Archive for category Mixed Economy
Billion for a billion
Posted by admin in Mix Up TV, Mixed Economy on December 12th, 2009
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For eco-friendly Christmas, rent a live potted tree
Posted by admin in Mixed Economy on December 12th, 2009
Dec. 12, 2009
USA Today
Fake or real? The sight of all of those Christmas trees tossed out to the curb, once the New Year dawns, has always made me wonder whether an artificial tree wouldn’t be more eco-friendly.
Now comes what may be the perfect solution: renting a live potted tree. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that is catching on in the United States and abroad.
In Portland, Ore. (no surprise there!) in 1992, the Original Living Christmas Tree Company began renting out live trees, picking them up after the holiday and replanting them in watersheds across the Pacific Northwest.
Since then, companies or non-profit groups in San Diego (adoptachristmastree.com), San Francisco (fuf.com) and Vancouver, British Columbia, (evergrowchristmastrees.ca) have also started offering this service. I’ve noticed quite a few in the United Kingdom as well.
“It’s a concept whose time has come,” says the website of Rent A Living Christmas Tree, which began this year to deliver pot-grown pine, cedar, redwood and cypress trees along California’s central coast. By planting them after the holidays, it says, ” you will be helping the environment.”
The Vancouver company replants the trees year after year. Its website says a live potted tree may not be right for everyone. It notes that the trees are natural, so they may not appear “perfect,” and as live plants, they require basic care. It cites, however, five reasons for renting a live tree:
- It’s alive. The trees keep on growing. You can even request to have your tree back the following year. When your tree becomes too big to live in its pot, it will be planted outside where it can continue to grow, sequestering carbon and converting greenhouse gases to life-giving oxygen.
- Ultimate convenience. Tree delivery and pick-up to and from your living room or business. It’s that simple. Avoid a trip across town and the hassle of wrestling a tree to the roof of your car.
- Locally grown. These truly are ‘green’ Christmas trees as minimal energy is used to bring your environmentally friendly tree to you.
- No mess. Unlike cut trees, live trees are not a significant fire hazard. Consider them like a house plant: alive and actively transpiring. All you need to do is to make sure your tree gets water.
- Forget that old tree stand. The sturdy pots our trees grow in negate any need for a stand or support. Your tree is ready to decorate as soon as it is set down on your living room floor.
So how much does this eco-friendly service cost? If you live in the Portland, Ore. area, the Original Living Christmas Tree Company charges $80 to deliver and pick up the tree. It offers several different types of trees, ranging from five to seven feet tall.
For those who don’t live in an area with such a service, the Portland company encourages people to buy a potted tree and if you don’t want to plant it outside yourself, donate it to your local parks department or a landscaper who will. Or, if you’re passionate about the idea, it recommends you consider starting your own service.
The Countries Most Known for Corruption
Posted by admin in Mixed Economy, World News on December 6th, 2009
by Phyllis Korkki - Dec. 5, 2009
The New York Times
When a business or individual can skirt the law by paying bribes to corrupt officials, the playing field becomes uneven, making the economy vulnerable. According to the newest Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, perceived levels of corruption are highest in countries where government infrastructure is lacking.
Defining corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain,” Transparency International ranked 180 countries by interviewing experts and business people both inside and outside each country.
“Fragile, unstable states that are scarred by war and ongoing conflict linger at the bottom of the index,” Transparency International says. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is seen as the least corrupt, Somalia comes in dead last with a score of 1.1. Afghanistan and Myanmar rank almost as low.
And the country perceived as being the least likely to foster corruption, at least according to the index, is New Zealand, followed by Denmark, Singapore and Sweden.
The Dumbest Stimulus Plan to Date
Posted by admin in Mixed Economy, Political Mix on December 5th, 2009
by Morgan Housel - Dec. 4, 2009
The Motley Fool
Look how far we’ve come, Fools: One year ago, banks were ridiculed for making so many bad loans. Today, they’re being threatened with fines for not making enough.
Earlier this year, the government enacted a $75 billion stimulus program to entice banks to modify mortgages. So far, the program has been a dud. In order to ensure that banks and mortgage servicers are doing their part, the Treasury warned on Monday that those not modifying fast enough “will be subject to consequences which could include monetary penalties and sanctions.”
Modify more mortgages, or be fined. Yikes. This is serious business. But why is the program failing so hard that banks and servicers have to be threatened with fines?
First, the numbers. There are two phases to the modification process: the trial modification, where a bank or servicer modifies the loan, and a second step, in which the modification is made permanent. In order to become permanent, borrowers have to make three on-time payments and document their financial condition.
So far, trial modifications have been on fire:
|
Month |
Trial Modifications Granted (cumulative) |
|---|---|
| May and Prior | 50,130 |
| June | 143,276 |
| July | 253,673 |
| August | 386,865 |
| September | 487,081 |
| October | 650,994 |
Source: makinghomesaffordable.gov.
No complaints there. The original goal was to hit 500,000 trial modifications by early November. Done and done.
Permanent modifications are another story. Data is hard to come by — the Treasury conveniently leaves out current figures — but with straight faces, the Treasury and Department of Housing and Urban Development recently predicted that 375,000 trial modifications will be made permanent by year end.
Now here comes the punchline: The Congressional Oversight Panel reports that from March until September, only 1,711 trial modifications were made permanent. Ouch.
Among these 1,711 permanent modifications, just one small servicer, Ocwen Financial Group (NYSE: OCN), claims it alone accounts for 44.6% of the total. Back out Ocwen’s percentage, and the rest of the mortgage industry made a nearly insignificant number of trial modifications permanent.
Black unemployment ‘a serious problem’
Posted by admin in Mixed Economy, Unemployment on December 5th, 2009
by David Goldman - Dec. 4, 2009 03:17 PM ET
CNNMoney.com
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — While the overall unemployment rate for Americans fell in November, the jobless gap between African-Americans and all other races actually rose, continuing a disturbing trend that has many lawmakers up in arms.
The black community has suffered the hardest during the economic downturn, with an unemployment rate that currently stands at 15.6%. That’s a much higher rate than for all of the other races that the Labor Department tracks, including Hispanics (12.7%), whites (9.3%) and Asians (7.3%).
The jobless rate for blacks has also grown much faster than for other races.
The difference between the unemployment rates for blacks and whites fell to an all-time low of 3.5 percentage points in August 2007. As the economy fell into a recession, that gap rapidly grew. By April 2009, the gap hit a 13-year high, doubling to a staggering 7 percentage points.
Though the separation between white and black jobless rates has narrowed slightly since the spring, it is still trending higher, rising to 6.3 percentage points in November from 6.2 points in the previous month.
The trend has many in Washington heated.
“We’re so focused on ‘too big to fail’ that we’re treating this issue as ‘too little to matter,’” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus’ jobs task force. “We have a serious problem, and the army of the unemployed is growing darker by the month.”
Cleaver said the main reason for such a high rate of black unemployment is a lack of opportunities for proper job training in urban communities. That’s an issue that the Obama administration says it is working on with stimulus money and other government-funded programs.
“Traditionally, these groups are most impacted when there’s a recession,” Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis told CNNMoney.com.
Solis said that through stimulus and Labor Department grant programs, the government has targeted job training in communities with high unemployment, particularly heavily urban communities with high concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos.
“We have had some success in doing that, but of course we have a long way to go,” Solis said.
But Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., argued that many of those programs are wasted money. She said a large amount of government dollars are spent on funding private post-secondary schools that are targeted to urban communities, and she believes the schools are “rip-offs.”
“They’re soliciting people to sign up for training on job titles that don’t widely exist like ‘nurses assistants,’” said Waters, also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “That money should be used for training for jobs that will be around in the new economy like green jobs and new technologies.”
Is America Losing Its Mojo?
Posted by admin in Mixed Economy on December 3rd, 2009
by Fared Zakaria - Published Nov 14, 2009 Mag. Issue
NewsWeek.com
Innovation is as American as baseball and apple pie. But some traditions can’t be trademarked.
By most measures, America remains the world leader in technological achievement. Consider the 2009 Nobel Prizes: of the 13 people honored, nine were American. Once you take out the economics, literature, and peace prizes, the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, still won close to 70 percent of the awards. Even amid a terrible recession, the country still dominates the fields of information technology, life sciences, and nanotechnology, all key industries of the future. The World Economic Forum routinely cites America as having the most competitive economy on the planet (though this year it was narrowly overtaken by Switzerland). When decision makers are asked to rank countries on innovation, the United States always comes first by a large margin.
Americans like to think there is something about their culture that’s especially conducive to innovation—the open geography and frontier spirit; a flexible economy with limited interference by government; the Protestant work ethic; an immigrant workforce, constantly renewed by the next generation of talent from around the world. Other countries can perhaps emulate some of these traits, but none can replicate the creative cocktail that is America.
That might be true today. But could it be that American achievements reflect the past more than predicting the future? It’s important to remember that many of the metrics that place the United States so far ahead are actually lagging indicators. Nobel Prizes tend to be given to scientists in their 70s, toward the end of their productive lives. What’s happening among scientists in their 30s? Who’s making the discoveries today that will receive Nobel Prizes four decades from now?
I’d always viewed the rankings that routinely show America on top as authoritative. But they may be misleading. Most traditional competitiveness studies use polls—of CEOs, scientists, investors—as a key part of their measurements. The World Economic Forum report, for example, relies upon surveys for almost two thirds of its data. But two studies of global innovation have been released this year, both comprehensive, and both relying entirely on government statistics and other hard data: one produced by the Boston Consulting Group, the other by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. In both, the United States does considerably worse, coming in eighth in the BCG study and sixth in the ITIF one.
China’s overdue credit-card debt reported rising sharply
Posted by admin in Financial Market, Mixed Economy, World News on November 30th, 2009
By John Letzing - Nov. 30, 2009 07:27 PM est
MarketWatch.com
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — While China has the reputation in the West as a nation of frugal savers, a state-media report Tuesday cited another sharp rise in overdue credit-card accounts, highlighting a downside to the country’s rapidly expanding economy.
Credit-card debt at least six months overdue rose 126.5% for the first three quarters of 2009 compared to the same period last year, Xinhua news agency reported, citing People’s Bank of China data.
By the end of September, China’s banks had issued 175 million credit cards, a 33.3% increase from last year, according to the report — which said that the central bank has warned of potential risks of mounting overdue credit-card debt.
Accounts overdue by six months or more made up 3.4% of China’s total credit-card debt outstanding at the end of the third quarter, a 0.3% increase over the prior period, the report said.
Credit-card debt at least six months overdue had risen 131.3% in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, according to the report, following a 133.1% increase in the quarter before that.
