Ben Slade

From a really gloomy article dated April 2010 on the ThePrudentBear.com website:

"The real economy remains fragile. Government actions, such as fiscal stimulus and special industry support schemes (cash for clunkers; investment incentives, trade credit subsidies), have boosted demand and industrial activity in the short term. As Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf told The Wall Street Journal on September 19, 2009: “If it’s not a government program, it’s basically not getting done.” Private demand remains somnolent. The problem remains as government incentives encourage current consumption and investment but ultimately “steal” from future demand."

My question on the Ask the President website (run by communitycounts.com). Feel free to vote it up:

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier.

That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them.

From an article by Robert J. Samuelson from the WashPost:

Does anybody remember how the conservatives went ballistic over the rumor of Kerry's 50 cent/gallon gas tax? It's hard to imagine people making sacrifices many times that large.

Under the most recent legislation authorizing the president to negotiate new trade agreements (the Trade Promotion Act of 2002) Congress required the executive branch to negotiate trade agreements that promote respect for workers rights. In hearings on the legislation, proponents argued that by linking trade to labor standards, workers overseas could organize, demand higher wages and better working conditions and ultimately, compete with American workers on expertise, quality and productivity.

He basically makes the point that the modern industrial scale agriculture is using fossil fuels and irrigation to maintain productivitiy and it's not a sustainable solution.

Here are a few interesting excerpts:

In an article in TomPaine.com Robert Reich argues that there can't be inflation pressures if wages aren't rising. What's more, the excess world production capacity could portend just the opposite, deflation. From the article:

Each generation responds to its own traumatic memory. Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve remember the double-digit inflation of the 1970s and are determined to mount a pre-emptive strike. That’s why they’re poised on raising interest rates yet again. Bernanke and company don’t have a direct memory of the trauma that haunted the previous generation, the depression of the 1930s.

While my gut says that free trade is generally good, this article does make some powerful points.

From the article:

While there has been some media coverage of NAFTA's ruinous impact on US industrial communities, there has been even less media attention paid to its catastrophic effects in Mexico:

• NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven Mexican farmers off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder so many Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their "death warrant.")
• NAFTA's service-sector rules allowed big firms like Wal-Mart to enter the Mexican market and, selling low-priced goods made by ultra-cheap labor in China, to displace locally-based shoe, toy, and candy firms. An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican businesses have been eliminated.
• Wages along the Mexican border have actually been driven down by about 25% since NAFTA, reported a Carnegie Endowment study. An over-supply of workers, combined with the government-sponsored crushing of union organization, has resulted in sweatshop pay along the border where wages now typically run 60 cents to $1 an hour.

From Does U.S. Face an Engineering Gap? in Christian Science Monitor (12/20/05) by Mark Clayton:

Many scientists and politicians have raised alarms about an October report from the National Academies that suggested that China and India are far outstripping the United States in terms of producing new engineers. The high numbers reported for Chinese and Indian engineers, however, were swelled by more inclusive definitions of engineers--which in some cases included graduates of two-year technical schools and even auto mechanics.

An article (PDF file requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to read) from Bernstein.com talks about how companies have historically only outsourced well defined manufacturing tasks and/or internal corporate subsystems, but that companies are now additionally divesting core business functions. The result of this new type of divesture is to:

...create economies of scale on an industry basis rather than
a company basis. Open corporate infrastructures enable a
few companies to provide a specific function to an entire
industry, eliminating the duplication of those functions
in each company. Thus, it increases productivity.

According to the article, this de-verticalization is "challenging traditional notions of what constitutes a firm."