NEW YORK, LONDON | If one of the intentions of the Spanish labour reform announced this Friday was to create headlines –like Mario Monti’s Salva Italia plan did– and calm the international money markets assuring that Spain was on the right track to make labour market more flexible, it miserably failed. Last Friday, when the ‘very aggressive’ labour revamp was announced, the major business networks, the ones that money makers…
By Juan Pedro Marín Arrese, in Madrid | Analysts are busy collecting evidence for a huge recession. The 70% drop in the Baltic Dry Index, ranging now below the lowest level hit in 2009, has been hailed as the proof doomsday is looming. It seems that only bad news are taken on board, others being hastily dismissed as rubbish. Are prospects so bleak? Well, we are far from expecting a favourable…
NEW YORK | You update your status. You share last weekend pictures in the snow and react on your colleague’s comments to the football game. You browse and snoop on people’s stuff and hit on the like and dislike buttons over and over… and everything goes into Facebook’s giant database. With 845 million users around the world (up 39% from 2010), the company is preparing for a public offering that…
By Luis Arroyo, in Madrid | The reason? Well, their States are exemplary. No banks in trouble, no massive public debt but a very aggressive monetary policy to grease the inevitable deleveraging process. Let us compare them to the US, for instance, whose gross debt to national GDP has already touched the 100pc base. This, I suppose, should shake the beliefs of old Keynesians like Krugman, stubbornly champions of a…
The EU is not closing the persistent gap with global innovation leaders US, Japan and South Korea. The European Commission on Tuesday published the results of its Innovation Union Scoreboard, which includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU 27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey, and also compares a more reduced set of indicators between the…
NEW YORK | It would be great news for hundreds of thousands of people: billions of dollars (an estimated $25 billion) in aid to homeowners who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who are still at risk. The money would come from big mortgage banks: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. Why on earth would those banks be willing to pay that amount? They…
NEW YORK | “Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings my friend.” That speech by GOP candidate Mitt Romney stirred a huge debate about the role of corporations in the US society. The Occupy Wall Street movement highly distrusted firms. Were they exaggerating? Do companies need…
WASHINGTON | What a coincidence. In an election year with a Democratic incumbent, Republican think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) releases (on January 6) an analysis headlined “Why the real U.S. unemployment is 15.6%.” The number is right… although if we count the unemployed plus the discouraged workers, those who have abandoned the job search because they know there are no jobs to search for, plus the part-time workers who…
NEW YORK | It’s a catastrophe, experts say: about 1.2 million US students drop out every year and this imposes a huge cost on the whole economy. “Many of these schools [with high dropout rates] are in the inner-city and are made up of blacks and Latino students who are not graduating at great rates. This increases the level of poverty, it increases crime, it increases the incarceration rate. 80…
