It’s hard to see how the United States can resume the rapid GDP growth necessary to reduce its fiscal deficit when almost 20 percent of its working population is unemployed or underemployed. A McKinsey Quarterly report on Globalisation’s Critical Imbalances. Prepare for large currency shifts between developed and rapid developing countries. If we are lucky …
Continue reading “Judgment day – when will US and China, India and others”
Here’s excellent graphic from FiveThirtyEight via Treehugger and via New Zealand’s The visible hand showing data from a report from the the Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies School Climate Change project. It needs no explanation. The project’s survey: “Climate Change on the the American Mind” is a lengthy and ponderous read, and is so queued …
As we progressively lose our freedoms on the internet, it was timely to have a read of some of the excellent material written by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society – it’s part of the Harvard Law School and has the delightful url of cyber.law.harvard.edu – as it was started from a seminar …
Alex Tarrant over at Interest.co.nz had a couple of, well, interesting posts on the housing market in NZ. There is a piece on the February housing statistics, which rose dramatically versus January, although the median price stayed down, and the number of days to sell was a record 62. Alex also looked at the REINZ …
Via the WSJ it appears that Stanford International is under investigation: Stanford International Bank Ltd. of Antigua recently failed to provide some $16 million in funding to a small Florida telecommunications firm, while a small Alabama health-care firm said it was unable to complete a roughly $62 million merger after funding fell through. ….The disclosures …
Continue reading “Bad news for Cricket: Sponsor Standford is being investigated”
New Zealand has the third highest car ownership per person in the world, the economist informs us. That’s amazing, especially as tiny Luxembourg tops the list. It’s especially amazing when you are standing at a rental car counter during summer and unable to get a car. Luxembourg is only 80 x 30 kms, and while …
Continue reading “Lower the barriers to raise car ownership”
Part two of a four part take on the end of Ferrit. We started with Market Space, and business economics and governance failure are next. The idea of the Ferrit site So while there was a space, the proposed way to address that space was flawed. The problem was that the proffered solution didn’t offer …
Continue reading “Final Ferrit: The site idea and execution”
Nickel prices are very low, and so there are some big cuts just announced for BHP Billiton Stainless Steel Materials. As rumored the $2 Bn Ravensthorpe laterite plant is going to go flat, and about 2,100 jobs in total will go across Nickel West and Yabulu. A total of 6,000 will go from the entire …
Continue reading “BHP Billiton SSM job loses – WA and NZ impact”
With 14,000 workers going from Rio Tinto, the folk at Tiwwai Point’s aluminium refinery are apparently nervous. They have “787 full time staff and 133 contractors” down there in the deep South, a bit under 1% of Rio’s total of 110,000 staff and contractors. So Rio is getting rid of 12.7% of it’s workers, which …
Continue reading “Rio Tinto: Tiwai Point will be fine, but Kiwis will be affected”
Take a look at the car (below) in this article. “You are looking at a nano-cosm of a foreshadow of the future of the world’s geopolitical risk. That’s how a friend of mine characterizes the global situation right now. And I though I was bearish. Oh – he works for the World Bank. (His opinions …
Continue reading “A foreshadow of the World’s geopolitical risk?”
Jeff Garten, the Dean of Yale School of Management when I was there, and now a Professor of International Finance there, was quoted via a recent NYTimes Thomas Friedman oped: “A great judgment has to be made now as to just how big and bad the situation is.. This is a crucial judgment. Do we …
Continue reading “Are we in a deep hole that the entire world could fall into?”
I have to agree with Greg Saunders, posting at Tom Tomorrow on this: “When it comes to bailing out the auto industry, count me in the “let them starve” camp. The auto industry has been outsourcing American jobs for 25 years now with little regard for the devastated communities they’ve left in their wake (seriously, …
It seems that we now have a longer life expectancy – 82.2 for women and 78 for men, up 1 and 1.7 years However there is still a substantial difference for Maori – with Maori newborns having life expectancy of 75.1 and 70.4 years. This is a key metric for New Zealand, for any country …
Here are a few starter strategy phrases. They should give some flavour of the sorts of things that could make good goals. The idea is not to have a goal cover everything, but to address the key things that drive the big changes in the big numbers. Let’s take life expectancy as an example. We …
Continue reading “Building a Strategy for New Zealand – some starters”
Writing a strategy is relatively simple – anyone can do it. Of course there is a catch.. The hard bit is getting people to agree to a strategy, (and the really hard bit is to execute that strategy effectively.) One good way to develop and gain agreement to a strategy is to gather the key …
Continue reading “Building a Strategy for New Zealand – two approaches”
Lance Wiggs 