Michael Mandel had an interesting take on the US trade deficit in Business Week earlier this month (btw: he also has a weblog).
His opinion is that the US trade deficit isn’t as big a deal as people often think. One of the reasons: that the ongoing import of human capital into the US (which of [...]

Provisional GDP numbers for eurozone countries in the first quarter are out today. The German economy surprisingly bounces back, whilst Italy is now officially in recession after two quarters of contraction. Also worthy of note is that the Dutch economy contracted slightly in the first quarter, which may have some implications for the forthcoming constitution [...]

Earlier this month, when Edward wrote

The alarm shot was given by Dalls Federal Reserve President Robert McTeer when he declared in a speech in New York last week that whilst overseas investors now ?finance? the US current account gap, ?theoretically some day that process will come to an end, the flows will turn against us [...]

Digital distribution changing industries? So very 1999.
Think again.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

The world of physical sales is a world of scarcity. Limited shelf space, limited distribution channels, limited display area; limits wherever [...]

With unemplyment currently running at a five year high of 10.7%, yesterday’s news that GM/Opel and KarstadtQuelle are to reduce employment further (’Germany Loses 15,000 Jobs in a Day’ was the Bloomberg headline) could hardly come at a worse time. There is plenty of evidence of the long promised restructuring, but little of jobs growth. [...]

Morgan Stanley (among many others) have been busy cutting their 2004 and 2005 growth outooks. With Oil prices continuosly hitting new highs this all has some sort of inevitability about it. Whilst it is probable that the slowdown in growth will bring oil back from its current peaks, MS estimate that “the new equilibrium for [...]

My out-of-consensus speculation that the Bank of England’s round of interest rate rises may be pretty much done looks sounder by the day. There may be one more rate increase, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they were pretty much over with it, and even if the next move (the end of this [...]

It’s sometimes interesting to give some thought to the things we believe, and don’t believe, about people. For some George W Bush is one of the most ruthless US Presidents we have seen in years, for others he is apparently the perfect gentleman, playing exactly by the rule book:
Financial markets may be all ears on [...]

Italian consumer confidence has remained near a 10-year low in March in the wake of the Madrid terrorist bombings. In fact the bombings may have hurt sentiment in Italy more than the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. according to a statement from the government-funded Isae institute. The confidence survey, which [...]

“Russia is our No.1 destination for technology outsourcing,” says Cha Dae Sung, who is in charge of “global technological cooperation” for Samsung.
And Samsung is not alone. LG Electronics, Daewoo Electronics, and hundreds of smaller companies rely heavily on Russian engineers, who labor either from Korean suboffices in Moscow or in the office towers of Seoul. [...]