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GM sells just 30,000 Cadillacs in China. It is one of 8 brands with total GM sales of 2.8 million vehicles in China. The luxury and premium vehicle market is growing in China with 8.5% of the total vehicle market in 2012. GM's 30,000 Cadillac sales makes Cadillac at only one tenths of one percent of its China sales volume, and way behind luxury car makers Mercedes and BMW. GM plans to take a larger share of this market and increase Cadillac sales to 100,000 by 2016. To do this GM will launch a new advertising campaign in China with actor Brad Pitt and increase dealers in China to 200 by the end of 2013. A new Cadillac will be introduced every year through 2016. Cadillac comes in the SRX, a small sport utility vehicle, and the XTS, a full size sedan. A 8 cylinder Cadillac, the SLS, will be discontinued.

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China's efforts to control air pollution by increasing supply of wind power, hydroelectric power and nuclear power. Efforts to control air pollution and the problems China faces. Proposal for a carbon tax on polluting plants.

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There is concern that though President Da Silva has had success in his term in office, he is leaving problems for the new administration. One expert says he leaves a giant question mark behind him. One of the problems is high spending by his administration. After the financial crisis of 2008, the government flooded massive state run banks with cash, ordering the banks to to lend heavily to businesses and consumers. The government also increased its own spending on contracts and projects. Public spending has continued to grow since 2008, and federal expenditures as a percentage of the economy have doubled during Da Silva's term in office. In an editorial recently, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, says the government should have used the high growth in the economy to cut public spending and improve the public finances. Because the Rousseff administration is a continuation of Da Silva's administration, and includes many of the same people, the daily asks if the Rousseff team's promises to cut spending in 2011 are believable. Inflation in 2010 is at 6%. The other serious problem is an highly overvalued currency, and volatile capital inflows from developed countries. The boom in China has helped Brazilian commodities and agricultural exports, a slowdown there would affect Brazil's economy. ...

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U.S. gasoline prices at the pump drop below $3.00 in November 2014.

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The Brazilian Real drops to 2.9836 to the U.S. dollar in March 2015. The year to date March 2015 decline for the Real is 10.9%. Increase in interest rates will depress growth even further.

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The percentage of credit card balances owed by subprime customers, according to Keefe Bruyette and Woods, is 30.3% for Bank of America, 29.8% for Capital One, 27.9% for Discover, and 27.3% for Citigroup. The companies ranked by market share in private label cards are GEneral Electric 39.2% and Citigroup 21.7%. All these companies that have turned risky customers into cash cows with hefty fees and interest rates will see much of this disappear with the President's new law banning some of the practices of these companies that hurt consumers. Most of the credit card industry has operated without some of the basic consumer protections one would expect in a highly educated and literate society with democratic governance. Even retailers like Target depend on this for profits. Target which has its own credit card operation earned $355 million in credit finance charges and $87 million in late fees and other revenue in the last fiscal quarter.

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The WTO setimates that global merchandise trade will decline by 9% in 2009. Betweeen 1990 and 2006 these trade flows increased by 6% a year, outstripping the growth of world output which remained at 3%. See the chart showing GDP and world trade growth year over year. Because of vertical supply chains products were shipped across borders and imported back into the country that exported a product, till the product was finally assembled in some third country like Mexico, in the case of automobiles. This interlinking of countries worsens the effect in adownturn, by bringing output down in many countries at once in any particular industry with these supply chains. And conversely positive effects are exaggerated in a upturn or boom cycle like that which was witnessed in recent decades. It makes a 1930's like situation less likely, where trade dropped by over 25%, because now all countries are affected, America's car industry exports as well as imports the same item as it is processed in several countries, and imported to the USA as a semifinished product and then assembeled in Mexico, as one example. Leaders of the G-20 agreed to fight protectionism athe the London meeting in April 2009. Is this enough? Should the Doha Round of talks be resumed? Arvind Subramanium of the Peterson Institute, and Aaditya Mattoo of the World Bank, argue that the Doha Round is too ambiious, as it tries to open markets for rich countries manufactured goods just when the crisis has hit developing countries making this ahard sell. At the same time DOha Round does not exclude Buy AMerica provisions and subsidies to fialing industries like the auto industry support measures taken by both the EU countries and the USA. So they sugggest anew "crisis round" of talks to replace Doha, and this makes sense as the items on the agenda can now be tailored to the pressing needs of a different time from when Doha round was conceived, and thus more realistic in its approach. And in the meantime all WTO members would commit to astandstill and take no measures that are protectionist. The Economist says the new "crisis round" would not do any better as there may not be the same level of interest in another round. It suggests that agood start would be for the leaders of the G-20 to be specificabout what protectionist measures it sees as unproductive and unhelpful in containing this crisis. Draw up a comprehensive list of protectionist measures that go beyond tariffs and export subsidies. The WTO would then be asked to monitor the countries based on this list and publish alist of offending countries, letting embarassment of these countries act as a kind of policing. And in addition an agreement should be reached on coordinating fiscal policy, so that it would reduce fears of leakages abroad. ...

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Somini Sengupta and Brian Frank provide this award winning quality of coverage in text and pictures of life in California's San Joaquin Valley, hit by wildfires and scorching heat in the middle of the pandemic. Shown are workers in the fields of one of America's largest agricultural regions fighting heat and the pandemic, struggling to survive on a precarious hourly wage in these conditions. During earlier periods from 1970 this was an almost picturebook place particularly in the cool and foggy winters, which stretched for miles with apricot, grape, almond and other fruit and vegetable fields. A dry valley using irrigation of fields with water from the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains. Most affected are millions of workers of Hispanic origin originally from Mexico, who provide most of the labor for harvesting of crops. California with a good educational system and without the drought that hit the region, without the effects of Silicon Valley splitting the people of the state in opposite directions most on minimum wage with a concentration of wealth around major cities and spiralling property values, was a very different place in the 1960's and 1970's from what it is today. Increasing wealth concentrated in pockets and not spread out as it was in the early post war period after Truman and Eisenhower has impoverished large areas and segments of the population, creating what Dickens called in his day- "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," depending on who and where you were. ...

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The new coalition government of prime minister, Antonis Samaras, will ask for a two year extension for meeting deficit targets from the March 2012 deal with the IMF, EC and ECB. The new coalition will also not make any large layoffs and only reduce the size of the public sector by attrition and retirements, a key condition of the Democratic Left partner in the coalition. This is one of the demands as part of the loan package to Greece. Since the beginning of the crisis the public sector has declined by 10% in Greece to 700,000. By 2015 the public sector is expected to lose another 150,000 workers by attrition.

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From the beginning, the infrastructure building component of the $787 Stimulus Bill, was never really what it was described in the rhetoric of the Obama administration. Even using the broadest definintion of infrastructure spending, the money allocated was never more than $150 billion, by one estimate. And only 8% of the total or $64 billion, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges, aviation, and waste-water systems. The money allocated to high speed rail was about $8 billion, too small for high speed rail network for the US, and this has proved to be a debacle. Work moved slowly, so that by October 2009 work under the highway and transit programmes had seen work start on $14.3 billion of projects. The new $50 billion infrastructure plan from the Obama administration, includes ideas for a National Infrastructure Bank. But by now the public mood has turned against spending, and political support for a gas tax to pay for it is lacking. The ultimate irony of this situation is that the public thinks the stimulus bill has taken care of infrastructure. So many false expectations were created, and vigorously built up by the Obama administration, such as describing the stimulus investment as "the largest new investment in infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950's." The irony is that the public perception is that the stimulus has already taken care of the US's infrastructure needs, says the transport director of the Chamber of Commerce....

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The director of Vote Leave on Brexit referendum Dominic Cummings says Brexit could be a mistake for Britain. Asked if he thinks differently now, he says in a Twitter exchange cited in Britain's Guardian newspaper- "Lots. I said before REF was a dumb idea, other things shdve been tried 1st." Others are having second thoughts about the referendum, as shown here.

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Michael Porter who is an authority on competitiveness and national strategy, is a Professor at Harvard University. He last servedin a national economic strategy advisor capacity in 1983, as a member of the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness. His view is that the USA badly needs an economic strategy. And the political system of the USA discourages developing such a strategy. The political dialogue also discourages the discussion from focussing on the key aspects of a strategy and because of the ideological slant the discussion between Republicans and Democrats tends to cancel each other out leaving the important work undone. What is an economic strategy? Its thinking clearly what are the advantages or strengths America as a nation has and how best to preserve these advantages in the future? And its thinking clearly about the weaknesses, and how to address the weaknesses, and where money and other resources should be allocated and what actions need to be takento get results. As strategy is a long term thing, it requires patient and perseverent effort and allocation of resources. The strengths he goes on to list are, an unparalleled environment for starting new companies and the science and technology, and the regional universities and clusters of high tech workers and resources in different regions of the country,the educational institutions for higher education, and the committment to competition and free markets, efficient and deep capital markets, and the acceptance of the uncertainty and cost in the huge job churn (restructuring of industry that destroys millions of jobs per year with net positive job creation). The problems that have arisen with these advantages have compromised some of them. Free markets are not really free as anti-trust enforcement has been lax resulting in mergers dominating markets and weakening compeititon. Many times the "free market' talk has become rhetoric and distorted for individual purposes. And regulatory oversight has been weakened in the name of "free markets", as if the market system could be run with no government regulation at all. The weaknesses are: remaining an energy inefficient nation even as countries like Japan have become increasingly and way more energy efficient, and doing nothing about it, not having any policies to fix this and assign a big priority to it. In the area of access to education, which is critically important to national competitiveness, the US ranks poorly in the number of college graduates and in the opportunties for access to college across the middle and working classes. Says Porter, the US ranks 12th in the college or higher educational attainment for 25-34 year olds. And the US he says has made no progress in this area for 30 years. This is a disturbing trend in a economy that must have the education and skills to justify its high wages, and how will Americans compete for jobs that can be moved elsewhere in these circumstances he asks. Strategy requires honesty with ourselves in identifying and addressing the strengths to be preserved and the weaknesses to be fixed. Solutions have to go to the heart of the problem, with the patient effort needed for longer term solutions, when problems have become embedded in the system, and in the habits, culture, and way of doing things, that will produce disaster down the road. Wen it comes to spending on priority investments, Porter prefers to tax rebates the spending that goes into educational assistance and into logistical infrastructure. ...

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U.S. auto sales including cars and light trucks reached 17.5 million in 2015, a 5.7% increase over 2014. Larger vehicles including pickup tucks and SUV's account for about half of all auto sales in 2015, with gas prices below $2.00 a gallon in Jan 2016 in most parts of the U.S. The average transaction price was up to $34,428, according to Kelley Blue Book. Auto incentives were up to $3063 per vehicle compared to $2809 ten years earlier, according to Kelley Blue Book. Analysts say automakers will reduce margins to subsidize zero interest loans in 2016 to increase sales. Lower sales are forecast after 2017 as the market will have caught up with much of the pent up demand by then. A plus for the automakers is the lower cost of steel and other material costs, and the better cost structures after bankruptcy, and renegotiated lower union pay scales. Additional plus is new management at U.S. automakers and at Toyota, and the technological advances this management is pushing, including fuel efficiency. Ride sharing, and other services developed by Google, are seen as disrupting the traditional car model to a limited extent. Countering this new development are millenials who are accounting for a quarter of Toyota sales in the last quarter of 2015, according to a Toyota executive....

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The Economist magazine points out that Indian companies will have to invest more in innovation if they are to maintain return on investment. It says the GST, government action to reduce corruption since 2012 through court decision on crony capitalism, better functioning markets for land, natural resources and capital, more efficient supply chains, will force large Indian companies to compete by becoming more efficient. Under the previous regime before 2012 large Indian companies were able to make high ROI but this was an illusory advantage, as the growth in the Indian economy could create opportunities for firms that can compete with innovation, quality and efficiency. In this sense the Indian economy is entering a new phase under the Modi administration with stretch goals and efforts to create  the next ten year period of growth very different from the past.