the next decade, Japan’s aging population will drag down the gross domestic product by about 1 percent every year. That will further strain Japan’s economy, which in 2010 lost its status as the world’s second-largest, a position now claimed by China.
“If you speak optimistically about Japan, nobody even believes it,” Koll said. “They say, ‘Oh, in 600 years there will be 480 Japanese people left. The Japanese are dying out and debt is piling up for future generations.’ Japan is an easy whipping boy.”
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Japan optimism became a mainstream movement with the 1979 publication of “Japan As No. 1,” an international bestseller that described the way a country the size of Montana had come to make cars as well as the Germans, watches as well as the Swiss and steel as well as the Americans — in more efficient plants. Japan’s people worked hard, its government guided the economy, and its streets were clean and crime-free.
“Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of post­industrial society than any other country,” wrote author Ezra Vogel, a sociologist at Harvard.
But Vogel, who has lived for several periods in Japan, and has traveled here at least once a year since 1958, says he, too, has become a pessimist. Most Japanese still have a comfortable life, he says, but the political system is “an absolute mess,” juggling prime ministers almost every year. The youngest generation, its expectations sapped by years of deflation, “doesn’t have the excitement about doing things better.”
Even the promise of lifetime employment and tight cooperation between government and corporations has backfired, leaving a bureaucracy-enforced status quo that makes it hard for established companies to reform and for smaller, more creative companies to emerge.
“What I did not foresee is that the slowdown would be such a challenge — that many of the things that worked so well on the way up . . . would be so difficult on the way down,” Vogel said.
Vogel, still a professor emeritus at Harvard, says he has switched his focus in the past five years to China.
A disturbing trend
For more than a decade after Vogel’s book was published, his predictions seemed prescient. Between 1980 and 1990, Japan’s national wealth nearly tripled. Real estate prices in downtown Tokyo skyrocketed so high that analysts said the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than the state of California. Japanese companies bought up American landmarks, and some policymakers feared Japan was challenging U.S. supremacy, particularly by using protectionist trade policies that blocked American products.
Vogel credited Japan’s success in part to its willingness to study others. He described a nation obsessed with overseas travel: Students went to American universities, national sports coaches studied the training programs in other countries, trade ministry bureaucrats went on missions to Europe to hone policies. Japan even had programs in five foreign languages available on its national television networks.
But today, former Japan optimists see a disturbing trend. Fewer Japanese, they say, want to interact with the rest of the world, and undergraduate enrollment of Japanese students at U.S. universities has fallen more than 50 percent since 2000. The generation now entering Japan’s job market is described by older workers here as risk-averse and unambitious, with security and comfort their top priorities.
“They have just given up trying to be number one” said Yoichi Funabashi, former editor in chief of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative. “People think you just cannot beat China, so don’t even try. But that’s bad, because if you don’t train yourself on the international scene, you don’t . . . sharpen your edge. And you become more inward-looking. There’s a sense in Japan that we are unprepared to be a tough, competitive player in this global world.”
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Japan is famous among historians for its sudden transformations, re-engaging with the world in the mid-19th century after two centuries of isolation, later moving toward the militarism that helped launch World War II. After the mega-disaster last year, Japanese hoped for another transformation, with the reconstruction of a tsunami-battered region prompting a broader political and economic overhaul.
But Japanese increasingly feel that hasn’t happened, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. Just 39 percent now say that last year’s disaster has made Japan a stronger country, compared with 58 percent in a similar survey taken right after the earthquake and tsunami. (According to the same survey, released in June, 93 percent of the Japanese public describe the current state of the economy as bad.)
Preference for self-criticism
Global sentiment has swung so far against Japan, the last few optimists now relish the chance to make a case on Japan’s behalf.
Although Japan is commonly thought to be a “Detroit-like zone” with little chance for economic growth, former Sony chief executive Nobuyuki Idei said in an interview, the country still has a chance to prosper if it can tap into Asia’s booming economies as a trade partner or investor. Tokyo-based venture capitalist Yoshito Hori said that Japan’s many strengths are often overlooked, because Japanese prefer self-criticism to self-promotion.
“The value of Japan is, even when we do something good, we rarely say it,” Hori said.
“When the Chinese achieve something, they say, ‘We have done this.’ ” Japanese must learn to do the same, Hori said, “otherwise, we will lose our position globally.”
That’s partly why Koll, a ­JPMorgan Japan manager, decided this summer to give a TED talk — the common name for a series of pop-education ­speeches — in which he described his reasons for being the last optimist.
Japan has the world’s most competent financial regulator, Koll said, and a per capita GDP several times that of China. Real estate prices are back down to 1981 levels — “wealth destruction has been tremendous,” he said — but Japan has weathered this while still retaining its social cohesion and relative quality of life, with an unemployment rate of just 4.2 percent.
But Koll also admitted in his speech that being bullish on Japan is tantamount to saying Elvis is still alive.
“Things have changed,” he said. “When I first got here, I had conversations with people who said, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky to speak Japanese, because we’ll all be working for the Japanese soon.’ You know, those are the things they’re saying about China now.”
円高で日本企業による外国籍企業の「合併と買収」が盛んとあるが、日本のリーダーシップが通用し成功につながるかは別問題。
*****
Japanese companies complete record number of overseas M&As
Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012 Kyodo
The number of mergers and acquisitions of foreign businesses by Japanese companies in the January-September period rose 7.4 percent from last year to 364, a record high for the reporting period, according to a survey by M&A advisory firm Recof Corp.
The survey underscored the role played by the yen's strength against the dollar and other major currencies in encouraging Japanese companies to pursue investments overseas, especially as domestic demand shrinks.
According to the survey, the previous record for the reporting period was 359 deals in 1990 — toward the end of the bubble economy era — when many Japanese companies were using surplus funds to buy overseas assets. The survey was first compiled in 1985.
With Softbank Corp. announcing a deal earlier this month to acquire a 70 percent stake in major U.S. cellphone company Spring Nextel Corp. for about \1.57 trillion, the current M&A momentum shows no signs of slowing.
By the end of 2012, it is highly possible the number of overseas deals involving Japanese companies will exceed the annual record of 463 marked in 1990.
By value, such M&A deals from January to September jumped 22.9 percent from the previous year to \4.99 trillion, the third-highest amount for the reporting period after \6.14 trillion in 2008 and \5.12 trillion in 2006.
M&A deals announced this year by Japanese companies include major advertising agency Dentsu Inc.'s buyout of British peer Aegis Group PLC for about \390 billion, and air conditioning equipment maker Daikin Industries Ltd.'s acquisition of U.S. rival Goodman Global Inc. for around \290 billion.
The safe haven yen has sharply appreciated against other major currencies amid the European sovereign debt crisis, with the dollar trading below \80 for much of the past year, down from a level of around \90 during most of a 20-month period through mid-2010. The strong yen makes purchasing overseas companies cheaper for Japanese businesses.
However, some analysts say souring ties between Japan and China is a worrisome factor going forward. One official at a major brokerage firm said the deterioration of diplomatic relations over the Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands, which are claimed by China, and the economic slowdown in the world's second-largest economy could put a brake on the current rate of M&A activity.
Economy unexpectedly contracts in fourth quarter
By Jim Puzzanghera
January 30, 2013, 6:25 a.m.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.1% annualized rate in the last three months of 2012 amid fears about the fiscal cliff, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
It was the first time economic growth contracted since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009 and showed how much the concerns about large tax hikes and federal spending cuts weighed on businesses as last year drew to a close.
A last-minute deal in Washington averted most of the tax increases and delayed the automatic spending cuts. Economists say they believe that will lead to economic growth in the first three months of 2013.
But Thursday's report -- the government's first estimate of fourth-quarter economic activity -- was a surprise.
QUIZ: Test your knowledge about the debt limit
Economists has projected that the gross domestic product -- the nation's total economic output -- would expand about 1% in the fourth quarter, a slowdown from the 3.1% growth in the July-through-September period.
But a drop in inventory investment by businesses, federal government spending and U.S. exports led to the first contraction since the economy shrank 0.3% in the second quarter of 2009.
Leading the drop in government outlays was a 22.2% drop in defense spending.
"The economy ended 2012 on a very sluggish pace, even though one-time factors put the number below the trend," said Kathy Bostjancic, director for macroeconomic analysis at the Conference Board.
"While the inventory runoff and the steep decline in defense spending in the fourth quarter made economic activity look weaker than it really was, the underlying demand from consumers and businesses kept moving forward at a moderate pace," she said.
Eurozone jobless rate climbs to record 11.9% in January
The 17-member single-currency bloc continues to grapple with recession and the effects of stringent government cutbacks.
By Don Lee, Los Angeles Times
March 1, 2013, 6:09 p.m.
The toll from the Eurozone debt crisis mounted in January.
The Eurozone's jobless rate climbed to a record 11.9%, from 11.8% in December, as the 17-member single-currency bloc continues to grapple with recession and the effects of stringent government cutbacks, according to figures reported Friday.
By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate was 7.9% in January, and its highest since the Great Depression was 10.8% during the 1982-83 recession. The Eurozone's population is about 317 million, similar to the U.S.
The U.S. jobless rate for February will be released March 8.
Within the Eurozone, jobless rates varied widely. Spain's rate ticked higher in January to 26.2%. Neighboring Portugal saw its jobless figure go up to 17.6%.
Joblessness in Italy, the Eurozone's third-largest economy, also moved higher, to 11.7% in January. And it edged up to 10.6% for France, the No. 2 economy.
On the other end of the spectrum, Germany, the region's largest economy, held its jobless rate at a comparatively comfortable 5.3%, even though its economic output declined in the fourth quarter.
Eurostat, the statistical agency for the European Union, said the jobless rate for the Eurozone's youth — 15- to 24-year-olds — rose to 24.2%.
"Most EU nations effectively have dual labor markets, with permanent jobs typically protected by unions and held by people older than 35 and temporary jobs that are unprotected and held by younger workers," Anna Zabrodzka, an economist at Moody's Analytics' office in Prague, Czech Republic, wrote in a research note Friday.
Analysts said the unemployment rate was likely to rise still higher as the recession drags on and the economic and political fallout from the fiscal crisis continues. Italy's recent inconclusive parliamentary elections, for example, have renewed concerns about that country's financial stability and its structural reforms.
"Rising unemployment, higher taxes, weakening wage growth and tightened credit are eating into household purchasing power and constraining household spending," Zabrodzka said. "The subdued global environment and fiscal austerity will affect economic activity in the Eurozone."
生糸生産ランキング−中国、インド、タイ、サウスコリア、イラン。
****
Uganda silk production set for 2012
Sunday, 09 October 2011 20:56 Patrick Jaramogi
KAMPALA - Uganda is set to join the world's top producers of silk-worm once the 1,000 hectare Kisozi silk-rearing project starts production next year.
The Iran Agro Industrial Group initiated project will be producing close to 1,500 metric tones of Silk, similar to Iran, currently ranked fifth in silk production in the world. China tops the charts followed by India, Thailand and South Korea.
The USD$9million investment that is currently employing over 500 people will boost the silk product manufacturing plants in Iran.
"We have so far planted over 5,000 mulberry trees that are instrumental in silk rearing. We are using so far 1,000 hectares of the 14,000 hectare farm in Kisozi for silk rearing," said Mohammad Ali Mousavi, the Chairman Iran Uganda Establishments.
He told East African Business Week at the just concluded Uganda Manufacturers Association (UMA) International Trade fair at Lugogo that once production starts, Uganda will be exporting silk worth USD$200,000 (Shs560m) each year.
He said Iran decided to invest in Uganda due to the good weather and market opportunities.
"Rearing of silk in Iran is becoming so hard due to expensive land and space. Whereas we can produce silk seven times a year in Uganda, in Iran it is twice a year. That means we can produce more here," said Mousavi.
"We have the capacity of producing 30 bags of egg worms from just one hectare of land," explained Mousavi.
Silk, a natural protein fiber can be woven into textiles. The best-known type of silk is obtained from the cocoons of the larvae that feed on leaves of the mulberry tree.
The table data comes from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's FAOSTAT database and has been displayed with the permission of FAO. The data was downloaded from FAOSTAT on 02/16/2012.
Rank Country Number (tonnes)
1 China 126,001
2 India 19,000
3 Viet Nam 7,367
4 Turkmenistan 4,500
5 Romania 2,100
6 Thailand 1,600
7 Brazil 1,300
8 Uzbekistan 1,200
9 Iran (Islamic Republic of) 900
10 Democratic People's Republic of Korea 350
11 Tajikistan 200
12 Indonesia 120
13 Japan 105
14 Turkey 50
15 Kyrgyzstan 50
16 Afghanistan 50
17 Cambodia 25
18 Spain 15
19 Italy 12
20 Lebanon 10
21 Greece 5
22 Bulgaria 5
23 Republic of Korea 3
24 Egypt 3
Silk fabric was first developed in ancient China and later spread around the world via the 'Silk Road' and became popular among super-rich or high society. Nowadays silk is an affordable luxury for the middle class in Europe and the USA, and continues to hold its own in Asia as traditional ceremonial wear.
Even though silk has a small percentage of the global textile market - less than 0.2% (the precise global value is difficult to assess, since reliable data on finished silk products is lacking in most importing countries) - its production base is spread over 60 countries in the world. While the major producers are in Asia (90% of mulberry production and almost 100% of non-mulberry silk), sericulture industries have been lately established in Brazil, Bulgaria, Egypt and Madagascar as well. Sericulture is labour-intensive. About 1 million workers are employed in the silk sector in China. Sericulture provides income for 700,000 households in India, and 20,000 weaving families in Thailand (FAO, 2009). China is the worlds single biggest producer and chief supplier of silk to the world markets. India is the worlds second largest producer. Ten per cent of world silk is produced altogether by Brazil, North Korea, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Sericulture can help keeping the rural population employed and to prevent migration to big cities and securing remunerative employment; it requires small investments while providing raw material for textile industries.
Supply and demand of raw silk
The five largest fresh cocoon producing countries are (in brackets average production of last 4 years in tonnes of per year is reported): China (500,000), India (126,000), Uzbekistan (20,200), Brazil (14,000) and Vietnam (13,000).
Countries with more than 300 tonnes of fresh cocoons per year are: Thailand, North and South Korea, Japan, Iran, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. Altogether approximately 35 to 40 counties are involved in sericulture. World production of raw silk is an average of 80,000 tonnes per year, about 70% of which is produced in China.
Originally published in New Cloth Market, December 2011
Dollar hits 100 yen, stocks slip after rally
By Rodrigo Campos
NEW YORK | Thu May 9, 2013 5:35pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar broke through 100 yen on Thursday, its highest level against the currency in over four years, while stocks in major markets slipped from recent record levels.
Investors sold the low-yielding yen as support from central banks around the world continued to push cash into higher-yielding assets. U.S. stocks fell slightly after recent gains from a rally that had taken the S&P 500 index to record highs for five straight sessions.
The dollar got support from U.S. data showing first-time applications for unemployment insurance fell last week to the lowest level in more than five years.
"A stampede out of safety and brightening U.S. job prospects helped catapult the dollar over the key triple-digit threshold against the yen," Joe Manimbo, senior market analyst at Western Union Business Solutions in Washington, said in a note.
The yen is on track for eight straight months of declines against the greenback, shedding more than 30 percent since its September high near 77. A major stimulus program by the Bank of Japan last month to revive the economy has helped prolong the yen's weakening trend.
U.S. stocks slipped but the recent uptrend remains intact, giving room for declines after the strong climb.
"This market is so stretched to the upside that if we get some little wiggle somewhere, I can easily see us getting back down to 1,580" on the S&P 500, said Stephen Massocca, managing director of Wedbush Equity Management LLC in San Francisco.
Pullbacks in U.S. equities have been short-lived and shallow even as traders have said the market could benefit from a correction. The expectation of continued accommodative monetary policy from central banks globally has sustained support for stocks.
At the close the Dow Jones industrial average finance/markets/index?symbol=us%21dji">.DJI fell 22.5 points or 0.15 percent, to 15,082.62, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 6.02 points or 0.37 percent, to 1,626.67 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 4.1 points or 0.12 percent, to 3,409.17.
The Euro STOXX 50 .STOXX50E index dropped 0.4 percent, retreating from a near two-year high but finding support at an upward trendline from lows hit on April 18. The pan-European FTSEurofirst .FTEU3 closed flat to stay near five-year highs.
The MSCI world index .MIWD00000PUS, which tracks stocks in 45 countries, was down 0.7 percent after earlier hitting its highest level since June 2008.
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The U.S. dollar .DXY rose against major currencies almost 1 percent and above its 14- and 50-day moving averages.
The yen closed the session down 1.6 percent at 100.59 per dollar.
The euro was down 0.8 percent at $1.3045 after earlier hitting a high of $1.3177.
The euro was pressured by slightly softer-than-expected demand at a Spanish debt auction, while Spanish government bond yields rose.
Brent crude edged up in volatile trade and U.S. crude settled slightly down, as investors weighed Middle East tensions against weak demand and high inventories.
U.S. oil fell 23 cents to settle at $96.39 a barrel and was down further in extended trading. Brent crude edged up 13 cents to settle at $104.47 per barrel and later dropped 9 cents to $104.25.
Brent has dipped from a one-month high of $105.94 touched on Tuesday after Israeli air strikes on Syria over the weekend stoked supply fears.
"There's a tug of war here; the demand is not going to be there, but the economy is slowly improving," said Mark Waggoner, president at Excel Futures in Bend, Oregon.
Saudi Arabia increased crude oil output by 160,000 barrels per day to 9.3 million bpd in April, industry sources said this week, adding to an already well-supplied global market.
Spanish bond yields rose on speculation Madrid may be planning another bond sale after borrowing costs fell at Thursday's auction of just over 4.5 billion euros of new debt.
The country's 10-year bond yields were 8 basis points higher at 4.195 percent, having moved away from the 2-1/2 year lows of 3.954 percent touched last Friday.
Prices for U.S. Treasuries were flat as investors balanced stronger-than-expected jobs data with expectations that riskier assets such as equities could see a correction soon.
The U.S. 10-year Treasury note yield inched up to 1.811 percent, the highest in nearly a month. The U.S. 30-year bond traded down 5/32 to yield 2.994 percent from 2.987 percent late on Wednesday.
Gold prices fell after the U.S. jobs data, with dollar strength weakening the price further. Spot gold was down 1 percent to $1,456.69. The metal gained 1.4 percent in the previous session, its biggest one-day rise in two weeks.
(Additional reporting by Angela Moon, Julie Haviv, Anna Louie Sussman and Ellen Freilich; Editing by Dan Grebler and Kenneth Barry)
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ばら色に描くアナリスト。その裏に潜む危険。輸入品や石油や光熱費や消費税の値上がり。貧富の差の拡大。アベノミクスは庶民の敵なのか。日本経済は全く予断を許さない。
*****
Japan's first-quarter growth spurt shows early benefits of Abe's policy gamble
By Tetsushi Kajimoto and Kaori Kaneko
TOKYO | Thu May 16, 2013 1:38am EDT
(Reuters) - Japan's economy expanded at a rapid clip at the start of the year, the first hard evidence that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's sweeping stimulus is beginning to rouse consumers and businesses into action even as risks loomed in the horizon.
Corporate investment, seen as an essential ingredient of a sustained recovery, fell for the fifth consecutive quarter though analysts expect improved business sentiment will eventually translate into more spending.
Gross domestic product rose 0.9 percent from the previous quarter, against the median forecast of a 0.7 percent rise in a Reuters poll of 24 analysts.
That translated into an annualized 3.5 percent growth, the fastest in a year, and topped a 1 percent rise in the fourth quarter, cementing a turnaround from six months of contraction in 2012.
It also outpaced U.S. growth in the same period for the second straight quarter. The last time Japan's growth trumped that of the world's biggest economy was in the first quarter of 2012.
"Personal consumption was really strong and exports did better than expected. Stock gains and expectations for higher salaries are driving consumption now," said Hiroaki Muto, senior economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.
The Cabinet Office data -- which covers the first full quarter since Abe's return to power in late December -- is viewed as the first comprehensive report card on his plan to revive the world's third-largest economy.
The solid readings validate Abe's "three-arrow" strategy to break a deflationary cycle, and should help him retain high support ahead of an election for the upper house of parliament in July. Victory would give his Liberal Democrat Party control of both houses of parliament.
The first quarter gain mainly reflects the psychological effects of improved expectations boosting domestic demand as households responded to the wealth-creating effects of a soaring stock market.
Abe is hoping to jolt the economy out of its two-decade long slumber with his "Abenomics" policy mix of unprecedented monetary stimulus, extra budget spending and promised pro-growth policies, and analysts expect those efforts to pay off in months ahead.
Sumitomo Mitsui's Muto said that despite a slow recovery in capital expenditure the economy should maintain its momentum.
"The GDP data would suggest that things are going well for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe heading into the upper house election."
The key to more lasting improvement will be whether the benefits reaped by exporters from the yen's rapid retreat will filter through to a broader economy, kicking off a virtuous cycle of more jobs, higher wages, profits and investment.
This is crucial if Abe's gamble is to pay dividends, with critics questioning the Bank of Japan's plan to flood the economy with money to the tune of $1.4 trillion in two years.
The BOJ's plan to double its government debt holdings has sent the yen sharply lower against the dollar and boosted share prices by 70 percent since last November, as Tokyo banks on Japan's export-reliant economy kicking into high gear on the back of a cheap currency.
Economists say companies, still cautious about their future, should start spending more in the current quarter.
"There is certain demand for capex among companies as exports are expected to recover, some firms need to update their facilities and there will be positive effect from the government's extra budget. I think capital spending will rise in April-June," said Yuichi Kodama, chief economist at Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance.
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Capital spending fell 0.7 percent in the quarter, defying expectations of a 0.7 percent increase, weighing a Tokyo stock market finance/markets/index?symbol=jp%21n225">.N225 that was initially buoyed by gains on Wall Street and a weaker yen.
Investors will closely watch data for core machinery orders due to be released on Friday and expected to show a 2.8 percent increase in March, as well as companies' forecasts for the following quarter.
Private consumption, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the economy, rose 0.9 percent as expected and was up for a second consecutive quarter, reflecting the better consumer mood helped in part by a buoyant stock market.
Exports, helped by the yen's retreat to 4-1/2-year lows against the dollar, beat expectations, making a 0.4 percent net contribution to GDP, despite higher import costs caused by a weaker currency.
Economics Minister Akira Amari said the GDP data showed the economy appears to be developing favorable conditions for a planned sales tax hike from April 2014, although a final decision will be made after second quarter data, due in August.
"We got off to a good start," Amari told reporters. "We'd like to develop conditions ... towards autumn."
RISKS
There are still some risks to the favorable scenario painted by the latest data.
Japan's aging and shrinking population poses a challenge to Abe's yet-to-be articulated plans to squeeze more growth out of the mature, highly developed economy.
Consumer spending could also suffer from rising costs of energy and imported goods unless the summer round of bonuses boosts incomes enough to make up for a squeeze in disposable incomes.
Another source of concern is an uncertain global outlook, underlined recently by a string of weak data from the United States and China, Japan's two biggest export markets.
Abe also has yet to deliver pro-growth reforms, considered necessary to bring back long-term solid growth that has eluded Japan for the past two decades.
There are also heightened worries over rising interest rates in the government bond market, which could undermine the BOJ's policies and refocus attention on Japan's huge public debt burden worth more than twice the size of its economy.
Yet the tailwind of extra stimulus spending is expected to sustain the momentum at least for the remainder of this year.
"The economy will enjoy strong growth for another year or so. It's no longer just about brightening sentiment and rises in equities prices. There's now proof that Abenomics is working and that the economy is on a solid footing," said Yoshiki Shinke, senior economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo.
(Additional reporting by Chris Gallagher, Stanley White and Leika Kihara; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Shri Navaratnam)
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Analysis: Little sign Abe can shake up Japan's inbound FDI
By Stanley White
TOKYO | Sun May 19, 2013 5:25pm EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan risks missing, yet again, an opportunity to use foreign investment to help fuel sustained economic growth that has eluded it for the last two decades.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to make Japan "the world's easiest country for companies to do business in" as part of his economic revival plan, which so far has been largely met with approval. The stock market has rallied 45 percent this year and Abe's approval ratings are around 70 percent.
Abe gave further hints on Friday about government plans to be unveiled in a longer-term economic growth strategy, referring to tripling infrastructure exports and doubling farm exports.
But a month before that strategy is due to be unveiled, his efforts to ramp up inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) are showing little indication a trickle of foreign investment will turn into a tide.
"Over the last five years, 90 percent of my work has been outbound deals," said Ken Lebrun, chair of the FDI committee at the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a partner at the law firm Shearman & Sterling specializing in mergers and acquisitions.
"The reason is the same as why Japanese companies haven't been acquiring companies in Japan: growth prospects are poor. Hopefully, Abe's reforms will improve these perceptions."
At first glance, Japan is tough to sell to a foreign investor. Its population is ageing and quickly shrinking. Its own corporations are pessimistic about home markets and have been hoarding cash or investing overseas.
Yet its appeal lies in the sheer size of the $5 trillion-plus economy, the world's third-largest, a survey by international consultancy Accenture showed in March last year.
In insurance and pharmaceuticals, areas of foreign investor interest, Japan is second only to the United States in market size, reports from ratings agency Standard & Poor's and research firm IMS Medical show.
Standing in the way of foreign investment are barriers that have kept Japan at the bottom of the FDI league table.
Compared with the size of the economy, foreign direct investment inflows into Japan are the lowest among the 34 developed nations grouped in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The total amount of inward FDI was less than 4 percent of its economic output at the end of 2011. In comparison, Britain's was 48.8 percent of GDP in 2011, while in the United States it was nearly a fifth of GDP.
The OECD's index of regulatory restrictions to FDI, which includes limits on foreign equity holdings, screening and approval procedures, rules on hiring foreigners and rules on repatriating capital, showed Japan was the club's most closed economy in 2012.
To break the mould, Japan needs to simplify and reduce corporate taxes, cut red tape and scale back regulations that are so excessive that they even deter Japanese firms, economists say.
"The single biggest area that Britain and other countries would welcome is a bigger move on deregulation and liberalization," said Sue Kinoshita, director of trade and investment at the British Embassy.
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The benefits of foreign investment would be heightened competition for skilled workers, which could help reverse a long decline in Japanese wages and boost productivity, helping to address concerns about the "hollowing out" of manufacturing.
"We have a lot of outgoing FDI, so we need to balance this with more incoming FDI," said Yasuo Yamamoto, senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute.
Rather than break the mould though, the advisory panels charged with drafting the growth strategy are discussing only modest steps, such as tax breaks for special economic zones.
One idea is to provide incentives for English-speaking doctors to work in Japan and another is to run Tokyo's subway and bus networks 24 hours a day. Proponents suggest that would make Japan more attractive to foreign executives.
Areas that are likely to remain a no-go zone for foreigners are agriculture and construction, two industries that tend to rely on cozy government ties for protection.
At 1.2 percent of GDP, the size of Japan's agriculture sector is about the same as many developed economies.
The appeal is that whoever can fix the sector's notorious lack of efficiency stands a better chance at marketing Japan's high-end vegetables, beef and other produce to gourmet consumers overseas.
Construction, on the other hand, may not hold much appeal to foreign firms as there are few prospects for growth after decades of excessive public works projects.
Elderly care is one area that will be growing as Japan ages. A third of Japanese will be 65 or older by 2035, up from a quarter now.
It is ripe for new entrants, foreign or local, but it is also a prime example of the red tape keeping newcomers at bay.
Each of Japan's 47 prefectures issue the licenses for nursing homes in their areas. But local governments often deny licenses to avoid the subsidies they have to pay to nursing home workers, who themselves have to hold several licenses and qualifications to work.
Pharmaceutical firms complain that strict rules on clinical trials and on prescribing new drugs make access to the Japanese market lengthier and costlier than other leading economies.
Some economists say Japan should make it easier for foreign companies to enter the renewable energy market in Japan as the country ponders life without nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Letting foreign players in is sometimes the best way to shake things up, such as when French automaker Renault (RENA.PA) took over Nissan Motor Co Ltd (7201.T) in 1999.
Nissan's chief Carlos Ghosn implemented what become known as the "Ghosn shock" by aggressively pushing its steel suppliers to cut prices. At the time Japanese automakers did not dare to squeeze their long-time suppliers.
The result was lower steel prices for all automakers and a restructuring of the steel industry.
絹遺産群で大騒ぎしている群馬だが、中国のシルクロードは世界経済を動かす大事業の舞台。冷戦の現実。イラン、中国、ロシアを中心とした反民主主義勢力が世界を主導するなんて、想像するだけで背筋に冷たいものが走る。
*****
New Silk Road Could Change Global Economics Forever
By Robert Berke of Oilprice.com Posted on Thu, 21 May 2015 20:58 | 1
Part 1: The New Silk Road
Beginning with the marvelous tales of Marco Polo’s travels across Eurasia to China, the Silk Road has never ceased to entrance the world. Now, the ancient cities of Samarkand, Baku, Tashkent, and Bukhara are once again firing the world’s imagination.
China is building the world’s greatest economic development and construction project ever undertaken: The New Silk Road. The project aims at no less than a revolutionary change in the economic map of the world. It is also seen by many as the first shot in a battle between east and west for dominance in Eurasia.
The ambitious vision is to resurrect the ancient Silk Road as a modern transit, trade, and economic corridor that runs from Shanghai to Berlin. The 'Road' will traverse China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Germany, extending more than 8,000 miles, creating an economic zone that extends over one third the circumference of the earth.
The plan envisions building high-speed railroads, roads and highways, energy transmission and distributions networks, and fiber optic networks. Cities and ports along the route will be targeted for economic development.
An equally essential part of the plan is a sea-based “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR) component, as ambitious as its land-based project, linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.
When completed, like the ancient Silk Road, it will connect three continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. The chain of infrastructure projects will create the world's largest economic corridor, covering a population of 4.4 billion and an economic output of $21 trillion.
Politics and Finance:
The idea for reviving the New Silk Road was first announced in 2013 by the Chinese President, Xi Jinping. As part of the financing of the plan, in 2014, the Chinese leader also announced the launch of an Asian International Infrastructure Bank (AIIB), providing seed funding for the project, with an initial Chinese contribution of $47 billion.
China has invited the international community of nations to take a major role as bank charter members and partners in the project. Members will be expected to contribute, with additional funding by international funds, including the World Bank, investments from private and public companies, and local governments.
Some 58 nations have signed on to become charter bank members, including most of Western Europe, along with many Silk Road and Asian countries. There are 12 NATO countries among AIIB´s founding member states (UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Norway), along with three of the main US military allies in Asia (Australia, S. Korea and New Zealand).
After failed attempts by the US to persuade allies against joining the bank, the US reversed course, and now says that it has always supported the project, a disingenuous position considering the fact that US opposition was hardly a secret. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2014 that “the U.S. has also lobbied hard against Chinese plans for a new infrastructure development bank…including during teleconferences of the Group of Seven major industrial powers.
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The Huffington Post’s Alastair Crooke had this to say on the matter: “For very different motives, the key pillars of the region (Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan) are re-orienting eastwards. It is not fully appreciated in the West how important China's "Belt and Road" initiative is to this move (and Russia, of course is fully integrated into the project). Regional states can see that China is very serious indeed about creating huge infrastructure projects from Asia to Europe. They can also see what occurred with the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as the world piled in (to America's very evident dismay). These states intend to be a part of it.”
Buttressing this effort, China plans on injecting at least $62 billion into three banks to support the New Silk Road. The China Development Bank (CDB) will receive $32 billion, the Export Import Bank of China (EXIM) will take on $30 billion, and the Chinese government will also pump additional capital into the Agricultural Development Bank of China (ADBC).
The US: Unlikely Partner on the Silk Road:
Will the US join the effort? If the new Trans-Pacific Partnership (that pointedly leaves out both Russia and China, two Pacific powers) is any indication, US participation seems unlikely and opposition all but certain.
But there's no good reason that America should sacrifice its own leadership role in the region to China. A project as vast and complicated as the Silk Road will need US technology, experience, and resources to lower risk, removing political barriers for other allied countries like Japan to join in, while maintaining US influence in Eurasia. The Silk Road could enhance US objectives, and US support could improve the outcome of the project.
An editorial in the Wall St. Journal argues that the US proposed trade agreement and China's sponsored Silk Road project are complimentary, with the trade agreement aimed at writing rules for international trade, while the Chinese aim at developing infrastructure is necessary for increased trade.
Initial Project:
A look at the first project, currently under development, provides a good example of how China plans to proceed.
The first major economic development project will take place in Pakistan, where the Chinese have been working for years, building and financing a strategic deepwater port at Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea, that will be managed by China as the long-term leaseholder.
Gwadar will become the launching point for the much delayed Iran-Pakistan natural gas pipeline, which will ultimately be extended to China, with the Persian section already built and the Pakistan-Chinese section largely financed and constructed by the Chinese.
The pipeline is also set to traverse the country, following the Karakoram Mountain Highway towards Tibet, and cross the Chinese western border to Xinjang. The highway will also be widened and modernized, and a railroad built, connecting the highway to Gwadar.
Originally, the plan was to extend the pipeline to India, with Qatar joining Iran as natural gas suppliers, forging what some considered a “peace pipeline” between India and Pakistan, but India withdrew, under pressure from the US along with its own concerns over having its energy supplies dependent upon its adversary, Pakistan.
India's Counter:
Not surprisingly, India, a US ally, countered China's initiative with one of its own, announcing a new agreement to build a port in Iran on the Arabian Sea, only a few hundred miles from Gwadar, bringing Iranian energy to India via Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan.
Although it would offer an alternative to the Chinese-backed Gwadar initiative, the US warned India not to move ahead with the port project before a final nuclear agreement between Iran and the West is actually signed.
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Both the Chinese and Indian projects are clearly in defiance of international sanctions on Iran, but both countries appear unconcerned. The Chinese could also be accused of a ‘double dip’ sanctions violation, given the immense and continuing trade deals it negotiated with Russia.
The rest of the business world is sure to follow, or risk losing out in what is certain to be a new “gold rush” towards Asia in a world still struggling with the lingering effects of the great recession. And New Delhi pointed out the harsh truth: American energy companies are also trying to negotiate deals with Iran. Following on the heels of the US visit, the German mission is due in Tehran soon, with the French beating everyone to the punch in an earlier visit.
What then of sanctions? Sanctions only work in a world united behind them. If a large part of the world chooses to ignore sanctions, they become unenforceable.
Conclusions:
China and much of the world is intent on developing the largest economic development project in history, one that could have dramatic ripple effects throughout the world economy.
The project is expected to take decades, with costs running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions. What that will mean for the world economy and trade is almost inconceivable. Is it any wonder then, that the world’s largest hedge funds, like Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, are rushing to market new multi-billion dollar international infrastructure investment funds?
No doubt a project as large and complex as this is likely to have failures, and is certain to face many western geopolitical obstructions. Assuredly, the “great game” will continue. Look no further than US President Barack Obama, who also senses the urgency. “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” he said in defense of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In a world where economic growth is tepid, with Europe still struggling with the aftermath of the global recession, along with China's growth slowdown, where else could a project that promises so much opportunity be found?
It's a good bet that giant iron mining companies like Vale, that have seen their business fall to a thirteen-year low, are currently busy figuring how much steel goes into construction of a new, high speed 8,000 mile railroad. If the project is successful, it could very well spark a boom across the entire depressed international mining, commodities, and construction sectors.
Consider how many jobs could be created in a decades-long construction project that spans a huge region of the world. In practically every sector, the prospects are enormous for a revival of trade and commerce.
The ancient Silk Road increased trade across the known world, but the Road also offered far more than trade. One of its least anticipated benefits was the widespread exchange of knowledge, learning, discovery, and culture.
Beyond the riches of silks, spices, and jewelry, it could be argued that the most important thing that Marco Polo brought back from China was a famous nautical and world map that was the basis for one of the most famous maps published in Europe, one that helped spark the Age of Discovery. Christopher Columbus was guided by that map and was known to have a well-annotated copy of Marco Polo's travel tales with him on his voyage of discovery of a new route to India.
For the world at large, its decisions about the Road are nothing less than momentous. The massive project holds the potential for a new renaissance in commerce, industry, discovery, thought, invention, and culture that could well rival the original Silk Road. It is also becoming clearer by the day that geopolitical conflicts over the project could lead to a new cold war between East and West for dominance in Eurasia.
The outcome is far from certain.
Coming in May, Part 2: Cold War or Competition on the New Silk Road.
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グローバル下の貿易関税における消費者保護重視のアメリカ経済学。
****
Donald Trump wants you to pay more for smartphones, TVs and a lot else
Yahoo Finance By Rick Newman Jan.8.2016/2 hours ago
View photo=U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds up his notes of a recent poll at a campaign rally in Claremont
What to do about China? It employs millions of people manufacturing things that used to be Made in America, and sells way more stuff to the United States than it buys from us.
Donald Trump’s solution is to get tough on China by imposing steep new tariffs on products made in China. The Republican presidential candidate told the New York Times recently that he’d levy a 45% tax on Chinese imports. The idea is to make Chinese goods more expensive so that American producers who pay their workers more can gain a competitive edge.
There’s a painful side effect to this plan, however: It would, well, make a lot of products more expensive, and most of the price hikes would come straight out of consumer wallets. China ships about $500 billion worth of goods to the United States every year, which is about one-fourth of all imports. Goods from China include iPhones, TVs, clothes, furniture, toys and a lot of other things found in nearly every American home. A 45% tariff on Chinese imports would encourage other low-cost exporters, such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Mexico, to ship more goods to America. Whether U.S. producers would gain an edge is debatable.
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Protectionists often argue that the cost of tariffs is borne largely by producers in foreign countries. But inevitably, some or most of any additional tax gets passed on to people who buy the products. “When you institute a tariff, the price goes up for consumers,” says economist Adam Ozimek of Moody’s Analytics. “People will also buy less. So consumers are hurt not just by rising prices, but by consuming less.”
The portion of Trump’s 45% tax that would be passed onto consumers would depend on how much competition there is for any given product. Anything made exclusively in China would become considerably more expensive. A fancy $100 sweater made only in China wouldn’t suddenly cost $145, because there would be fewer buyers at the higher price, and weaker demand would force the manufacturer to adjust the price downward. But it might rise to $115 or $125, since the producer won’t sell at a loss and would have to account for the big jump in costs caused by the new tariff.
Even if there’s competition from producers in other countries, prices would still rise somewhat, since higher prices from one major source allows other sources to raise their prices, too, and make a bit more profit. So if clothes made in China were suddenly 45% more expensive to Americans, similar clothes made in Bangladesh would cost more, as well―not 45% more, but still, more.
That might help American producers making competing products, but even if it did, prices for consumers would still go up. And many low-wage industries that have migrated to China, such as textiles and electronics manufacturing, are likely to stay there. American businesses and entrepreneurs are more interested in making specialized products that can't be produced just anywhere, and in coming up with new producs that command higher profit margins. The best way to boost U.S. growth is to encourage high-end innovation, not to fence off low-wage jobs that can be performed anywhere.
If Trump were to get elected and actually put his tariff into effect, it would reverse a 20-year trend of declining prices for many consumer goods, which has helped offset the rising cost of important things like healthcare and college tuition and occasional spikes in the cost of energy. Overall inflation, excluding food and energy, is a scant 2% at the moment, a level so low that economists worry more about deflation than inflation. But a big tariff on imports would quickly make inflation a big pocketbook concern and leave consumers with less money to spend on other things. Combine that with rising energy prices or some other mild shock and it could even cause a recession.
Trump’s tariff plan would likely meet firm public resistance. Economists would also protest. “Economists disagree about a lot,” says Ozimek, “but there’s very strong agreement that free trade benefits Americans, on average.” A poll of economists by the University of Chicago, for instance, found that 100% of them believe U.S. trade with China makes most Americans better off.
Most economists also agree that free trade―like anything that improves efficiency and market performance―produces winners and losers. And the losers usually include people who get the job done slower, at a higher cost than competitors. Protecting underperformers isn’t likely to help the U.S. economy. Helping them perform better would.
Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
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Denmark Ranks as Happiest Country; Burundi, Not So Much
MARCH 16, 2016 By SEWELL CHAN The New York Times
Photo=Denmark has topped the World Happiness Report every year but one since 2012. Credit Nils Meilvang/European Pressphoto Agency
LONDON ― Denmark has reclaimed its place as the world’s happiest country, while Burundi ranks as the least happy nation, according to the fourth World Happiness Report, released on Wednesday.
The report found that inequality was strongly associated with unhappiness ― a stark finding for rich countries like the United States, where rising disparities in income, wealth, health and well-being have fueled political discontent.
Denmark topped the list in the first report, in 2012, and again in 2013, but it was displaced by Switzerland last year. In this year’s ranking, Denmark was back at No. 1, followed by Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden. Most are fairly homogeneous nations with strong social safety nets.
At the bottom of the list of more than 150 countries was Burundi, where a violent political crisis broke out last year. Burundi was preceded by Syria, Togo, Afghanistan, Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania and Madagascar. All of those nations are poor, and many have been destabilized by war, disease or both.
Of the world’s most populous nations, China came in at No. 83, India at No. 118, the United States at No. 13, Indonesia at No. 79, Brazil at No. 17, Pakistan at No. 92, Nigeria at No. 103, Bangladesh at No. 110, Russia at No. 56, Japan at No. 53 and Mexico at No. 21. The United States rose two spots, from No. 15 in 2015.
From 2005 to 2015, Greece saw the largest drop in happiness of any country, a reflection of the economic crisis that began there in 2007.
Picture=A market in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. Burundi, a poor African nation where a violent political crisis broke out last year, came in last according to the fourth World Happiness Report. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The happiness ranking was based on individual responses to a global poll conducted by Gallup. The poll included a question, known as the Cantril Ladder: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
The scholars found that three-quarters of the variation across countries could be explained by six variables: gross domestic product per capita (the rawest measure of a nation’s wealth); healthy years of life expectancy; social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble); trust (as measured by perceived absence of corruption in government and business); perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (as measured by donations).
The report was prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an international panel of social scientists that includes economists, psychologists and public health experts convened by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
Though the findings do not represent the formal views of the United Nations, the network is closely tied to the Sustainable Development Goals, which the organization adopted in September, aiming, among other things, to end poverty and hunger by 2030, while saving the planet from the most destructive effects of climate change.
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The field of happiness research has grown in recent years, but there is significant disagreement about how to measure happiness. Some scholars find people’s subjective assessments of their well-being to be unreliable, and they prefer objective indicators like economic and health data. The scholars behind the World Happiness Report said they tried to take both types of data into account.
In a chapter of the report on the distribution of happiness around the world, three economists ― John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia; Haifang Huang of the University of Alberta; and Shun Wang of the Korea Development Institute ― argued against a widely held view that changes in people’s assessments of their lives are largely transitory. Under this view, people have a baseline level of contentment and rapidly adapt to changing circumstances.
The three economists noted that crises can prompt vastly different responses based on the underlying social fabric. In Greece, where the economy began to plummet in 2007, setting off a crisis in the eurozone that has resulted in three financial bailouts, widespread corruption and mistrust were associated with the diminishing sense of happiness over the past decade.
In contrast, trust and “social capital” are so high in Japan that scholars found, to their surprise, that happiness actually increased in Fukushima, which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, because an outpouring of generosity and cooperation contributed to the community’s resilience and rebuilding.
“A crisis imposed on a weak institutional structure can actually further damage the quality of the supporting social fabric if the crisis triggers blame and strife rather than cooperation and repair,” the economists wrote. “On the other hand, economic crises and natural disasters can, if the underlying institutions are of sufficient quality, lead to improvements rather than damage to the social fabric.”
The report, which was released in Rome, included a chapter analyzing Pope Francis’ influential encyclical last year, called “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You,” which included a cutting assessment of a world in which continuous technological progress was accompanied by environmental degradation, growing anxieties about the future and persistent injustice and violence.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist who edited the report with Dr. Helliwell and Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, praised Pope Francis’ admonition against hedonism and consumerism.
He also forcefully rejected the notion that happiness and freedom ― especially when narrowly defined as economic liberty ― are interchangeable.
“The libertarian argument that economic freedom should be championed above all other values decisively fails the happiness test: There is no evidence that economic freedom per se is a major direct contributor of human well-being above and beyond what it might contribute towards per-capita income and employment,” Dr. Sachs wrote. “Individual freedom matters for happiness, but among many objectives and values, not to the exclusion of those other considerations.”
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