SAO PAOLO | By Benjamin Cole at Marcus Nunes’ Historinhas | Slated to be No. 2 at the Fed is Stanley Fischer, who espouses adjustable inflation-targeting more than the locally preferred shooting for steady increases in nominal GDP (Market Monetarism), who knows?—it may amount to the same thing in practice.
PARIS | By Jérôme Hourdeaux at Mediapart via Presseurop | Despite being strong advocates of competition, European institutions are bound to the US software giant through murky contracts. Any transition to “open source” software, which in theory they encourage, would be too complicated and too expensive, they claim. Excerpts.
NEW YORK | By Ana Fuentes | The debate about the minimum wage is making big headlines both in the U.S. and in Europe, although for very different reasons. In Washington, the main issue is whether to raise it, since at $7.25 per hour the richest country in the world pays less per hour to many other developed countries.In Europe, Germany has joined the minimum wage club as one of the highlights of the coalition agreement, and France is increasing it by 1.1 per cent. In Spain the minimum wage was frozen two years ago due to austerity measures, and today minimum wage workers are struggling to make ends meet. Still, they can still enjoy free health insurance, education or a paid vacation, something that their American counterparts cannot even dream of.
MADRID | By Luis Arroyo | This week is tapering week, and we will see the Fed’s first step towards a reduction of the quantitative easing. There is consensus about what the economic data show: every single indicator (except inflation) are more and more vigorous.
MEXICO CITY | By David Brunat | Mexico is broadly considered as one of the most promising emerging markets. A member of the so-called MIST countries (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey), a group of economies that are soon to equal the BRICS’ influence, according to Goldman Sachs. However, Mexico still has to face several internal threats if it wants to fulfil the forecasts. Along with high-scale corruption, the North American country must solve the huge problem that crime gangs pose to economic development.
WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | In 2012, 70 companies drilled 134 deepwater wells in the US side of the Gulf of Mexico. On the Mexican side, only one company drilled 6 wells: Pemex. The disparity is one of the reasons explaining why Mexico’s oil production has fallen from 3.5 million bpd in 2005 to 2.5 now. According to the US Geological Survey, the Mexican part of the Gulf of Mexico is, after the Arctic, the largest unexplored oil region in the world.
WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | Stanley Fischer will almost certainly not achieve his dream of being managing director of the IMF, but his legacy can still be deeper than it would have been had he reached it. Earlier this year, the Zambian-born Israeli-American economist completed a successful eight year mandate in the Bank of Israel, and he is now poised to be the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve.
LONDON | By Barry Knapp at Barclays | Tuesday night’s two-year budget agreement between the heads of the House and Senate Budget Committees, Paul Ryan and Patty Murray, looks to be the culmination of a difficult process that has succeeded in stabilizing the US federal government fiscal position for the investable horizon. We have maintained that, since 2010, public policy uncertainty – stemming in part from government spending reaching a post-WWII high, and the associated budget deficit –has helped weaken business confidence and investment.
WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | For all the talk about the jobless recovery, Barack Obama has, in less than 5 years, created three times more jobs than George W. Bush did in eight years. Under the current president’s tenure, 3,140,000 jobs have been added to the US economy. It is not a bad record of achievement, at least taking into account that, in January 2009—when Obama moved to the White House–, the United States destroyed 600,000 jobs, its worst number in 34 years. Talk about legacies.