1 OECD warns of low global growth (Khaleej Times) The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, has warned declining global productivity will usher in a new and extended era of low growth unless there are major structural reforms. Its new “Going for Growth” report identifies infrastructure shortages and slowing trade activity as key problems — issues that will be in focus at the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Sydney this weekend.
“The widespread deceleration in productivity since the [global financial] crisis could presage the beginning of a new low-growth era,” the OECD said. “The global economy’s momentum remains sluggish, heightening concerns that there has been a structural downshift in growth rates compared with pre-crisis levels.
OECD chief Angel Gurria said the report came at a time of transition for the global economy, when “we see the recovery strengthening in advanced economies, albeit at different speeds, while growth in emerging economies is slowing. Gurria noted that key drivers of productivity growth such as credit, investment and trade, had been “very very sluggish, in some cases unusually weak since the crisis”.
Growth was muted, unemployment and economic inequality was rising and the OECD chief said there had been a “big drop in the confidence, in the trust in all the institutions we’ve built up over 50 to 100 years”.
http://khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?section=internationbusiness&xfile=/data/internationbusiness/2014/February/internationbusiness_February107.xml
2 The stimulus tragedy (Paul Krugman in The New York
Times) Five years have passed since President Obama signed the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the “stimulus” — into law. With the passage of
time, it has become clear that the act did a vast amount of good. It helped end
the economy’s plunge; it created or saved millions of jobs; it left behind an
important legacy of public and private investment.
It was also a political disaster.
And the consequences of that political disaster — the perception that stimulus
failed — have haunted economic policy ever since. All the evidence points to
substantial positive short-run effects from the Obama stimulus. And there were
surely long-term benefits, too: big investments in everything from green energy
to electronic medical records.
But the important point is that US
fiscal policy went completely in the wrong direction after 2010. With the
stimulus perceived as a failure, job creation almost disappeared from
inside-the-Beltway discourse, replaced with obsessive concern over budget
deficits. Government spending, which had been temporarily boosted both by the
Recovery Act and by safety-net programs like food stamps and unemployment
benefits, began falling, with public investments hit worst. And this
anti-stimulus has destroyed millions of jobs.
In other words, the overall
narrative of the stimulus is tragic. A policy initiative that was good but not
good enough ended up being seen as a failure, and set the stage for an
immensely destructive wrong turn.
The brainchild of Swiss automotive dream factory Rinspeed, the concept car is kitted out with special seats, developed by a medical prosthetics manufacturer, that tilt into more than 20 different configurations, as if you ever needed that many ways to sit down. Now your passenger can face you and be even more distracting, or you can swap over and face them – or you can both swivel round and face the same way.
The dashboard itself is stripped away and replaced with a 1.2m-wide screen, home to the “scalable infotainment platform”, which is linked to online data sources and can speak to other cars to create “travel-specific cloud services”, giving traffic warnings and route directions. When you get tired of driving, you can slide the steering wheel across to your passenger and let them take over.
For such a high-tech concoction, the most bizarre feature of all is a wind-up watch, which sits imprisoned in a mysterious crystal dome above the steering wheel, bringing the permanent glamour of the duty-free trolley to your very own car. It is, the designers proudly declare, “arguably the world’s most expensive watch-winder,” and perhaps also the most pointless: when the car is stationary, the globe spins to wind up the mechanical watch movement – driven by an electric motor.
So she wrote this letter to the burglars after they looted her house when she had taken her husband David, a 65-year-old retired utility worker and disabled combat veteran to hospital. He died on the way to the hospital.
To Whomever This May Concern; Thank you to whomever it was that was so thoughtful that they found it necessary to kick in my front door and rob my house when I left to follow the ambulance to the hospital when my husband David died last night. You have saved me from having to come home and look at David’s laptop and his guns, his prescriptions, all my jewelry, which included the ring that David’s mom gave me right before she died.
But, most of all thank you so very, very much for taking David’s pillowcase off of his pillow. I know you needed it to carry the drawers from my jewelry box so you wouldn’t drop them and damage them. With that single act of kindness displayed by you, you saved me from ever having to lie in our bed and be able to still smell David’s scent while I slept.
So, thank you so much for thinking of me and removing the things from my house that you knew would remind me of him in my period of grief. Sincerely, Mrs. David Richmond (Naomi)
http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2014/02/21/woman-pens-piercing-letter-to-burglars-who-ransacked-her-home-as-her-husband-died/
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