| From: Sam Citron | 3/31/2009 2:23:17 PM | | | | | | Despite Downturn, Japan Tries to Increase Exports [NYT]
By HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — Japanese companies are caught in a double bind, facing markets at home that are shrinking with the population as well as the global downturn. Nevertheless, companies must expand foreign sales aggressively — or face longer-term decline.
Exports from the world’s No. 2 economy fell an unprecedented 49 percent in February. But even as Japanese policy makers call for a renewed focus on domestic markets, companies are tying themselves more tightly to overseas markets and innovation.
“Japanese companies themselves just don’t see a future in the domestic market,” said Yasuo Yamamoto, senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute. “They’re looking for opportunities overseas instead of investing at home. That makes it almost impossible for Japan to reduce its export dependence.”
Prime Minister Taro Aso announced Tuesday that Japan would put together yet another economic package to stimulate demand, with steps to create jobs and further reduce taxes. Japan has already announced stimulus plans worth 12 trillion yen, or $122 billion, including 2 trillion yen in cash handouts.
A recovery led by domestic demand will be difficult. Even as the government pumps money into the economy, household spending has continued to decline, falling 3.5 percent in February as unemployment jumped to 4.4 percent, the highest level in two years.
With the decline in domestic spending, Japanese companies have their eyes fixed overseas despite the fall in exports. A cutback in spending among consumers in the United States, Japan’s biggest export market, is simply turning attention toward new foreign markets. The trend is clear in companies across the spectrum.
Hurt by a global slowdown in sales, Panasonic is set to book a net loss of 380 billion yen, or $3.9 billion, just in the year through March. The electronics company will lay off 15,000 workers. But as part of a new strategy called “Double-Digit Overseas Growth,” the company is making products specifically for emerging markets like China and Vietnam. And last month, Panasonic introduced a line of household appliances in Europe.
It is a similar story for Japan’s carmakers. While most auto markets could recover from the global slump as early as next year, vehicle sales in Japan are in decline, hurt by a marked lack of interest in cars among younger Japanese.
Sales of new cars have slumped by more than half from their peak in 1990. An industry organization expects sales to fall to their lowest since 1977 in the coming fiscal year.
Even Toyota Motor, which has doubled its overseas sales since 1998, experienced a drop of almost 10 percent in Japanese sales in that period.
At a recent news conference held by Honda Motor’s incoming president, discussions about a recovery in sales inadvertently turned to the United States market.
“America will always require cars,” said Takanobu Ito, who takes the helm at the automaker in June. “In Japan, consumers aren’t finding anything they want to buy.”
Even companies that previously concentrated on the home market are turning overseas.
Kirin Holdings, one of Japan’s largest breweries, grew rapidly as bubble-era Japanese drank more beer. But consumption peaked in the mid-1990s, hurt by a long economic malaise, an aging population and a shift in consumer tastes toward wine.
To woo recession-weary consumers, Kirin introduced a cheap, low-malt beer in 1998, and an even cheaper beer-flavored beverage seven years later that did away with malt altogether. Kirin also bought a domestic winemaker. Yet the company still struggled to grow.
Now Kirin has begun an aggressive buying spree overseas to bolster its foreign sales. It recently announced it would spend $1.26 billion to raise its stake in the beer unit of a Philippine conglomerate, the San Miguel Corporation. That came after Kirin bought National Foods, an Australian company, for $1 billion in 2007.
“Australia is an attractive market compared to Japan, because population and income are actually growing there,” a Kirin spokesman, Makoto Ando, said. (Australians also drink twice as much beer per capita as Japanese.)
Underlying the rush overseas is the acuteness of Japan’s demographic challenges. Japan’s population has been falling since 2005, and its working-age population could fall by a third by midcentury.
The Japanese are also becoming poorer, relatively speaking: Japan’s income per capita, once among the top five in the world, slipped to 19th in 2007, far behind the United States and many European countries.
A mismanaged pension system, cumbersome regulation in sectors like services and health, and a stark frugality adopted by many Japanese during years of economic stagnation are also weighing on spending and darkening the prospects of many companies.
Prime Minister Aso has tried to lift domestic demand with a series of stimulus measures, but gridlock in the country’s Parliament is slowing progress. Moreover, economists say Mr. Aso’s plans will be little more than stopgap measures.
“Any government spending could support domestic spending, but the effects will be temporary,” said Hiroshi Shiraishi, a Tokyo-based economist at BNP Paribas. “Japan faces deeper structural problems.”
Marketers at a baby goods maker, Unicharm, say they have done everything to keep sales growing despite the falling birthrate and sluggish economy.
A leading maker of disposable diapers, the company seized on a striking fact: even as the number of babies was falling, the Japanese were keeping more pets. So Unicharm used its diaper technology to develop paper litter sheets for cats and dogs. The company also developed a line of adult diapers for Japan’s swelling ranks of the elderly.
But that will not be enough to stem a downward trend in sales, said a Unicharm spokesman, Yasushi Shiraishi.
To make up for the shortfall, Unicharm is increasing its sales network in neighboring China. This year, the company plans to increase its sales network to 500 cities across China, from about 300 now. The company has also started selling diapers in Southeast Asia.
“Thanks to our efforts, we’re not seeing sales fall off precipitously in Japan — yet. But a decline is inevitable in the long run, so it’s important to look overseas,” Mr. Shiraishi said.
“There are 18 million babies born in China every year,” he said. “That’s 16 times more babies than Japan.” |
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| From: MattMarriott | 3/31/2009 7:15:19 PM | | | | | | German school massacre repackaged to push disarm citizens agenda to utter limits
Illustrates illuminati repackaging; exposes worldwide first the package, uncovering it as Virginia Tech II. Compares the core hoax with the 9/11 core hoax (both media hoaxes). Explains how the satanic celebration of Virginia Tech was upscaled.
Difference between Hitler 1933-1934 and US now
Manual used by Hitler in 1933-1934, with the first edict TOTALLY denying citizens access to weapons, with monopoly reserved to the nazi forces responsible for enforcing the terror state (Gestapo and SS), is the same as now.(1)
The difference in the implementation: what the party of Hitler did alone in Germany is done now together by the two "parties" in the U.S.: one of the objectives of the role of Bush was to cause as much dissociation as required for the acceptance of the most important edict of his "democratic" successor in script: total disarmament of the citizens. (2)
Germany, once again reaches utter limits first
Massacre in German school by teenager (3), was the perfect (4) first act (5) to be repackaged and sold to push to the utter limits the "Disarm citizens" agenda, i.e. abolishing the absolute last right to self protection, to keep a weapon at home.
Repackaging includes:
- "explaining" that the cause for the massacre is the possibility to buy guns legally. The same record continues to be played long after after the right of defense (prohibition on carrying weapons) was legally abolished ("coincidentally" following the first school rampage in Germany, 2002).
- using the massacre to "prove" that the right to keep a weapon at home must be completely abolished, i.e. "concluding" that it should not even be allowed to sport shooters. Repackaging this point included having the largest (both in size and audience) german newspaper, Bild, use all of the first page, the day after the rampage, a fake photo of a 10 year old, supposedly Tim Kretschmer, practicing at a shooting stand.
- censoring any question about how was is possible that nobody was able to respond to a single attacker, and that for hours.
- censoring the real reason for the massacre: Tim Kretschmer was under "psychiatric treatment", i.e. his mind had been completely destroyed by BIG PHARMA (6). While "serious" media keeps this information out from any headlines, the media playing the boulevard role report it ONCE in Sub-Headlines, repackaged ("interrupted psychotherapy" - "Psychotherapie hat er unterbrochen") to pass the opposite message (Tim K. stopped taking drugs, the cause of the massacre). And what better location for placing this than below the photo that "Bild" would confess after to not show Tim (one day later, in small font, and of course not in the front page) and the headlines "The sick world of the killer - Here he was only 10 years old" (Die Kranke Welt des Killer - Hier war er erst 10) ?
Separation between Packaging and Repackaging - Tim Kretschmer v 9/11
To explain how the official story is repackaged to serve the "Disarm Citizens" agenda the relevant question is not "how true is the package?" but "Is the package consistent, i.e. are the basic assumptions valid?".
The package has Tim Kretschmer undergoing "psychiatric treatment" and that is consistent with the profile of a teenager going on rampage. This is why it was worth to previously explain the repackaging process.
Contrast this with the 9/11 package, where despite the fact that only a small part of the basic package was consistent - "suicide bombers" being muslims, like "amok teenager" undergoing psychiatric treatment or "paparazzi persecuting Princess Diana's car" - people accepted the rest of the impossible package (what was deliberately designed to pass a terror message from the beginning, like the Pentagon "crash", not relevant in this context):
- "muslims attacking targets within Illuminatiziland, aka West" violates the fundamental law ruling behavior of muslims: the tactic of the muslims is to NOT execute any attacks in areas where they are a minority, because the demographic bomb is the weapon used to become a majority, the moment where the terror begins.
- "WTC planes evaporating after crash" or "steel melting leading to collapse of skyscrapers": any of these pieces of the package violate the laws of physics. No further evidence is required to expose 9/11 as a total lie.
FULL article
citizens-disarmed.blogspot.com |
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| From: Sam Citron | 4/6/2009 11:54:15 AM | | | | | | Italy muzzled scientist who predicted quake
Mon Apr 6, 2009 11:09am EDT
By Gavin Jones
ROME (Reuters) - An Italian scientist predicted a major earthquake around L'Aquila weeks before disaster struck the city on Monday, killing more than 90 people, but was reported to authorities for spreading panic.
The government on Monday insisted the warning, by seismologist Giacchino Giuliani, had no scientific foundation.
The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, creating mounting alarm in the medieval city, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Rome.
Vans with loudspeakers drove around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after Giuliani, from the National Institute of Astrophysics, predicted a large quake was on the way, prompting the mayor's anger.
Giuliani, who based his forecast on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas, was reported to police for "spreading alarm" and was forced to remove his findings from the Internet.
As media asked questions about the whether the government properly safeguarded the population in light of his warning, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi appeared on the defensive at a news conference.
He said now was the time to concentrate on relief efforts and "we can discuss afterwards about the predictability of earthquakes."
Italy's Civil Protection agency held a meeting of the Major Risks Committee, grouping scientists charged with assessing such risks, in L'Aquila on March 31 to reassure the townspeople.
"The tremors being felt by the population are part of a typical sequence ... (which is) absolutely normal in a seismic area like the one around L'Aquila," the civil protection agency said in a statement on the eve of that meeting.
It added that the agency saw no reason for alarm but was nonetheless effecting "continuous monitoring and attention."
The head of the agency, Guido Bertolaso, referred back to that meeting at Monday's joint news conference with Berlusconi.
The Major Risks Committee concluded there was no reason to forecast a more powerful earthquake than the previous tremors, he said. "There is no possibility of predicting an earthquake, that is the view of the international scientific community."
Enzo Boschi, the head of the National Geophysics Institute, said the real problem for Italy was a long-standing failure to take proper precautions despite a history of tragic quakes.
"We have earthquakes but then we forget and do nothing. It's not in our culture to take precautions or build in an appropriate way in areas where there could be strong earthquakes," he said. |
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| From: Sam Citron | 4/9/2009 2:43:14 AM | | | | | | Japanese Machinery Orders Unexpectedly Rebound 1.4% (Update3)
By Jason Clenfield
April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese machinery orders unexpectedly rose for the first time in five months in February, adding to signs that the recession may be easing.
Bookings, an indicator of capital investment in the next three to six months, climbed 1.4 percent from January, the Cabinet Office said today in Tokyo. The median estimate of 28 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 6.9 percent drop.
Shares rose, led by Komatsu Ltd., Japan’s biggest maker of earthmovers, on optimism that the economy’s 12.1 percent contraction in the fourth quarter represented the worst of the slump. Prime Minister Taro Aso is poised to unveil a 15.4 trillion yen ($154 billion) stimulus package, the largest for a single year, to counter an unprecedented collapse in exports.
“It’s highly likely that when we look back at this downturn we’ll see that February was when it hit bottom,” said Kyohei Morita, chief economist at Barclays Capital in Tokyo. Still, he added, “bottoming out doesn’t mean Japan will have a solid recovery.”
The benchmark Topix stock index climbed 2.8 percent, extending its rally to 18 percent over the past month. The machinery index surged 4.9 percent. The yen traded at 99.94 per dollar at 2:14 p.m. in Tokyo from 99.74 before the report.
Recent reports show companies plan to increase output after draining inventories, merchant sentiment climbed to an eight-month high in March, and manufacturers expect to be less pessimistic next quarter.
‘Green Shoots’
Economies around the world are showing signs of improvement as governments spend record amounts of money to bolster demand. Chinese urban fixed-asset investment climbed 26.5 percent in the first two months of 2009. South Korea left interest rates at 2 percent today after factory production gained and manufacturing confidence rose to a five-month high.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said last month that he sees “green shoots” in some financial markets and the pace of economic decline “will begin to moderate.”
Japan’s Cabinet Office raised its assessment of machinery orders for the first time since May 2007, saying they’re “rising slightly but still on a downward trend.” Previously it said orders were declining “sharply.”
Bookings from service companies rose 3.3 percent from January, a second month of gains. Orders from manufacturers fell 8.1 percent, less than the 27.4 percent drop in the previous month.
Stimulus Plan
Confidence among Japanese merchants surged to the highest since July last month, the Cabinet Office said yesterday, indicating factory production may recover soon, according to Takahide Kiuchi, chief economist at Nomura Securities Co. in Tokyo. Companies cut inventories at a record pace in February.
Even so, there’s no letup in the export slump that prompted Aso to order his third stimulus plan since coming to office in September. Shipments abroad plunged a record 50.4 percent in February from a year earlier, the Finance Ministry said yesterday, and another survey showed bankruptcies rose to a six-year high in March.
The increase in machinery orders “could be a temporary rebound from the rapid worsening in the past six months and it’s difficult to say Japan’s economy is heading for a sustainable recovery,” said Soichi Okuda, chief economist at Sumitomo Research Institute in Tokyo. “The private sector is still reluctant to invest as their cash flow remains severe.”
Cut Spending
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party will propose the government spends 15.4 trillion yen in the latest package, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News. The measures would represent 3 percent of gross domestic product, taking Aso’s total stimulus to 25 trillion yen.
Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said in parliament today that the economy is likely to keep worsening and uncertainty remains high.
Plunging demand for Japanese cars and electronics drove manufacturer sentiment to a record low in March, the central bank’s Tankan survey showed last week. Big companies said they plan to cut spending by 6.6 percent this fiscal year, the bleakest projection since the 2002 recession.
While the Tankan showed large companies expect sentiment to improve in three months, it also indicated that they have too many workers and excess capacity.
Sharp Corp., which yesterday posted its first loss in half a century, is eliminating 1,500 workers and closing two production lines as global flat-panel television sales slump.
Honda Motor Co. last month delayed the opening of a new domestic factory for the second time in four months. The plant, initially scheduled to start production in 2010, will now open in 2012 at the earliest, the automaker said.
“Companies are clearly under pressure, earnings have been squeezed and you’d expect to see that reflected in the investment,” said David Cohen, director of Asian economic forecasting at Action Economics in Singapore. “Capital spending will likely remain a drag on growth for the next few quarters.” |
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| From: Sam Citron | 4/9/2009 3:11:13 AM | | | | | | Greece Teeters on the Verge of Bankruptcy
By Manfred Ertel
spiegel.de
Greece is on the brink of bankruptcy despite the fact that the global recession has yet to hit the country with full force. Strikes are paralyzing the country and the EU is putting on the pressure. But the government is still trying to put a positive spin on things.
For 33 years now, Dionisis Sargentis, 58, has been selling medical and orthopedic supplies to hospitals, products like screws and clips for damaged vertebrae or broken joints, implants, and surgical instruments. He started out as a one-man business. Today he has 13 employees and annual sales of nearly €7 million ($9.3 million).
One would think that his line of business would be recession-proof, given that there is always a need for medical supplies and his regular customers include major public hospitals in Athens.
And yet Sargentis is currently on the verge of going out of business. "I love my work," he says, "but the business is no longer worth it." For four-and-a-half years now, the public hospitals haven't paid him for the supplies he has delivered. At the moment they owe him somewhere around €4.5 million -- more than half his company's annual sales.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
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Now he's fed up with waiting. Together with a number of other hospital suppliers he drove up in front of the General Hospital of Attica (KAT), which has the largest orthopedic department in Athens. But instead of delivering new supplies, he removed existing stocks from the clinic's storerooms. "We're only repossessing what belongs to us," he said. "They were just on loan." Sargentis and his fellow hospital suppliers are hoping that the Greek government will get the message and finally pay up.
As of Dec. 31 last year, the Greek government owed the 75 member companies of the Greek association of medical equipment suppliers, which Sargentis is president of, almost exactly €800 million. An entire sector of the economy is on the brink of ruin. "Everyone has their backs against the wall," he said.
There is a systemic reason for this. In Greece, hospital suppliers sell their goods to clinics on what is virtually a commission basis. The clinics pay only for what they use and in most cases only after a considerable time lag. Two to two-and-a-half years are considered normal waiting times. The suppliers take that into account in their planning. The orders made by the hospitals serve the companies as security for bank loans they take out to pay salaries and to place new orders with manufacturers. This is the way the business works -- or rather, this is the way it used to work.
But now the banks have stopped cooperating. They are refusing to provide new loans and this has caused the entire system to collapse. "It has cut off our oxygen supply," Sargentis says. "We are being suffocated by debt." But it is not the hospital suppliers' debts the banks are worried about -- it is the highly indebted Greek government they no longer see as being creditworthy. Companies like Sargentis's are the unwitting victims of the change in attitude.
No wonder, then, that there is so much public displeasure being expressed against the Greek government. Over the past few weeks, workers and public employees have been calling strikes across the country. Last Thursday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Greece's major cities, paralyzing public life. Trains, buses, and ferries stopped running. Hospitals offered only emergency services. Public schools were closed.
Crisis? The situation in Greece is not all that bad, insists Panos Livadas, the government's secretary general of information. The shops and cafés are full of customers, he points out. The Greek economy is "really indestructible. I don't understand these international situation assessments."
Livadas's job is to make people see things through rose-colored glasses. He explains that in 2008 his country's economy expanded by 3.2 percent, "one of the highest growth rates in the euro zone." Over the past four years, he says, economic growth in Greece has been twice as high as the overall average in the currency union countries.
He characterizes Greece's banking sector as being "basically sound" and "in considerably better condition" than those in other EU countries and in the United States. He notes that Greece was the first EU country to provide a government guarantee for personal savings up to a total of €100,000. Nothing seems to be able to shake the official's self-satisfied depictions of Greek reality.
But is this what the situation really looks like?
Short of Cash
One needs luck, especially in difficult times. At the crisis summits of EU member countries in Brussels, Prime Minister Caramanlis was lucky in the sense that the community was under such strong pressure to act in response to the crisis in Eastern Europe that not very much attention was given to the situation in Greece.
But now the European Commission has instigated disciplinary proceedings, because Athens has exceeded the euro zone budget deficit limit of 3 percent for the third time in a row. The results of audits carried out by Brussels look very different from the information in Livadas's glossy brochures.
In EU statistics, Greek government debt is listed as amounting to 94 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Italy is the only other euro zone country which has a higher level of government debt. Greece also has the lowest credit rating of all the euro zone countries. It has to finance its government debt under terms which are worse than for any other euro zone country, with the exception of Malta.
Greece has yet to break its old habits. The level of competitiveness is low, much-needed reforms are overdue, government bureaucracy is bloated and corrupt, and the country continues to live beyond its means. Even though the national pension funds are chronically short of cash, female public employees with school-age children are allowed to retire at the age of 50.
Educated young people from the middle class have little prospect of finding employment, despite being well qualified, and are forced to take casual jobs to make ends meet. As a result, many young Greeks are forced to live with their parents until they are well past the age of 30. The anger of the "€700 generation" -- as the young people are known -- over their situation exploded last December in weeks of rioting throughout the country.
The EU is now no longer willing to accept lethargy on the part of the Greek government. European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs Joaquín Almunia called for significantly harsher cost-cutting measures, a "prudent wage policy in the public sector," and greater efforts with regard to structural reforms. Georgios Provopoulos, the governor of the Bank of Greece, the nation's central bank, warned his countrymen against "self-satisfaction" and spoke of a looming danger of national bankruptcy. And Greece has still to feel the full effects of the global recession.
"The negative factors you see here are all leftovers from the past," says one EU diplomat, adding that most of them are homegrown. Economic experts are anxiously waiting to see what's going to happen this summer. They fear there could be a decline in the tourism sector, one of the most important pillars of growth in the Greek economy, accounting for 17 percent of gross domestic product. The volume of tourist bookings from the United States is reported to have dropped by up to 50 percent. The number of British vacationers, some 3 million annually in the past, alongside 2.3 million Germans, is expected to shrink by up to 30 percent.
The situation of banks that invested in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans is uncertain. Greek financial institutions invested billions of euros in bank takeovers or in setting up their own branches in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Given that the value of the national currencies in some of those countries has fallen dramatically, what were originally seen as attractive investments in developing economies could well turn out to be huge losses.
That's what the crisis looks like in Greece. "Nobody wants to see it, but everybody is afraid of it," says Kalliope Amyg, a young political scientist. "The country is dancing on a volcano."
'We Don't Know What Tomorrow Will Bring'
In Greek, there is no direct translation for the verb "save" in a monetary sense. And that is precisely the way the Greeks live.
Greece continues to have a flourishing informal sector. "It helps to stabilize people's incomes and standard of living," observes one European businessman who works in Greece. "Families try to have as many separate sources of incomes as possible."
For 24 years, Popi Kalogeropoulou, 48, has worked as a graphic artist for publishing companies, most recently for the women's magazine Young. At the end of last year she was laid off. The magazine was forced to cut costs, which meant job cuts.
Fortunately it didn't take her long to find a new job. Since mid-January, she has been doing the layout for a weekly newspaper. The pay she was offered isn't bad, more than €2,000 a month, which is a bit more than what she was getting in her last job.
The only thing is, she wasn't given a contract -- she is being forced to work under the table. "I'm being made to do something I don't want to do," she says. She was paid for the first time eight weeks and one day after she started. But she only received €1,000 -- in cash, naturally. "Companies are simply taking advantage of the crisis," she says.
Nobody believes that Greece will be able to cope with the crisis, if and when its hits the country with full force, using just its old inefficient habits. "We don't know what tomorrow will bring," says the entrepreneur Dionisis Sargentis.
Sargentis only knows what will happen if the Greek government continues to be unable to pay its bills and the companies in his sector are unable to sell their goods. "This will spell the end of the health care system in our country." Among other things. |
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| From: Sam Citron | 5/13/2009 11:06:28 PM | | | | | | Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson [NYT]
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
nytimes.com
When capitalism seemed on the verge of collapse last fall, Kristin Halvorsen, Norway’s Socialist finance minister and a longtime free market skeptic, did more than crow.
As investors the world over sold in a panic, she bucked the tide, authorizing Norway’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund to ramp up its stock buying program by $60 billion — or about 23 percent of Norway ’s economic output.
“The timing was not that bad,” Ms. Halvorsen said, smiling with satisfaction over the broad worldwide market rally that began in early March.
The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.
With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way. When others splurged, it saved. When others sought to limit the role of government, Norway strengthened its cradle-to-grave welfare state.
And in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt.
By comparison, the United States is expected to chalk up a fiscal deficit this year equal to 12.9 percent of its gross domestic product and push its total debt to $11 trillion, or 65 percent of the size of its economy.
Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter. It counted $68 billion in oil revenue last year as prices soared to record levels. Even though prices have sharply declined, the government is not particularly worried. That is because Norway avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich countries.
Instead of spending its riches lavishly, it passed legislation ensuring that oil revenue went straight into its sovereign wealth fund, state money that is used to make investments around the world. Now its sovereign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world, despite losing 23 percent last year because of investments that declined.
Norway’s relative frugality stands in stark contrast to Britain, which spent most of its North Sea oil revenue — and more — during the boom years. Government spending rose to 47 percent of G.D.P., from 42 percent in 2003. By comparison, public spending in Norway fell to 40 percent from 48 percent of G.D.P.
“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility.”
Eirik Wekre, an economist who writes thrillers in his spare time, describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”
Mr. Wekre, who paid for his house and car with cash, attributes this broad consensus to as the country’s iconoclasm. “The strongest man is he who stands alone in the world,” he said, quoting Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
Still, even Ibsen might concede that it is easier to stand alone when your nation has benefited from oil reserves that make it the third-largest exporter in the world. The money flowing from that black gold since the early 1970s has prompted even the flintiest of Norwegians to relax and enjoy their good fortune. The country’s G.D.P. per person is $52,000, behind only Luxembourg among industrial democracies.
As in much of the rest of the world home prices have soared here, tripling this decade. But there has been no real estate crash in Norway because there were few mortgage lending excesses. After a 15 percent correction, prices are again on the rise.
Unlike Dublin or Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where work has stopped on half-built skyscrapers and stilled cranes dot the skylines, Oslo retains a feeling of modesty reminiscent of a fishing village rather than a Western capital, with the recently opened $800 million Opera House one of the few signs of opulence.
Norwegian banks, said Arne J. Isachsen, an economist at the Norwegian School of Management, remain largely healthy and prudent in their lending. Banks represent just 2 percent of the economy and tight public oversight over their lending practices have kept Norwegian banks from taking on the risk that brought down their Icelandic counterparts. But they certainly have not closed their doors to borrowers. Mr. Isachsen, like many in Norway, has a second home and an open credit line from his bank, which he recently used to buy a new boat.
Some here worry that while a cabin in the woods and a boat may not approach the excesses seen in New York or London, oil wealth and the state largesse have corrupted Norway’s once-sturdy work ethic.
“This is an oil-for-leisure program,” said Knut Anton Mork, an economist at Handelsbanken in Oslo. A recent study, he pointed out, found that Norwegians work the fewest hours of the citizens of any industrial democracy.
“We have become complacent,” Mr. Mork added. “More and more vacation houses are being built. We have more holidays than most countries and extremely generous benefits and sick leave policies. Some day the dream will end.”
But that day is far off. For now, the air is clear, work is plentiful and the government’s helping hand is omnipresent — even for those on the margins.
Just around the corner from Norway’s central bank, for instance, Paul Bruum takes a needle full of amphetamines and jabs it into his muscular arm. His scabs and sores betray many years as a heroin addict. He says that the $1,500 he gets from the government each month is enough to keep him well-fed and supplied with drugs.
Mr. Bruum, 32, says he has never had a job, and he admits he is no position to find one. “I don’t blame anyone,” he said. “The Norwegian government has provided for me the best they can.”
To Ms. Halvorsen, the finance minister, even the underside of the Norwegian dream looks pretty good compared to the economic nightmares elsewhere.
“As a socialist, I have always said that the market can’t regulate itself,” she said. “But even I was surprised how strong the failure was.” |
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| From: Sam Citron | 5/23/2009 8:41:08 PM | | | | | | As Economy Struggles, Russia’s Market Has Surged
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW — Despite continuing weakness in the Russian economy, the stock exchange here has surged to become the best performing in the world, after being the worst last fall.
After the sell-off last year pushed the valuations of Russian companies to record lows, rising energy prices in recent months have drawn investors back into the market, traders said, even as the government has twice downgraded its expectations for growth this year.
Other big emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil, have rebounded sharply in recent months on signs that the fractured global economy may be beginning to heal, but none have been more buoyant than Russia.
When the authorities reported this month that industrial output declined 16.9 percent in April, the stock market still continued a five-day streak.
“Investors are not analyzing macroeconomics when deciding whether to invest in Russia,” the chief economist in Moscow for Merrill Lynch, Yulia Tseplayeva, said.
“They look at oil prices, and believe that when oil prices rise so will the Russian market,” she said. “And that is true.”
Officials now expect a contraction of more than 6 percent in the Russian economy before it begins to improve. Yet investors who braved the yo-yo bounce in the Russian market have profited handsomely.
The Micex index of major Russian company shares, for example, is up 105 percent after bottoming out on Oct. 27. It rose 19.66 points, or 1.9 percent, on Friday to close at 1,054.03.
For some investors, the very air of dismal news hanging over the country inspired contrarian bets in February and March that shares were oversold.
“It seemed a consensus emerged generally that Eastern Europe was going to hell,” Ian Hague, a partner at Firebird Capital Management, a New York hedge fund that focuses on the former Soviet Union, said by telephone. “When you see that, it is very bullish. Because the reality is never as bad as people’s fears.”
Firebird, after selling Russian shares in the second half of 2008, reinvested in February, he said.
But for all Moscow’s effort to diversify the economy, the rise in Russian equity values has closely tracked the price of oil, by far its largest export commodity — much as the market plunge last fall coincided with the collapse of oil prices.
In the second half of last year, oil prices declined 75 percent and the RTS index fell by 72 percent, said an investor note from UralSib, a Moscow brokerage firm. This year, crude prices have risen 59 percent and the RTS index 58 percent. The RTS is denominated in dollars and its fluctuations reflect both share prices and the ruble-dollar exchange rate, unlike the Micex.
Still, Russian stocks plunged last fall not only because of oil price declines, but also because many Russian industrialists had pledged shares as collateral for loans, and were required to sell when credit lines were called in.
Then, uncertainty over the stability of the ruble prompted foreign investors to sell shares.
By late January, however, the ruble had stabilized and the forced selling was over, eliminating two Russia-specific risks and leaving a very depressed market behind. Then oil prices ticked back up.
Money is trickling back into Russian investments. For now, the inflow has not balanced the outflow of capital as companies repay foreign banks for loans that are not being rolled over. But the new money coming in was very nearly equal to the outflow in April, according to an estimate by Merrill Lynch.
In that month, the central bank reported a net loss of $2 billion of capital. Since roughly $10 billion in loan payments came due in April, the investor inflow probably was about $8 billion for the month, the bank said.
And the Russian stock market bounce came in spite of looming troubles in the real economy that analysts say make it look tenuous.
But given Russia’s dependence on the boom-and-bust commodity price cycles, a lack of so-called long money investing in the economy and a good deal of jitters about political stability and relations with the West, Russia’s stock market probably will remain highly volatile.
In fact, since its inception after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian stock market has been either in the top five performing markets in the world or the bottom five in every year except one, according to Renaissance Capital, a Moscow brokerage. |
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| From: Sam Citron | 6/17/2009 10:12:14 AM | | | | | | Iran’s Latest Protests Seen as the Toughest to Stop [NYT]
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
nytimes.com
In an iconic photograph of antigovernment demonstrations in Iran, a student with flowing black hair and a headband held aloft the bloody T-shirt of a wounded protester. After his face appeared on the cover of The Economist magazine in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi paid dearly for it, enduring nearly a decade of imprisonment and torture before fleeing into exile.
On Tuesday, as he watched the swelling antigovernment protests in Iran from suburban Virginia, Mr. Batebi described a sense of dread mixing with happiness. “Every society has to make their own version of freedom and democracy, and that is what the Iranian people are doing right now,” he said through a translator. “But I know that people are being beaten, some are going to jail and some will be killed.”
The Iranian government tolerated student-led uprisings in 1999 and 2003 for only a few days before unleashing fearsome crackdowns, sending Basij vigilantes onto campuses, where they flung a few students from the windows; bloodied as many heads as they could with bricks, chains or truncheons; and jailed scores.
Similar intimidation tactics have been on display over the past few days with little result, as Iranian state news reports of seven people killed in various cities did not deter another major antigovernment rally on Tuesday. This time, analysts say, the government will have trouble bringing about a swift, sharp end to the demonstrations over the contested presidential election results in the same way it had shut down previous eruptions.
First, there is the sheer size of these demonstrations, with protests that are not limited to students, but cut across generations and economic classes. Second, there is a more pronounced, if still nebulous, leadership centered around the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who has adopted an openly hard-edged attitude toward the government. Third, the current crisis was inspired by common anger over a national election, not the more narrow issues students took to heart.
The question mark remains how long Iran’s rulers will tolerate the demonstrations, and indeed how long the protesters will stay in the streets until what many analysts expect will be a “Tiananmen moment.” They fear a replay of the Chinese government’s rolling out tanks to ruthlessly crush pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 — China’s economic growth and centralized control being something of a model for the mullahs.
“This is an order of magnitude different from those earlier demonstrations,” said Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, who has been tracking the upheaval on his Informed Comment blog. “In the earlier student demonstrations, people were saying that the hard-liners were doing things that were wrong. What these demonstrators are saying is that the regime has become so corrupt and so dictatorial that it has become rotten to the core.”
In the earlier protests, the middle class extended something like drive-by support, honking their horns or flashing their high-beam headlights as they drove past the chanting students. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke like a rueful patriarch, saying he regretted the few student deaths and that people who criticized him should not be chastised. After the initial spasms of violence the president at the time, Mohammad Khatami, fearing wider bloodshed, declined to call his followers out in support.
The general sentiment was that everyone should go home and try to solve problems through the ballot box, noted Ervand Abrahamian, an expert on Iranian opposition movements at Baruch College. But the chance of that kind of compromise has been soured by the sentiment that Friday’s election was stolen.
“Those arguments don’t work now because the ballot box has proved to be a cul-de-sac,” said Mr. Abrahamian.
Mr. Moussavi was a staunch leftist in an era when such leaders admired Che Guevara, and he served as prime minister of Iran during the 1980s when postrevolutionary battles with guerrilla movements left between 10,000 and 20,000 people dead, noted Professor Cole. He is viewed as a much tougher fighter than Mr. Khatami, an ayatollah who came from the very clerical class that runs the country.
“Moussavi was around in some tough times, he has not shown any signs of being intimidated by all this,” said Gary Sick, a senior scholar at Columbia University who runs the Persian Gulf research and information Web site called Gulf 2000. Just how far Mr. Moussavi takes the mantle of leadership is another unanswered question — the demonstrations will have to continue for the demands for change to yield results, he said.
Finally, there has been a critical shift in alliances. In the earlier uprisings, it was basically the reformists calling for change, opposed by both the religious hard-liners and the more pragmatic conservatives. This time, the pragmatists and the reformists have joined forces against the hard-liners, analysts said.
With that, the route to any workable compromise over demands by demonstrators for a new election is difficult to envision, analysts said. One reason Mr. Moussavi and other leaders have labored to keep the chants focused on the election result is to avoid giving the government the excuse to open fire because the demonstrators want to topple the system.
“I expect the situation to polarize further, and given the character of this regime, I think it is a matter of time before they roll in the tanks,” said Professor Cole. |
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| From: Sam Citron | 9/3/2009 12:31:03 PM | | | | | | Spain's Solar-Power Collapse Dims Subsidy Model [WSJ]
By ANGEL GONZALEZ and KEITH JOHNSON
Spain's hopes of becoming a world leader in solar power have collapsed since the Spanish government slammed the brakes on generous subsidies.
The sudden change has rippled across the global solar industry, in a warning of the problems that government-supported renewable-energy programs can encounter.
In 2008, Spain accounted for half the world's new solar-power installations in terms of wattage, thanks to government subsidies to promote clean energy. But late last year, as the global economic crisis worsened, the government dramatically scaled back those subsidies and capped the amount of subsidized solar power that could be installed.
Factories world-wide that had ramped up production of solar-power components found that demand for solar panels was plummeting, leaving a glut in supply and pushing prices down. Job cuts followed.
"The solar industry in 2009 has been undermined by [a] collapse in demand due to the decision by Spain," says Henning Wicht, a solar-power analyst at research group iSuppli.
Spain is providing important lessons for the U.S., where lawmakers are engaged in a debate about how to support renewable energy. Boosters of clean energy, including President Barack Obama, have pointed to Spain as a success story showing how government policies jump-started renewable energy, created new industries, and helped the environment.
Spain's early bet on wind power paid off: The country is one of the world leaders in generating such power, only recently eclipsed by the U.S. Spanish wind-power companies have become global players. In 2008, wind power accounted for 11% of Spanish electricity production, compared to less than 1% for solar power.
Reyad Fezzani, chief executive of BP Solar, a unit of oil giant BP PLC, said that despite the current crisis, the Spanish model succeeded in creating a solar industry from scratch. "Once you pay for the infrastructure, you have a skilled work force and you can expand and contract very easily," he said.
Clean-energy skeptics, however, point to Spain as a cautionary tale of a government policy that created a speculative bubble with disastrous consequences. Some Republicans have cited Spain's solar bubble and bust as an example of how unsustainable government clean-energy pushes are.
[Cloudy Outlook chart]
The U.S. is experimenting with different ways to promote clean energy, including tax incentives and direct federal subsidies to defray installation costs, and mandates for utilities to get a certain amount of their power from renewable energy.
California and New Jersey, which lead the U.S. in solar power, are among states that have used subsidies similar to the ones in Spain to make solar power more attractive. Two House Democrats, Jay Inslee of Washington and Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts, are drafting legislation that would create European-style tariffs for solar power.
The industry's fundamental problem is that, without subsidies, it's still not economically viable.
Mike Ahearn, chief executive of Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar Corp., says solar power could be competitive "within a couple of years" -- but only if the industry gains scale. That would require generous government subsidies and other forms of support, Mr. Ahearn says: "It's a chicken-and-egg problem."
Spain's solar ambitions started as an outgrowth of its earlier push to become a global player in wind power. By offering generous long-term support for wind power, Spain became a world leader. Companies such as Iberdrola SA and Gamesa Corp. catapulted from their home market to the U.S.
Wind energy was a cheaper renewable option than solar, so the Spanish government sought to make solar power more attractive by increasing subsidies, just as other countries, particularly Germany, were scaling back support.
As a result, Spain's solar capacity last year increased to 3,342 megawatts from 695 megawatts, the size of a coal plant, a year earlier. Government subsidies for solar power jumped to €1.1 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2008 from €214 million in 2007.
Solar power "was a financial product, not an energy solution," says Ignacio Sánchez Galán, chairman of Iberdrola, the world's biggest renewable-energy company. Iberdrola has largely shunned solar because wind power is cheaper and requires less land.
That's especially true of the new wave of large-scale solar power, known as solar thermal power, which uses the sun to heat water into steam which runs turbines. That technology offers the potential for much bigger clean-energy projects than silicon-coated photovoltaic panels, and has attracted interest from utilities in Spain and the U.S., especially. But solar thermal power is far from being cost-competitive with traditional power sources, and it requires large swathes of empty land, such as those found in parts of Spain and the U.S. Southwest.
Faced with the unraveling world economy and a deepening budget deficit, the Spanish government late last year reduced the money it paid for solar electricity and capped the amount of subsidized solar power installed each year at 500 megawatts. Spain's solar-power capacity has actually shrunk this year as a result.
The effects have been felt far beyond Spain. China's Yingli Green Energy Holding Co., which makes solar-power components for export, posted a 43% slide in first-quarter earnings, in large part because Spain was no longer buying.
Yiyu Wang, Yingli's chief strategic officer, said the Spanish experience could teach governments around the world to undertake "more practical, more stable plans."
Solar makers such as Norway's Renewable Energy Corp., China's LDK Solar Co. and JA Solar Holdings Co. posted big second-quarter losses. German giant Q-Cells posted a first-half net loss of €697 million and plans to cut about 500 workers, about a fifth of its work force.
"We are without a doubt in a difficult situation," Q-Cells CEO Anton Milner wrote in a report to shareholders. |
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| From: Sam Citron | 10/1/2009 1:43:10 PM | | | | | | With Help of Russian Business Leaders, M.B.A. School Opens in Moscow
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
nytimes.com
MOSCOW — A handful of top Russian business figures have created a Master of Business Administration program that tackles the issues they faced themselves: bribery, relentless bureaucracy and imperfect laws.
Supporters of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo say it will fill an important niche by getting students ready for the unpredictable, sometimes corrupt world of emerging market economies.
“We’d like to change the whole model,” said the school’s dean, Wilfried Vanhonacker. “It doesn’t make sense for us, nor are we interested in competing with Harvard. That’s a business school of the past, I have to say. But a business school of the future has to be different.”
With construction not quite finished on its $250 million glass-and-steel campus just outside the Moscow city limits, the school began its full-time, 16-month M.B.A. program this month, with classes temporarily in the five-star Hotel Baltschug Kempinski near the Kremlin.
Mr. Vanhonacker, the former director of the doctoral program at the Insead business school in France, said that developing economies provided the biggest business opportunities but schools did not prepare students to work in them.
“We looked and we didn’t see any business school preparing this talent, even though in most corporate sectors this is where we expect the growth to come from,” he said.
Other business schools do offer some focus on emerging markets. Insead, for example, offers field work in China, India and Middle East. Loïc Sadoulet, academic director of the Insead Africa Initiative, said one optional course focuses on developing countries and deals with issues like foreign direct investment, corruption and health.
The Skolkovo program includes classroom courses in management theory but also will invite dozens of guest speakers to provide the students with examples of the challenges of emerging economies. And part of their training consists of working at companies solving real-world problems.
After three months of studying management theory, students will be placed with a government department or company in Russia, China, India or the United States.
“It’s learning by doing, not learning by acting or playing,” said Serge Hayward, director of the M.B.A. program. “We’re trying to put them in an environment where they are going to function rather than tell them about this environment.”
Mr. Hayward said that he had considered asking officials in police agencies and private security companies to speak to the business students, and might even invite an organized crime boss to talk about the challenges of management.
One of the aims of putting students into the world of business and government, Mr. Vanhonacker said, is to break down their preconceptions. “We want to shock them that there is a reality out there which is very different from what they think it is,” he said.
Last week, 40 students in their 20s and 30s, most dressed casually in sport shirts and jeans, listened to a professor, Pierre Casse, lecture on leadership. Mr. Casse used a hypothetical murder case to illustrate how judgment depends on a person’s point of reference and how leadership is about rallying people around one reference point.
Julia Davis, an American student, said she had chosen the Moscow school because it was a “forward-looking” institution with no preconceived notion of either business education or the nature of the global economy. Ms. Davis said she was glad the Skolkovo instructors talked about topics like corruption, flawed legislation and the role of ruling political parties in emerging economies.
Among the patrons of the school are some of the biggest names in the Russian business world, like Ruben Vardanian, founder of Troika Dialog investment bank, as well as global companies like Credit Suisse and industrial giants like Severstal, the Russian steel maker.
Roman Abramovich, the billionaire investor and owner of the Chelsea soccer team in Britain, donated 26 hectares, or 64 acres, of land for the campus.
President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, who has spoken of the need to fight corruption, sits on the advisory board and spoke at the program’s inaugural ceremony. Mr. Vardanian said that only private money had been involved in starting the school, but approval from the higher authorities had spared the project bureaucratic hurdles that it might otherwise have faced.
Although there are M.B.A. programs at a handful of universities in Russia, few of them attract professors with global credentials and most of the programs are taught in Russian. Classes in Skolkovo are conducted in English.
Skolkovo’s training is not cheap. Fees for the full-time M.B.A. program, including accommodation and flights to India, China and the United States, are €50,000, or about $74,000. The sum will sound daunting for many in Russia, where the national average for a monthly salary is 18,000 rubles, or about $600, and 33,000 rubles in Moscow.
Alexandra Dronova, a student, said she had chosen Skolkovo because she wanted an education relevant to life in Russia. “There’s not much point to be educated somewhere in the States,” she said. “There are excellent schools there, but how do you apply this in Russia?” |
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