Dancing on the Sand - By Bruce Jones At 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, 1,000 or so advanced delegates at Rio+20 (formally, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) laid down their pens and shut off their laptops. At noon, Brazil's worldly foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, gaveled through the Outcome Document from the chair. And by mid-afternoon, Rio was full of a sound to which that joyous city is unaccustomed: the collective moan of 40,000 environmentalists disappointed about the results. (Yes, you read that right: 40,000. Alongside 10,000 official government participants.) That the Rio outcome fell short of the highest expectations was not only predictable, it was predicted -- by everybody. There were some avoidable mistakes. In practice, though, the best-organized process in the world wasn't going to produce serious outcomes on environment issues, either in Rio or Mexico City. What's more, the outcomes from Rio aren't all bad. The U.N. is not alone in having had a tough week.
Hudson: The Neo-Rentier Economy « Multiplier Effect Michael Hudson is giving a talk titled “The Road to Debt Deflation, Debt Peonage, and Neofeudalism” at the Levy Institute on Friday, February 10 at 2:00 p.m. Hudson is a research associate at the Levy Institute and a financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends. He is distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and an honorary professor of economics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. The abstract for the presentation is below the fold. “What is called “capitalism” is best understood as a series of stages. To make a long story short, the end product of capitalism thus has become a Neo-Rentier Economy – something that Industrial Capitalism set out to replace in is Progressive Era from the late 19th century to early 20th century. The result is economic shrinkage – the opposite of industrial capitalism’s original expansive industrial and commercial impulse.
"Labor’s Paradise Lost" by Robert Skidelsky LONDON – As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called “technological unemployment” – that is, “unemployment due to the discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. Machines were rapidly replacing human labor, holding out the prospect of vastly increased production at a fraction of the existing human effort.
Why are Cash-Rich Companies Being Subsidized by Tax-Poor Governments? The latest Q3 US national accounts data shows profits as a share of GDP are at historical highs. Meanwhile household’s share is at all time lows (see chart). Will pressure from the electorate force to address this imbalance? In the UK, we witnessed just what SocGen described as “the public lynching of Starbucks, Amazon and Google” as public ire has shifted “very swiftly from banker bashing to corporate bashing.” Forget the official tax rate, and look at the actual tax dollars US and European companies have been paying. Societe Generale warns that there is risk to these rates going forward — and that could have implications for profitability. Source: Quant Quickie Societe Generale Category: Politics, Taxes and Policy
"Rio’s Unsustainable Nonsense" by Jagdish Bhagwati Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an axe to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase “sustainable development.” Thus, the International Labor Organization and trade-union lobbies have managed to insert “Decent Jobs” into the seven priority areas at the Rio conference. No one should pretend that we can magically offer decent jobs to the huge numbers of impoverished but aspiring workers in the informal sector. The flavor of the week in Rio is “sustainability indexing” for corporations, by way of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Corporations can, of course, be asked to conform to a “don’t” list – don’t dump mercury into rivers, don’t employ children for hazardous tasks, etc. Even when the Rio+20 agenda includes something more properly “environmental” – say, the supply of water – platitudes predominate.
Don't Sweat the Bond Markets The ongoing eurozone debacle has driven home certain straightforward lessons: the fiscal rules enshrined in the EU's 1997 Stability and Growth Pact had almost no teeth, government bonds of EU nations are not a risk-free asset, and voters do not readily tolerate economic austerity. Beyond these, however, the last few years have also contained subtle lessons about the relationship between governments and capital markets. More specifically, they have shown that our understanding of the pressures that private capital markets place on governments is incomplete. Although holders of government debt certainly would react markedly to a change in the membership of the eurozone, they would not likely react strongly, or over the longer term, to many other government policy decisions and political outcomes. And these reactions have varying consequences for governments, depending on how governments have managed their debt profiles. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
"Fast Food’s “Ethnic Insights”" by Andrew Billo Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – There is no denying the fast-food industry’s contribution to America’s obesity epidemic. Now, Asians and Asian-Americans could follow on this path, as major fast-food chains like McDonald’s target them disproportionately. Although Asian-Americans amount to only 6% of the United States’ population, the marketing magazine Advertising Age reports that for every nine focus groups that McDonald’s organizes, two (22%) are Asian-focused, while another four center on other minorities. At the Asia Society’s Diversity Leadership Forum earlier this month in New York, McDonald’s Director of Ethnic Marketing Vivien Chen described how the company has focused its marketing on the ethnic consumer. Chen claims that its strategy – called “Leading with ethnic insights” – shows the company’s commitment to the Asian-American consumer. In fact, this link represents the scope of Asia’s incipient obesity problem.
"The Female Economy" by Nena Stoiljkovic Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space WASHINGTON, DC – Today, women own roughly 35% of small and medium-size enterprises in developing countries, and make up approximately 40% of the global workforce. Women’s consumer spending is projected to reach $28 trillion globally in 2014. And women contribute to their societies by investing their earnings in health, education, and family. And yet recent research by the World Bank Group documented discrepancies between treatment of women and men in 102 of 141 countries surveyed – policies and practices that severely limit women’s economic opportunities. Gender-based barriers to investment not only put women at a disadvantage; they also reduce the entire economy’s growth potential. Three fundamental and interrelated gender-specific challenges must be addressed to make countries’ investment climate more woman-friendly. But women entrepreneurs need better access to finance.