Excellent Document on Decoupling and Global Supply Chains by ECRI; Why BRIC, and U.S. Decoupling Won't Happen | Mike Shedlock. By: Mike Shedlock | Fri, Mar 23, 2012 Lakshman Achuthan, Co-Founder & Chief Operations Officer, of ECRI just released an exceptional 9-page document on supply chains and decoupling called The Yo-Yo Years. Here are a few snips but those bullish on emerging markets, commodity producers, as well as those who think the US is going to decouple from the global economy should take the time to read the entire document. The idea of "decoupling" often comes up as a way for one part of the world to dodge weakness elsewhere. But, over the last two decades, a key driver of the greater coupling of economic cycles had been the increasing interdependence of world economies, with more openness in the flows of capital and trade - especially merchandise trade.
Indeed, the export dependence of most economies has risen dramatically in this period. We agree with the consensus that developing economies have become a key driver of long-term secular global growth. No BRIC Decoupling Pettis Writes ... THE PROTEIN BOMB. By Niels C. Jensen, Absolute Return Partners LLP Question for you: Which distinctly British asset class has offered the most attractive returns over the past decade? Central London property? Not even close, even if it has done rather well. UK farmland is the answer, having more than tripled in value over a decade which will otherwise not be remembered for its outsized returns (see story here). The rise in farmland values is not only a British phenomenon. All over Northern Europe and North America farmland values have responded well to higher commodity prices.
Now, if ‘rental income’ on farm land is going up as measured by higher crop prices, it is only logical that the value of the land appreciates, similar to the dynamics in the commercial property sector. In this month’s Absolute Return Letter we will take a closer look at agriculture. Let’s begin with some numbers to set the stage. As the poor get wealthier, they will want more protein – mainly chicken, pork and beef. Niels Jensen. Intellectual property and mobile devices: World patent war 1.0. Edward Flattau: The Seven Billion Quandary. Is the recent announcement of the world's population reaching the seven billion mark a cause for celebration or concern? Those who exult are apt to embrace the philosophy "the more, the merrier". Those who have grave reservations worry that the human race is in danger of overrunning the planet's natural resource carrying capacity, especially with 4.5 billion people having been added to the world's population in just the last 60 years.
The individuals who applaud the seven billion figure contend that civilization needs more young people to support their elders. But there are not nearly enough jobs to put the burgeoning numbers of youths to work, particularly in developing countries where the greatest population growth is concentrated. Another argument of "the more, the merrier" crowd was popularized by the late Julian Simon, an economist who argued that the earth's greatest resource was human ingenuity.
How could the human race slow its growth and degradation of the global environment? How China Drives The Global Economy. Unless investors get spooked today during Halloween trading, the S&P 500 Index will post its second-best month since the post-World War II era, according to a report published by GaveKal Research. The last time markets rallied so strongly, Gerald Ford had recently moved into the White House and Muhammad Ali “rumbled in the jungle” with George Foreman.
A few weeks back, we noted that Citigroup’s Panic/Euphoria model signaled an extremely negative sentiment level, indicating that higher equity prices should follow. Read: "Can Markets Find the Road Back to Positive Territory? " Other contrarian signals that can often be used as a guide when investor sentiment swings to extremes are cover stories reflecting bullish or bearish sentiment.
We’ve stated many times we don’t believe the Chinese economy is a bubble, but that does not mean a significant slowdown wouldn’t affect the global economy, especially natural resources. Want more from this author? Follow Frank Holmes (779 followers) New! What Business Should Do about Occupy Wall Street - S. Sivakumar. Media & web mentions/coverage of recent Wikistrat International Grand Strategy Competition.
Rounding up for the record the various sorts of coverage Wikistrat enjoyed over the course of the competition, I wanted to highlight the following: Brian Hasbrouck over at Political Risk Explored wrote up his impressions of the first week, when - unsurprising to me as Head Judge - he cited the eventual winner Claremont Graduate University's entries as being the most impressive and eye-popping. CGU played Pakistan 1. One participant, Timothy Nunan, wrote a nice bit about how the game play allowed a bigger input role for those players with a more historical bent: While I’m normally not so big of a fan of “strategic studies” and much of the direction of the discipline of international relations, I find the collaborative aspect of the Wiki tremendously useful, and it’s certainly more interactive and a richer learning experience to have content up online instantly, rather than the turnaround time associated with sending out drafts of papers.
Here's another nice press piece on Ramirez alone. "Intellectual Property in ACTA and the TP" by Kimberlee G. Weatherall. Kimberlee G. Weatherall, University of Queensland, Australia Abstract In this paper I am interested in what ACTA as it emerged from the negotiating process has to teach us about the negotiation of international agreements in IP, and in whether we can see any evidence that those lessons have been learned or are being applied to the TPP negotiations. As I will show below, the ACTA text that emerged from several years’ controversial negotiations was a quite different beast from the original aspirations of the negotiating parties. ACTA as it was finalised retreated significantly from earlier proposals: it contains more safeguards, and less detailed and stringent provisions, than was feared or expected by many commentators. This suggests that even in negotiations among ‘IP-enthusiast’ countries there are limits to the consensus on the appropriate scope of IP-protective measures.
Suggested Citation Kimberlee G. Don't just blame Wall Street: The American Dream has been eroding for years. No more white picket fences? FORTUNE – Since the bust of the U.S. housing market and the subsequent financial crisis, many people in this country have jumped on the view that the American Dream is somehow deteriorating. Hope of living behind a white picket fence was dashed with the mortgage crisis, but the dream is about much more than homeownership. Look no further than the recent Occupy Wall Street movements for proof -- college students and young people are angry about everything from joblessness to student loan debt.
The American Dream is the broader notion that the current generation will be able to outdo their parents' – whether by earning more or being more educated or other ways of moving up in the world no matter where you started. Here's why it's getting harder to get ahead: Stagnant pay, higher productivity The American Dream of upward mobility is tied to the idea that those who work hard get to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Education under siege Young and jobless. China to invest £400bn to overcome water shortage. The Social Return on Professions: bankers destroy £ 7 of social value for every pound they generate. - City bankers destroy £ 7 of social value for every pound they generate. - Top advertising executives destroy £11 of value for every pound they generate. - Tax accountants destroy £47 of value for every pound they generate - For every £1 they are paid, childcare workers generate between £7 and £9.50 worth of benefits to society The figures above are from a New Economics Foundation report from 2009, but still essential reading. * Report: A Bit Rich.
This report takes a new approach to looking at the value of work. From the Executive Summary, we are excerpting the mythbusting section as well as policy recommendations: 1. “This report sets out to shatter some myths about pay and value. . * Myth 1: The City of London is essential for the UK economy Access to finance for everyone is vital for the UK economy to function. . * Myth 2: Low paid jobs create a ladder for people to work their way up – opportunities to advance are open to all Of course poverty matters. 2. . * Launch a green industrial policy. You share something, you get something back: How the web is redefining privacy.
Migrant Farm Workers in the PIGS, America, and Elsewhere: Noting a Balance Sheet Correlation. Contact Summit 2011: The Evolution Will Be Social | Contact Un-conference. OurGoods. The New Rules: U.S. Resilience Can Rise to Future Threats. COLUMN-Stateless income: David Cay Johnston. Solow: Keynesian Economics Has Become Dramatically Relevant Again Today. Chart of the Day: Migration map (site) » Geoffrey B. West, “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster” A Summary by Stewart Brand “It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs.
And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities.” “We need,” West said, “a grand unified theory of sustainability— a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive theory of cities.” Such a theory already exists in biology, and you can build on that. But the proportion is not linear. With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life.
Does such scalability apply to cities? But unlike animals, cities do not slow down as they get bigger. Does that go on forever? (West pointed out that there is a bit of variability between cities worth noticing. Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? China Analyst: U.S. Can’t Win in Space, So Why Bother Racing? | Danger Room. With access to more than 400 satellites plus at least two tiny, maneuverable robotic shuttles, the U.S. military is the clear leader in military spacecraft. But with 70 orbiters of its own, China is catching up fast. Last year, Beijing matched Washington in space launches for the first time, boosting no fewer than 15 satellites into orbit. It was the first time any nation China kept a celestial pace with the U.S. The new space race is on. But in the view of one influential analyst, the race isn’t worth the prize.
No one disputes that China is gaining “ground” in space. “Some of the most debilitating asymmetric tactics could be employed against space and cyberspace targets,” Erickson explained. The Pentagon is already following Erickson’s advice with a handful of new systems. This trend should continue, Erickson recommended, with terrestrial robots in particular standing in for orbital hardware. In Erickson’s perfect world, U.S. forces probably wouldn’t rely on space at all. See Also: The Seneca Effect: Why Decline Is Faster Than Growth. Don't you stumble, sometimes, into something that seems to make a lot of sense but you can't say exactly why? For a long time, I had in mind the idea that when things start going bad, they tend to go bad fast.
We might call this tendency the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff," from Lucius Anneaus Seneca who wrote that "increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid. " Could it be that the Seneca cliff is what we are facing, right now? If that is the case, then we are in trouble. With oil production peaking or set to peak soon, it is hard to think that we are going to see a gentle downward slope of the economy. Rather, we may see a decline so fast that we can only call it "collapse.
" The symptoms are all there, but how to prove that it is what is really in store for us? I have been working on this idea for quite a while and now I think I can make such a model. Models of growth and decline The paradigm of all models of growth and decline is the Hubbert model. References. Book of the Week: The Commons of Soil. * Book: Patrick Noble. The Commons of Soil. Feasta, Ireland, 2010. Available via www.bryncocynorganic.co.uk! Author Patrick Noble introduces the theme of the book: “We have picked up our fossils and minerals because they have been lying around. We have done so more and sometimes less judiciously. However soil is provident as a consequence of behaviour. We note that such virtue is traditionally found in labour, craft, dwelling and suffering supported, not by an abstract earth, environment or energy system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces, says Ivan Illich (Declaration on Soil 1990).
Modernism has transcended soil by oil and oil’s technologies. A tentative calculation is that one litre of oil may be replaced by ten days of toil. The fossilised proteins of millions of summers have provided for us to live as Ivan Ilich says, by simply managing behaviour on a shared planet. An excerpt from Chapter 2, by Patrick Noble: Chart of the Day: The Dragon Eats Corn. WSJ story. This is, of course, big news to those of us who own farmland in the Midwest (I do by extension through my wife), because China is already buying up all the soybeans (or so it would seem), and now they're moving in corn in such a big - and I believe, a permanent - way, that a state like Indiana, where damn near everything is corn or soybeans, is feeling pretty good.
Our acreage, BTW, is in NW Ohio - basically the farm my wife grew up on (her share). With China sucking up this corn and the rest of the world's demand rising as well, it almost strikes me as criminally stupid, in a strategic sense, to continue with the economic farce that is corn ethanol. I've seen estimates where one-third of our crop (!) Mini rant for the day. The New Rules: The Race for Global Leadership in the Age of Anger. Ian Bremmer, the founder and head of Eurasia Group (for which I work as an analyst), has argued that we are living in a "G-Zero" world, or one in which there is no genuine great-power leadership.
From the perspective of political science, it is hard to disagree, as anyone reading a newspaper these days can attest. Still, the historian in me says this situation cannot last for too long. My reasoning here has nothing to do with the global correlation of military force, since thanks to globalization's emerging middle class, "butter" will inevitably emerge as the winner over "guns. " Instead, pay attention to all the populist anger building up across the world system today, because it demands a progressive response from government elites in the global North, South, East and West. In this process, some states will dramatically succeed in addressing their citizens' grievances, while others will dramatically fail. Opinion: Next wave of illegal immigration will be from China. By Dudley L. Poston, Jr. and Peter A. Morrison Special to the Mercury News Posted: 08/18/2011 08:00:00 PM PDT0 Comments Click photo to enlarge A protester is detained by police officers during a protest against China's Vice Premier Li...
Until now, Mexico has supplied the United States, especially California and Texas, with immigrant workers to fill low-wage jobs. These developments will cast in sharp relief the inherent contradictions in the practices comprising our current immigration "policy. " Mexican immigration -- legal and undocumented -- now stands at an all-time low and may have even stopped. In China, meanwhile, an economy demanding urban manpower has precipitated what surely ranks as the largest peacetime migration in recorded human history. Most rural Chinese move within China without official permission, as temporary urban workers known as "floaters.
" Urban unemployment in China, now at an all-time high, has turned the floaters' world upside down. DUDLEY L. Transitioning (1): De-growth and an Economic Kyoto Protocol. The Role of Open Methods in the Development of the First Airplane. The two faces of Wal-Mart in Mexico. Jared Diamond: 5 factors that will collapse our society. Stavins: Why Polarized Politics Paralyze Public Policy.
The Geopolitics of Brazil: An Emergent Power’s Struggle with Geography - Outside the Box Investment Newsletter. The Not Smart Enough Grid. FRBSF: The U.S. Content of "Made in China" Austerity and Anarchy. CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST. Links 8/10/11. Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space - space - 08 August 2011. Will Russia and China Collapse Before 2020? | Oil Price.com. P2P Foundation. Umair Haque on the new corporate road to serfdom.
Building data startups: Fast, big, and focused. Internet Class Warfare. Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity. Enter the Cyber-dragon. For those who still doubt the role of corporations in raising food prices through speculations. Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster. Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations. The Coming Global Instability, Part I. Civil society in a globalizing world. The Shape of Inequality And Its Impact on Growth. How Greedy Corporations Are Destroying America’s Status as ‘Innovation Nation’ » New Deal 2.0. UN Says Geo Data as Important as Roads or Telecom. Is economics a real science? « forensicstatistician. Cash Flow Discounting Leads to “Astronomically” Large Mistakes Over the Long Term.
How fast will the Chinese revalue to dump dollars? How America Could Collapse. Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas. Intellectual Ventures And The War Over Software Patents : Planet Money. GEAB N°56-Special Summer 2011 is available! Global systemic crisis – Last warning before the Autumn 2011 shock, when $15 trillion of financial assets go up in smoke. Paul Gilding - Personal website of Paul Gilding “The Great Disruption” »
Paul Gilding on the Great Disruption: Effective Global Default is only a matter of time. Small amounts of antibiotics generate big problems. Legal Decay in a Soviet Style Collapse. Chance favors the concentration of wealth, U of M study shows. Henry C.K. Liu Home. End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (9780767915878): Barry C. Lynn. Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon. China Law Blog : China Law for Business. The Archdruid Report. Toward a Bioregional State. Book of the Week: Toward a Bioregional State. Entries Tagged mobile disruption - O'Reilly Radar. When Math(s) Turns Out To Be Useful | Degrees of Freedom. Are Chemicals Making Us Fat? Towards a Technological, Social, and Legal Infrastructure for Secure Leaking. Too Many Public Works Built on Rosy Scenarios: Virginia Postrel. Can the commons bring us “beyond growth”? The Commons as an Antidote to Relentless Growth. Seven Problems a Recovery Won't Fix - Umair Haque.
How to lose the globalization game. An Uncertain World 1: Future Babble by Dan Gardner - Whimsley. An Uncertain World II: Adapt, by Tim Harford - Whimsley. Africa - JJ. Externalities - JJ. References - JJ. Russia - JJ. India - JJ. Profligacies of Scale. China - JJ.