In a major move that indicates corporate Japan is starting to think about global strategy as a way to overcome the stagnation that has afflicted domestic markets for the past 20 years,
Fast Retailing, Japan’s largest clothing chain operator, will ask executives in offices both at home and around the world to conduct meetings and write documents in English.
The Obama administration has announced that it would ask Congress to ratify a long-stalled free-trade agreement with South Korea after the midterm elections in November.
The decision, which risks angering labor unions and their Congressional supporters, was announced after a meeting with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak at the G-20 meeting in Toronto.
Mr. Obama’s aides said they would try to resolve lingering issues by the time of the next G-20 leaders’ talks,
It’s not really funny, but the pathetic in-ability / un-willingness of the Democrats
to counter the power of the TBTF banks & their Congressional running dogs IS becoming ever more clearly what we called it:
a total farce.
The Senate will not be able to complete legislation to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system this week, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said on Wednesday,
Congressional negotiators briefly reopened the conference proceedings on a sweeping financial regulatory bill on Tuesday
after Senate Republicans who had supported an earlier version of the measure threatened to block final approval
unless Democrats removed a proposed tax on big banks and hedge funds.
The need to reopen negotiations was deeply embarrassing for Democrats and represented a price they had paid for rushing to complete the legislation at the request of President Obama.
Quantitative funds, or “quants,” are the “black boxes” of investing —
portfolios run by managers who generally try to generate profit with computer algorithms that they don’t share with outsiders, or even their own investors.
When you put your money into one of them, you are trusting not only that the overall strategy is sound,
Under intense scrutiny after several suicides at its factories in southern China this year, Foxconn Technology,
a major supplier to Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, has decided to stop operating its own dormitories for workers.
Last week, the company said that it was essentially outsourcing its living arrangements to two Chinese real estate companies.
The firms will take over the operations of 153 dormitories that house half of its 420,000 workers in Shenzhen.
While Japan’s long economic stagnation has prompted a slow dismantling of the nation’s postwar order, punctuated by a historic change of government last year,
one pillar of that order, the news media, has so far been left relatively untouched.
The new government has taken the initial steps to open up some of the exclusive press clubs that dominate coverage at Tokyo’s powerful central ministries,
but it has yet to follow through with more sweeping changes.
New mining in Zimbabwe has quickly yielded millions of carats of diamonds and could help catapult the nation into the ranks of the world’s top diamond producers,
according to the head of a group of experts for the United Nations-backed effort to stop the trade in conflict diamonds.
But the new wealth has provoked fears that the riches will be used to subvert attempts
to bring democracy to a country that has long suffered under authoritarian rule, and also to finance conflicts.
Ever since we started here, we’ve been saying the “advanced” world – US / EU / Japan – are in a depression,
whatever good things – which we hope will continue – are happening in China, India, Brazil etc.
And we almost NEVER link to Paul Krugman, economics columnist of the New York Times,
because, as we’ve said, we think EVERY reader of Economy Watch should be reading his stuff regularly as well.
Han Dongfang is founder of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based organization that defends the rights of workers across China.
After 30 years of reform and spectacular economic growth, the cracks are beginning to show.
The workers who have created China’s economic miracle are tiring of being treated like cogs in a machine, working long hours in dangerous conditions for derisory pay.
