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Electric cars have perfomed well in disaster hit regions of Japan after the earthquake, when oil refineries and gasoline stations were out of operation. 89 Mitsubishi i-MiEVs were put to use in Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate prefectures. They were perfect for Sendai say city officials. The cars were driven an average of 30-45 miles a day in Sendai, which is half the distance for a full charge. Each night they were returned to city hall and recharged using 220 volt outlets. Fast recharging stations which replenish batteries to 80% of capacity in 30 minutes were used. The standard 100 volt outlets take 12 hours. This performance should speed up the timetable for electric car development in Japan.

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Adam Bryant interviews Barry Salzberg, new CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Salzberg pays attention to tried and tested ideas and this adds to the value of what he has to say about managing and leadership. He emphasizes being prepared, being a little proactive and forward looking, thinking ahead. Its about being transparent and having people reporting to you being comfortable with being open and direct, sharing everything they know. He talks about the importance of being open to feedback, even as in his own personal experience when it takes effort, and takes some maturing to learn from what one hears and what people are saying. Questions he says that reveal more about a person are asking- was there something in the last few years that did not go well, why didn't it go well, and what did you do about it. In work his advice is cascade the things you learn through the organization by sharing it with others. Be yourself not what what someone wants you to be, find that thing which makes you unique, find ways to express this and make your contribution this way. And he says get out of your comfort zone to widen your horizons and see and experience new things. As Salzberg says these things were true in 1980 in his early years and are just as true today in 2011....

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Stress-testing a portfolio and diversification, by Jonathan Burton, the Money and Investing Editor at Market Watch in San Francisco.

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Former U.S. Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, says the attacks on Charlie Hebdo weekly in France were the result of an intelligence failure. The 2 brothers who conducted the attacks were already on a U.S. no-fly list. The U.S. has already alerted European authorites to about 3000 European citizens, about 1000 from France, who went to Syria to fight with Islamic State. Panettta says there is much room for improvement when it comes to tracking of individuals returning from conflicts in the Middle East, and making certain that the U.S. and Europeans are at the top of their game when it comes to security. Operationally the U.S. and Europeans need to be working together and being aggressive about individuals who have a history in these places in the Middle East.

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The U.S. Federal Reserve policy in March 2015 changes to take out the phrase about being "patient" on future interest rate increases. At the same time Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen points to the 2% target rate for inflation and the stronger dollar making it harder to reach that target. The Fed will take a data driven approach looking at all the relevant information before making its decision, says Yellen.

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Dealogic reports show 64 U.S. listed IPO's raised $16.8 billion in the first 5 months of 2013, up from the $13.1 billion raised by 73 companies in the same period in 2012. Recent price gains by IPO's are driven by the lack of alternatives to stocks for investors in a low interest rate environment.

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Delta, United Continental and European airlines face competition from newcomers with lower costs and new fuel efficient fleets. Airlines from the Gulf region, Etihad Airways, Emirates Airlines, and Qatar Airways, are taking customers away from the established airlines on longhaul transatlantic, Asian and European routes.

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Israel's Yesh Atid (there is a future) party came in second with 19 seats after the party of prime minister Netanyahu in Jan 2013 Israeli elecions. Yair Lapid helped organize the middle class protests for social justice in the summer of 2011. He founded the Yesh Atid party to fight for better opportunities for the struggling middle class. Many of the votes came from Tel Aviv. Lapid writes a column for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot under the title, "Where's the money?" He writes in the newspaper: "This is the big question asked by Israel's middle class, the same sector on whose behalf I am going into politics. Where's the money? Why is it that the productive sector, which pays the taxes, fufills its obligations, performs reserve duy and carries the entire country on its back, doesn't see the money?" The summer protests were about an Israeli middle class that is falling behind like the middle class in the U.S. Yair Lapid started as a print journalist and went on to anchor the Channel 2 Friday evening news. His father is a Holocaust survivor from Budapest, Hungary, who went on to become Justice minister. Unlike his father who was strongly secular, Yatid's support comes from all parts of Israeli society including the ultra-religious, and is mainly focussed on the middle class. ...

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After cellphone sales crumble by dropping 50% in the holiday season quarter compared to ayear ago quarter, Motorola cuts 4000 more positions.

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With auto sales collapsing, initially for trucks and large vehicles in the face of gas prices at $4-5 per gallon, and the shift to fuel efficient small cars that the Detroit automakers failed to have in their product lineup, and in October 2008 with the credit crisis choking off credit to even credit worthy customers, GM is running out of cash for operations. The aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy is to choke off credit to car buyers and to practically all companies. Sales declined 45% for GM in October over the prior year October. GM reported that it burned through $6.9 billion in cash in third quarter 2008, and ended the period with just $16.2 billion in cash reserves. Today GM made a honest assessment, saying "it will fall significantly short" of the cash needed to run its business in the first half of 2009. "GM's estimated liquidity during the remainder of 2008 will approach the minimal level necesssary to operate its business." Ford Motor said it burned through $7.7 billion in cash in the third quarter, leaving it with $18.9 billion at the end of Septemer, as its sales in October declined by over 30%. Ford's automotive business lost $2.7 billion in the third quarter....

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New mortgage plan announced by the Federal Housing Agency on November 10, is just a drop in the bucket and helps only a few homeowners, it barely scratches the surface of the problem. It helps thousands but more than 4 million homeowners or 9% of borrowers wit mortgages were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure in June according to Mortgage Bankers Association. There were 765,000 foreclosures in the third quarter. This will have intensified since then with the October credit crisis and the huge job losses in the fourth quarter.

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The writers argue for what is essentially a gas tax for prices that would otherwise be below $3.50 to promote conservation with the proceeds going to pay for sustainable transportation policy.

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U.S. Federal Reserve vice chairman, Janet Yellen and Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor call for consideration of downside risks emerging from the eurozone crisis and from the approaching fiscal cliff of government spending cuts, as the Fed debates policies in July 2012.

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The U.S. Labor Department reports 204,000 nonfarm jobs were created in October 2013. Upward revisions of prior months lead to a level of about 202,000 jobs created in the three months July to October 2013. The unemployment rate goes up from 7.2% to 7.3% in the household survey, with furloughed government employees counted after the temporary government shutdown. The negative part of the picture is that 720,000 persons dropped out of the labor force, a high and puzzling number, and the labor participation rate drops to a 35 year low of 62.8%. This has been a problem since the 2008 crisis as more discouraged workers drop out of the work force, go to school or stay home and care for children, and increasing numbers retire. Some economists now see the Fed waiting till the unemployment rate drops to 6% before withdrawing from the bond buying program in place of the earlier announced 6.5%.

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Robert Reich, a former Labor Secretary, says that instead of "rebalancing" with Chinese consumers buying more American goods and China exporting less to the USA, things are headed in the opposite direction. Why? Because at the macroeconomic level China is devoting more of its country's resources to production capacity. Chinese consumers are taking home a smaller proportion of the total economy. In 2008 personal consumption amounted to 35% of the total economy, whereas in 1998 it was 50%. Capital investment in the same 10 years went up 35% to 44%. Chinese continue to save and these savings are going into infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. There is even a social twist to the savings, with fewer young Chinese women than men parents with boys have to compete in the marraige market and save assets for this. Households are also saving to support more elderly people as population is aging quickly with population policies. All this means that with all the talk (see links to Niall Ferguson and Krugman), the situation will likely roll on in this manner till things reach an impasse, or there is a strong political backlash in the USA which leads to stronger trade actions by the government, or there is a crisis. Meanwhile the trade deficit is headed higher and Chinese foreign reserves will go far above the current $2.3 trillion. And the Europeans will also be getting restless with their trade imbalance, as the euro edges higher and the yuan remians pegged to the dollar, leading to trade distortions. ...

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Figures from the European Commission and the ECB show that the ECB's balance sheet reached 32% of eurozone GDP in March 2012. Comparable figures for the U.S. Federal Reserve for March 2012 are 19%, Bank of England 21% and the Bank of Japan 30%. The ECB's balance sheet in March 2012 is at 3.023 trillion euros. ECB president Mario Draghi says this is high but "it will be managed very well."