Your daily Economy dose!
Attention young professionals — and companies that employ them. Business Volunteers Unlimited’s Give Program is currently looking for applicants for its class of 2010. This is an outstanding personal and professional development opportunity for young professionals seeking to make a difference in their communities
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BVU GIVE Program Seeking Applicants
The blog continues to believe that the current downturn is a transition period, at least in the West, towards a more frugal way of life. And its theory has received a boost from a New York Times feature which suggests this might be happening in the bastion of consumerism, New York. The NYT suggests the key question is whether middle class Americans ” Can change their mind-sets and lifestyles in order to accumulate capital and work down debt?” And rather than focusing on upwardly-mobile lifestyles, it provides tips on how to be more frugal.
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New York considers a more frugal way of life
Dean Baker The Guardian Unlimited , December 14, 2009 See article on original website There is a growing movement in both the United States and around the world for taxing financial speculation. The logic is simple: even a very small tax on trades in stock, options, credit default swaps, and other derivative instruments can raise an enormous amount of revenue. Even assuming large reductions in trading volume due to the tax, the country could still raise more than $100 billion a year in revenue or more than $1 trillion over the 10-year budget horizon.
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Financial Transactions Taxes: Easy and Fun Money
VeteranOwnedBusiness.com is proud to welcome Laredoans Lending a Helping Hand, Inc. of Laredo , Texas ( Webb County ) to the Veteran Owned Business Directory Non Profit Section . Laredoans Lending a Helping Hand, Inc
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VeteranOwnedBusiness.com Welcomes Non Profit – Laredoans Lending a Helping Hand, Inc
Ok I am visiting Australia, and in between meetings thinking about that notion of the Internet of Things or IoT. At the IETF 76 held in Hiroshima, Japan , one of the Birds of a Feather sessions I had attended was on Smart Grid co-chaired by Fred Baker, Cisco and Tim Polk, NIST . The question to answer is “Where should the Smart Grid standardization occur and what role will the IETF have in its standards development?” The topic is still open, and the Internet Society published a great list of hotly debated issues at IETF 76.
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From IETF 76 Japan to the Internet of Things!
Friends of New York’s Environment, a partnership of more than 100 environmental, health, agricultural, recreational and community groups, today urged Governor Paterson and the State Legislature to protect the state’s environment and …
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Conservationists, Municipal Leaders & Chambers of Commerce Call on …
I have repeatedly criticized Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and the rest of the boys for their approach to “saving” the too big to fail banks. I have argued that they are trying to paper over the banks’ real problems instead of fixing them. I have pointed out that the giant banks may still be insolvent – even after all of the money which the fellas handed them – demonstrating that: (1) The giant banks have repeatedly gone bankrupt in the past due to speculative bets, and the government hid the insolvency (2) The too big to fails have used “creative accounting”, and may still be in big trouble
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Do Summers, Geithner and Bernanke Have to Share Credit for Saving the Banks with Drug Kingpins?
by Edward Hugh: Barcelona All the recent critical attention which has been directed towards Greece of late might seem surprising to some (or part of a global anti-PIGS conspiracy, to others) since, on the face of it, the Greek economy had managed over the last decade to appear to be something of a success story. Indeed the economy did clock-up a more than respectable growth rate, and the country even seemed to be well on the road to economic convergence with its richer neighbours, with GDP growing at an average annual rate of around 4.25% between 2000 and 2007, as compared with a 2% average for the euro area as a whole. In particular there was a sharp acceleration in the growth rate in the early years of this century, stimulated in part by preparations for the Olympic games
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So What’s It All About, Costas?
Two leading White House economic advisors – Larry Summers and Christina Romer – are giving very different views on the economy. As Fox news summarizes : “Everybody agrees that the recession is over,” said Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council. “Of course not,” countered Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer in a separate interview when asked if the recession is a thing of the past …
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Larry Summers Is Like a Guy Who Yells That the Sun Really DOES Revolve Around the Earth and that the Current Orbit is Just a Temporary Aberration
Arnold Kling of EconLog and the author (with Nick Schulz) of From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts.
The subprime mortgage “meltdown” that launched in 2007 were far-reaching economic changes that we can still be seen today in 2008. Many banks went out of business, and lost thousands of Americans have their homes due to foreclosure. …
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Buying a house in the New Economy – Advice for Buyers | the house
Every year, the venerable old Chilean polling firm Latinobarometro publishes the world’s most comprehensive survey of Latin American perceptions, with a handy country-by-country breakdown. And every year, we take a look at what the data actually says about Venezuela and then have a good laugh over whatever retarded nugget of information the U.S
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Colombians Hate Democracy (and Other Stories That Will Never Be Written From the 2009 Latinobarometro Survey)
A small business quote keeps you thinking, inspired and entertained. “The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well. ” Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) French founder of the modern Olympic Games, Speech (July 1908) To view previous quotes, click here winweb.com – Software and business services online to start and run a small business – free trial and 100+ free business ideas.
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Winners – Small Business Quote of the Week
[Editor: This the the first of a four-part series on virtualization and cloud topics] As you may have noticed, we have not yet done the recap of my OOW’09 E-Business Suite Virtualization Update presentation. The reason was twofold: we wanted to create a blog mini-series, for which this is the first article, and we wanted to publish that after we finished some development work.
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E-Business Suite 12.1.1 Templates for Oracle VM Now Available
If you entered the professional workforce more than, say, ten years ago, you probably can’t imagine an environment in which computer access was disallowed. Or imagine, twenty years ago, if using the telephone in your daily tasks was not permitted.
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What if You Couldn’t Have a Phone on Your Desk?
Maryland Chamber Vice President of Government Affairs Allyson Black has completed an eight-month long leadership development program, and is a member of the 17th graduating class of Leadership Maryland.
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Vice President of Government Affairs Allyson Black Graduates from Leadership Maryland
In Romania during the early 2000s, an alliance of information and communications technology (ICT) business associations formed the Tech 21 Coalition, which developed a business agenda offering practical solutions to barriers facing the industry. Their efforts resulted in a dialogue with the government that produced reforms such as introduction of a zero salary tax on software developers to prevent brain drain. Following implementation of these reforms, Romania ICT companies created 1,500 jobs within 18 months, and significantly enhanced the competitiveness of the Romanian ICT sector
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The Role of Advocacy in ICT Sector Development
Dean Baker The Huffington Post, December 10, 2009 See article on original website When Congress debated the TARP last fall, the political elites insisted that the bill must be passed immediately or the economy would collapse. For example, Federal Reserve Board President Ben Bernanke told Congress that the commercial paper market was shutting down, which meant that the country’s largest companies would soon be unable to meet their payrolls and pay other bills.
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The Return of the TARP Hostage Takers
Reuters reports : “It is unfortunate that China decided to impose provisional countervailing duties on imports of grain oriented electrical steel (GOES) from the United States,” said Carol Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative's office. “We do not believe that the imports in question are subsidized, nor do we believe that those imports have harmed the Chinese GOES industry,” she said
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Will The U.S. Challenge Foreign Trade Remedies At the WTO?
by Edward Hugh: Barcelona In a recent post on the FT Money Supply Blog the ever perceptive Ralph Atkins made the following, very interesting, observation which, I think, goes a long way towards helping us all understand what exactly the thinking is which lies behind the ECB’s current strategy for its handling of the Eurozone economy. One of the subtleties of yesterday’s complex package from the European Central Bank was that it attempted to re-assert the principle of “separation”
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That Which The ECB Hath Separated, Let No Man Join Together Again!
The UN and other agencies calling for a war on global warming say the price tag will be trillions . But – according to top experts on climate and cap and trade – the regulatory framework being rammed through in America and internationally won’t actually reduce carbon to any meaningful degree. See this , this , this and this .
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Copenhagen Framework Demands Huge Amounts of Spending, But Allows Enron-Style Accounting Tricks So That Carbon Isn’t Actually Reduced
After months of civil unrest and economic isolation, Honduras signaled its reemergence in the global marketplace this week by putting an end to at least one Zelaya-era big government regulator. Tegucigalpa’s back, baby!
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New Honduran Gov’t Moves Quickly To Stop Market Obstructionist Policies
One of the things that Philip has been emphasising since the start of the year is that if wages are cut to the point where workers feel confident that they won’t be cut further, they will then start spending again. On the other hand, workers who fear their wages will be cut in the future will, quite rationally, save for the rainy days ahead. The worst of all possible worlds, from the point of maintaining domestic consumption, would be a situation where wages fell, predictably, in slow motion, over a number of years.
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If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly
To continue our reflections on the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the eventual collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia… I had one of those experiences yesterday when you look at something you’ve seen dozens of times before and you see it in a new light, and get to thinking about it more deeply. But first, a small digression… on a recent trip to Russia, I bought a friend of mine a postcard-size copy of the following Soviet-era propaganda poster: The text, literally translated, means “As you worked, thus you earned,” or, in plainer English, the message is, “The more you work, the more you get paid.” I bought the postcard because my friend was pondering his reentry into the job market after a lengthy break, and I was trying to tease him about the upcoming job hunt. But he landed a job rather soon thereafter, so I never gave him the card; instead, it remained in my kitchen. Last night, I looked at the card again, and I got to thinking. The poster was produced in 1964. What was the reasoning for the Soviets to produce a poster like that? Clearly, they had an interest in encouraging their workers to work harder — to build more roads, factories, planes, and so on. But for the workers themselves, what was the incentive to do so? In a country founded on Marxist principles, shouldn’t it have been to glorify the party, or to build socialism, to surpass the West, or some such
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Material Incentives – Even in the USSR
December 10, 2009 For Immediate Release: December 10, 2009 Contact: Alan Barber, (202) 293-5380 x115 Washington, D.C.- While there is much talk of intergenerational debt among DC political insiders, few people have an understanding of the debt figures discussed in current policy debates. A new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the $62 trillion figure most often discussed is actually due almost entirely to spiraling private-sector health care costs. “It would be dishonest to portray projected debt levels as an issue of intergenerational equity,” said Dean Baker , an author of the report and Co-Director of CEPR.
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Private Health Care Costs Driving Force Behind Debt Burden
A recent article in the New York Times brought to light the growing debate in Iran about the government’s plans to phase out subsidies, as they constitute an unsustainable burden on the state budget. Subsidies have been a legacy of the 1979 Islamic Revolution which ingrained the government responsibility to “distribute the oil wealth” into the state system
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Ahmadinejad’s Economic Justice
Facilitation payments – small payments to government officials to facilitate action on their part – are the grey area of corruption. In the eys of some they are a bribe, in the eyes of others they are not. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has long made an exception on facilitation payments, allowing companies to make small payments to government officials as long as such payments are properly recorded and reported.
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Facilitation Payments No More
As I have repeatedly pointed out, proposed derivatives legislation will not make things better: A leading credit default swap expert (Satyajit Das) says that the new credit default swap regulations not only won’t help stabilize the economy, they might actually help to destabilize it. Senator Cantwell says that the new derivatives legislation is weaker than current regulation Now, Mike Konzkal points out that the new derivatives bill may be completed gutted, and that Congress might not even realize it: Have lobbyists snuck another major loophole into the OTC Derivatives bill
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Financial Reform Is Being Gutted … And Congress Might Not Even Realize It
This Chamber and this blog have made no secret of our support for the planned CSX Integrated Logistics Center (ILC). This intermodal facility and the anticipated business park that will surround it have the potential to be a positive economic engine that is sorely needed in not only Winter Haven but Central Florida. Having visited Alliance, Texas in May of 2008, area business leaders and elected officials have witnessed firsthand the type of facility that can be created and the type of business and economic development that can follow.
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CSX: Welcome Opportunity for a Weary Economy …
December 2009, David Rosnick and Dean Baker Many proponents of conservative fiscal policies talk of the budget deficit as being a matter of intergenerational equality. However, this paper shows the younger generations (and those yet to be born) will contribute more to the deficit than older generations. This analysis uses data from the CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook and the authors’ calculations to show that the driving force behind the deficit is our broken health care system and that this should be the focus of the debate. Report – PDF | Flash Press Release
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Taming the Deficit: Saving Our Children from Themselves