Welcome back!
It’s amazing how quickly things can return to normal. You wouldn’t know it from watching CNN, but big segments of life in Haiti, including in the capital, Port au Prince, which suffered the greatest damage, have returned to what would have been considered normal in the days and months before the quake. There is plenty of destruction still evident, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of people living in tents or under blue plastic tarpaulins throughout the city and surrounding areas. But shops and restaurants and gas stations are open, petty street commerce has resumed, and children in clean, if faded, uniforms walk to and from school. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
charity,
Clinton Foundation,
earthquake,
garment,
Haiti,
IDB,
IMF,
infrastructure,
Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission,
Paul Collier,
textile,
World Bank
I present here a few paragraphs on wages and benefits, an excerpt from Human Action, a work by the famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who is the intellectual godfather of F.A. von Hayek, among other notables. I find it especially relevant because I have been working in Haiti for the past couple of weeks, my firm having won a contract to conduct a pre-feasibility study for an industrial park in the northern part of the country, which will accommodate garment manufacturers. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
benefits,
garment,
Haiti,
Hayek,
informal sector,
remuneration,
sweatshop,
textile,
von Mises,
wages
I’ve just returned from a few days in Sydney, Australia, where it is more or less the dead of winter, which means sunshine, highs in the upper 60s, and lows in the 50s. Not a snowplow in sight. Leaving aside the World Cup and Aussie Rules football and the odd murder and sex scandal, the main news story is the precipitous loss of confidence in Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader who became Prime Minister in 2007, soundly defeating John Howard and his center-right Liberal Party, who had been in power for the previous eleven years. Rudd, a former civil servant in the Foreign Office known mainly for his fluency in Mandarin Chinese and his geekish, technocratic look, was meant to be the antidote to Howard’s proud pro-Americanism and belligerent attitude towards darker-skinned folks seeking political asylum in the Land of Oz. Rudd was the new internationalist, prepared to identify Australia as an Asian country and to place Australia in the vanguard on such cutting global issues as climate change. Barely three years later, and with the next election no more than 10 months away, Rudd appears to be hanging on by his fingernails, facing his lowest poll ratings ever as well as grumblings within his own party that he might have to be replaced by another politician – Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for example – if Labor is to have any chance of staying in power. What went wrong? [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Australia,
Bolivia,
Brazil,
China,
Iran,
Kevin Rudd,
Labor Party,
mining tax,
Rio Tinto,
sovereign risk,
Venezuela,
Wayne Swan,
Xstrata
General Motors’ return to profitability had to jostle for attention with other big stories in last week’s newspapers, notably the burning of Bangkok, the resurgence of Iceland’s volcano, and the Greek crisis and bailout, but it stood out nonetheless. Here was a bankrupt company, delisted from the New York Stock Exchange and deprived of its 83-year place in the Dow Industrial Average, now owned by an unholy trinity of the U.S. and Canadian governments and the United Autoworkers, showing a respectable first quarter profit almost exactly a year after it filed for bankruptcy protection. Although axing various brands like Hummer, Saturn, and Pontiac, closing plants, and laying off thousands of workers played a big part, no less significant was a nearly 50% increase in GM sales, from $22 billion in the first quarter of 2009 to over $31 billion in the first three months of this year. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
auto industry,
bailout,
Chrysler,
General Motors,
GM,
TARP
Attentive and loyal readers of this blog will recall that I wrote, almost exactly a year ago, about China’s proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with the special drawing right (SDR), a unit of account used by the IMF, which is based on a weighted basket of currencies that includes the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the pound. I wrote then that this proposal had virtually no chance of being adopted, one reason being that the Europeans would be loath to abandon their new currency, which already accounted for a growing share of world reserves, in favor of a faceless accounting unit. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Angela Merkel,
bailout,
Britain,
Bulgaria,
dollar,
Dominique Strauss-Kahn,
euro,
European Union,
Greece,
Greek,
IMF,
Ireland,
Portugal,
reserve currency,
Romania,
SDR,
Spain
