Archive for March 7th, 2008
Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Exports from emerging economies to U.S. have fallen, while exports to other emerging economies have remained strong:
Emerging markets now export more to China than to the U.S.:
THE ECONOMIST — “Decoupling” is the source of a great deal of controversy. Economists argue about whether or not emerging economies will follow America into recession. […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
The top chart above shows the annual percentage changes in the monthly monetary base from 2002-2008. The bottom chart shows M1 (red) and the monetary base (blue) from 2002-2008.
Clearly, the growth rate of the monetary base (”high-powered money”) has been slowing, and both M1 and the monetary base have been flat […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Silicon.com — Egypt is making a pitch to be the next offshore outsourcing hot-spot, claiming that its foreign language skills and low labour costs put the country in a strong position to compete with India and eastern Europe.
AT Kearney recently ranked Egypt number 12 in a list of top offshore outsourcing destinations […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
Amidst all of the gloom and doom, here is some good news from a recent paper by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer titled “The Age of Milton Friedman“:
The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5,400 in 1980 to $8,500 in 2005 (see […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by The Capital Spectator
There’s more than a week to go before the Fed’s next scheduled FOMC meeting on March 18, but judging by the February employment report released this morning the odds of another rate cut look virtually assured.
Payroll employment slumped by 63,000 last month, the Labor Department reported today. That’s the second monthly […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by Econbrowser
If the Fed thinks that recent commodity price moves have nothing to do with their own actions, perhaps they should think again.
The yield on the 2-year Treasury fell yesterday to 1.5%. It’s impossible to imagine that the average inflation rate over the next two years could be less than 2%, meaning that the […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
“Democratic candidates for national office will: 1) make negative comments about free-trade deals while campaigning in a state where hundreds of thousands of blue-collar manufacturing jobs have been lost and yet 2) be committed to free trade should they happen to win.”
~Daniel Gross in his Slate.com article “NAFTA Nonsense”
~Rod Hunter in today’s […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by CARPE DIEM
From The Economist:
Belgium’s central bank still employs more than 2,000 people, even though it has not had a currency to oversee since 1999, when it abandoned the Belgian franc and joined the euro. The survival instinct of Belgian civil servants is especially impressive when you compare the National Bank of Belgium’s […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by unsettling economics
This article says that a small shoe manufacturer failed because the exit of shoe manufacturers left the industry with too few suppliers for the plant to survive.
Supposedly, the most efficient businesses are supposed to survive, but that works only if there is adequate infrastructure.
Aeppel, Timothy. 2008. “U.S. Shoe Factory Finds Supplies Are […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by EconWeekly
…on EconWeekly: A generous reader gave me a tip today.
If you visit the website you’ll see this at the end of each post:
starting with my post from last week. (For people reading this on an RSS reader: there’s a link to the tipping button at the end of the post. The company that […]
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Posted in March 7th, 2008
Submitted by A Dash of Insight
There is a Street perception, which we generally share, that fixed income markets are “smarter” than equity markets. At the moment, the fixed income signals are all very negative. Many on the Street interpret this to mean bad news for equities. The complete explanation for the discrepancy, now at record […]
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