1 Eurozone tumbles back into deflation (BBC) Consumer
prices in the eurozone fell sharply in February to minus 0.2%, putting more
pressure on the European Central Bank. The slide into deflation is a sharp
reversal from the revised 0.3% increase recorded in January.
It is the first fall in inflation since September
when it shrank by 0.1%, according to Eurostat. Energy drove the decline, with
prices down 8% in February compared to a 5.4% slide in January.
The dismal figures have dashed hopes that ECB
efforts to boost prices were working. That raises the chance of the bank
announcing further stimulus measures next month. It has already announced a cut
to its bank deposit rate, which remains in negative territory.
2 China factory output shrinks more than expected
(Straits Times) Activity in China's manufacturing sector shrank more than
expected in February, an official survey showed on March 1, adding pressure on
policymakers to provide additional stimulus for the cooling economy.
The official Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) stood
at 49.0 in February, down from the previous month's reading of 49.4 and below
the 50-point mark that separates growth from contraction on a monthly basis. Analysts
had predicted a reading of 49.3.
Late on Monday, China's central bank reduced the
amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves for the fifth time since Feb.
2015, as regulators move to get more cash into the system to cushion painful
structural reforms.
3 Technology is eating middle class jobs, too
(Michael White in The Guardian) “One million jobs to vanish in 10 years,” shout
the Monday morning headlines just to get the week off to a good start. But it’s
not another scary intervention in the referendum debate by a pro-European or a
Brexiter. It’s more serious than that.
The culprit on this occasion is the British Retail
Consortium (BRC), the people who speak for shops of many sizes and employ one
in six of British workers, about 3 million people. They think that 900,000 of
them (not quite the million of the FT’s headline) will disappear in the next
decade, more in smaller businesses and poorer areas.
Why so? This is an upgrade of an old story, the
impact of disruptive technologies on existing patterns of employment, bigger
and smarter computers, more online sales. But since George Osborne decided to
become the worker’s friend and raise the minimum wage to a “national living”
variety (NLW), albeit slowly, it’s also a political story. Higher wages imposed
by government will put low-paid shop workers’ jobs in danger, says the BRC.
Don’t be smug, Mr Lawyer, Ms Doctor, Sir Financial
Adviser. Tech is starting to eat good middle-class jobs, much as automated
production lines ate so many well-paid working-class jobs a generation ago. We
know about this in journalism because our business was one of the first
white-collar industries in the queue. Facebook and Google are busy eating our
lunch; if we aren’t nimble enough, we’ll be pudding.
It was Keynes who first spoke of “technological
unemployment”. But it’s getting faster, as it did for handloom weavers around
1800. The result for all such businesses, so the conventional scenario goes, is
the pear-shaped labour market, which sees huge rewards for a tiny elite at the
top and a lot (though not enough) insecure ones for millennials working in the
gig economy.
So computers may beat us all at chess, but we still
have the edge on human-to-human skills and much still needs to be done to
tackle mental health problems in the ways we have done so many physical
ailments with spectacular success. Is the future jobs path out of retail and
into therapy?
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