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The number of unemployed in Spain reaches 5.6 million people in April 2012. Finance Minister Guindos said the only bright spot was exports and a drop in the current account deficit which shows Spain's improving competitiveness: "This shows the Spanish economy is competitive, unlike some other European economies, thats the most important element of optimism for the future." The Spanish cabinet approved a Stability Program Report to be submitted to the European Union showing GDP growth of 0.2% in 2013 and 1.4% in 2014, following contraction of 1.7% in 2012, and unemployment falling slightly to 24.2% in 2013. Spain's government debt level is shown at 82.3% of GDP in 2013 declining to 81.5% in 2014.

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Christian Noyer, the Governor of the Bank of France, says that the supervisory infrastructure and deposit guarantee structure for the eurozone has not kept up with the creation of a single currrency, leaving an obvious gap that has to be fixed. Of particular importance is the link between sovereign and banking risks that is behind dangers in today's eurozone crisis, especially in Spain, which he says should be broken. The creation of a single euroarea supervisory authority is a prerequisite for a deposit guarantee fund that will separate and delink bank and sovereign risks. The other step is to create a banking resolution scheme similiar to what the U.S. has setup, with the FDIC having a resolution plan to come in and unwind a failing bank, include large banks with systemic risk.

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European Central Bank executive board member Benoit Coeure, says the ECB will act quickly on a program to buy government bonds, so as not to fall behind the curve in taking action. He said the ECB had a moral and legal responsibility to act, considering the low annualized inflation of 0.3% in November 2014. Analysts say this could come as early as Jan 22, at the next ECB meeting, because the meeting in March may be too late. Coeure pointed out that the design of the program will be made in the manner similiar to that of the Outright Monetary Transactions Program of 2012, so that broad consensus is achieved. The ECB's staff is currently working on this. The U.S. and Japan have implemented monetary easing programs with quantitative easing, and the ECB is now moving in this direction to increase growth and bring inflation to about 2%. The ECB also now plans to put out detailed policy minutes after each meeting. The euro is expected to weaken further below $1.24 with the announcement of the program....

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Household debt levels declined in the U.S. to 108% in 2014 for ratio of total debt to disposable income, returning to levels in 2003, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve. The level reached a high of 130% for the U.S. in 2007. The reached a level exceeding 150% in Canada for 2014, which combined with decline in oil revenues with lower oil prices puts additional stress on the Canadian economy. In Japan the level has declined to 125% in 2014. France is close to the U.S. level, up significantly since 2003. Germany's ratio declined significantly to about 90% in 2014. In the U.S. consumer credit levels were up 2.3% in the 3rd quarter as credit for consumer purchases such as autos and appliances increased. Credit for home mortgages increased only slightly by 0.1%, as demand for new homes remained sluggish and banks imposed stricter standards following the mortgage crisis. U.S. households continued to pay down mortgage and credit card debt.

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The step that Osborne took to lay out Britain's Conservative party's plan to tackle Britain's awful deficit of $280 billion, and making this journey through the bleak landscape ahead is forbidding but enormously useful, says the Economist. Everyone shares the burden equally and the Conservatives will keep the 50% tax on higher incomes, raise the age for pensions, freeze public sector pay in 2011, take away middle class tax breaks.

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Anxiety in financial markets about exposure of French banks to Greece pulled down French bank stocks on August 10, 2011. Societe Generale shares were down 15%. A British tabloid the Daily Mail published an article on Societe Generale saying that it was in a perilous condition, and on the "brink of disaster." The Daily Mail later retracted its report. The rumors spread quickly in a jittery market, reminiscent of the rumors that affected Morgan Stanley at the height of the U.S. financial crisis in 2008. Sanford Bernstein analysts say in a report that the selloff in French banking stocks was based more on anxiety and the rising price of insurance of thinly traded credit default swaps, and not based on rational concerns about earnings and raising capital. Societe Generale says it has no exposure to Greek bonds maturing after 2020 on its books- to deflect fears of additional bank bondholder haircuts beyond 2020- and has taken a 395 million euro provision against losses on Greek sovereign bonds maturing upto 2020. The jittery condition of markets was also affected by rumors that France was about to be downgraded. Moody's, Fitch, and S&P reaffirmed that French credit ratings of triple A and stable outlook would not change....

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The U.S. government has spent $18 billion on training and job-search programs, with 47 programs offering training for the year ending Sept. 2009, according to the Government Accountability Office. President Obama proposed spending $8 billion more over 3 years to train 2 million people for new jobs. In addition there are state and local programs which get federal funding. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard labor professor says the money is given out on a haphazard basis and does not have a good track record of matching the training to the job openings. Part of the problem is that the government leaves it to state unemployment offices to evaluate labor markets and help trainees decide on professions to prepare for. A better approach is now being take by getting employers to offer on-the-job training. This approach is being adopted by community colleges and the Labor Department to improve matching of skills training to job openings.

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Efforts being made to convince the Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy to accept IMF aid to recapitalize its banks. The IMF released information showing Spanish banks would need to raise at least 37 billion euros or $46 billion to prevent a worsening of the banking crisis. The report was released before the meeting of EU finance ministers on June 9-10 to persuade the Spanish government to accept IMF aid. The eurozone bailout fund was given powers in 2011 to make loans to governments for the purpose of recapitalizing banks, with conditions and terms set for the financial sector not for the government's spending plans. According to people aware of the discussions taking place in the European Commission and the IMF, one option is to have the European Banking Authority and not the IMF oversee the program. This avoids the usual stigma of accepting aid coming from the IMF with strict conditions attached including restrictions on the government's fiscal plans.

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After the secession of South Carolina in late December 1860, for a brief period New York city's governing body, the Common Council, considered secession to become an independent city state. Pro-independence position was because as an independent city state, similiar to the northern German port cities, New York could keep to itself the tax revenue of $56 million- tariffs on imported goods collected at ports- as two thirds of imports by value passed through New York. The state's merchant class was pro-south, especially as most of the cotton exports passed through New York. New York made 40 cents on every dollar that Europeans paid for cotton from the South. The money came from warehouse fees, shipping, insurance and profits. Cotton helped build most of the mercantile buildings in lower Manhattan and rows of upscale brownstones. Wall street businessmen and The New York Herald newspaper opposed Lincoln's election. The New York Daily News was edited by the mayor's brother, Benjamin Wood, and it warned working class whites about competing with emancipated black labor. New York financiers even threatened to stop buying federal bonds. At which point Horace Greeley, pro-Union publisher of the New York Tribune, urged the Treasury to sell bonds directly to individuals. What changed all this was the firing of the cannon at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers gathered in a patriotic rally in Union Square on April 20. New York quickly declared its support for the Union alongside other Northern states that April. ...

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Is Summers too confident that things will return to the way things were, so that eventually jobs losses will dissipate, and the business cycle will return, so that preventing the economy from becoming bubble dependent for growth is the serious concern. How long will these job losses like the one in March of 663,000 last, WSJ reporter Wessel asks Summers. His response is essentially no one can forecast this. But he thinks these losses will dissipate, because production is running well below capacity, and eventually inventories will fall to the point at which they will need to be replenished. But what is cause for concern is the example he gives. He says next, that in the auto industry sales have normally run at 14 million, now they are down to 9 million. As they return back up to that level or a similiar level he says, and similiarly for other industries with underutilized capacity, the economic cycle will kick in. This depends on what is happening in the market . It is worth asking are there deeper and lasting changes ocurring in the American automobile market that Summers may be missing? See the links for Japan car market, and German car market for information on the changes that ocurred in these highly developed markets. Is a fundamental change ocurring in the American car market which this crisis brings to the forefront, that leads to a long term change to a smaller market closer to what sales are now? Is Summers too sanguine and complacent or is he simply hoping for the best. ...

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Shoichiro Toyoda and Okuda who ran Toyota in the eighties and nineties to make Toyota what it is today, question Toyota's strategy. The precise criticism is outlined in this article at the timwe Tooyota was considering its eigth plant in Tupelo, Mississippi. Their criticism focusses on the complacency to tolerate higher labor costs, to accept less manufacturing efficiency in overseas plants compared to Japan, and put in billions of dollars in new plants which may not be profitable quickly when the same result can be accomplished by adding more assembly lines to existing plants. The Toyota Tundra plant in Texas has overcapacity as the pickup has not sold as expected and this could happen at other plants if Toyota is not careful enough. Also the decisions to build plants in many different states appears to be based not just on manufacturing efficiency but also on desire to win political support in those states- California, Indiana and 6 southern states. Has that gone too far even when it is cheaper to manufacture in Japan because of the weaker yen? If it helps to keep the targets for Toyota vehicle content made in the USA (when imports have increased significantly) cannot this be accomplished by adding more assembly lines to existing plants? These are the points made by Shoichiro and Okuda. Especially that complacency may be getting into decisionmaking at Toyota. Behind all this is the fear that the Big Three may finally be breaking free of the higher unionized wage and benefit costs that put them at a disadvantage. And at the same time the quality gap may be shruinking between Toyota and the US manufacturers. This is evidenced in other articles, one recently on Ford's progress in JD Powers surveys. Here the figure of 2.3 million vehicles recalled in 2005 by Toyota is cited as showing Toyota slipping in the quality it was known for....

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The knowledge that the virus  caused human to human transmission and that it spreads to wide parts of the population very quickly were critical pieces of information that remained with Chinese epidemiologists, doctors and medical researchers, and were suppressed by local authorites in Wuhan.  Yet China's version of the U.S. CDC, China's Centre of Disease Control and Prevention, modeled on the U.S. control efforts worked effectively to identify the problem. Virologist Gao Fu, heads China's CDC. This report in Germany's Der Spiegel says Mr. Fu made it a habit to scan China's internet before bedtime for any signs of possible disease outbreaks. On the night of December 30 he came across rumors of an internal memo from the Wuhan Health Commission of an outbreak of a vaguely worded lung disease. When he called the Wuhan health authority he found their answers to be evasive which alarmed him. The next morning December 31 Mr. Fu sent the first of three teams to Wuhan which is how China was able to identify the problem, in the sense that Chinese authorites in Beijing were to rely on Dr Gao Fu to overcome the problem of Wuhan provincial authorites. He informed the World Health Organization Beijing office on that day. The Der Spiegel report says "shortly afterward," the Seattle Times in its report says this was about New Years Day 2020- Mr Fu made a call to Dr. Redfield, head of the U.S. Centre for Disease Control, who was on vacation. Redfield is deeply disturbed on hearing this from Fu and they have conversations over the next few days to the point that Dr. Gao Fu is in tears about what has happened. On January 1 Taiwanese public health authorites shared the information with WHO that the cornonavirus was a human to human transmission, would the Taiwanese authorites not have shared it with the U.S. the same week during calls from the U.S. CDC or other public health authorites alarmed about the situation. (The WHO was proving useless by Jan 14 when it contradicted Taiwan's more reliable assessment  on Jan 14 going by the letter from president Trump to WHO). On January 6 a few days later Dr Redfield and Dr. Azar head of Health and Human Services ask China for permission to send a team of CDC U.S. experts to China. This is cited in the U.S. letter to the World Health organization- the lack of human to human transmission information being given to the U.S. officially early by China. A risk that could have been a topic of conversation between the U.S. and China heads of CDC. That letter from president Trump also points out that the team of experts the U.S. planned to send was not accepted by China till Feb 16, one and half months after that series of conversations between Dr. Gao Fu of China CDC and Dr. Redfield of U.S. CDC in an alert message.  In effect removing one of the key defences for the U.S. and Europe in making their own defensive actions and plans, laying the basis of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic affecting millions of people. Dr Redfield is a AIDS researcher at the University of Maryland who spent most of his life trying to control spread of HIV and was appointed by president Trump to head CDC agency in 2018. He set a goal of eliminating AIDS by 2030 and is more comfortable with aids patients and research than the bureaucratic nature of agencies- CDC has about 11,000 employees. Once it was clear that a team of U.S. experts was not given permission to make its own assessment in Wuhan in the few days after January 6 offer to sent the team to China by Redfield of U.S. CDC and Dr. Azar, would it have alerted the U.S. that something was seriously heading the wrong way for a epidemic risk. That letter of president Trump cites how the head of WHO during the first SARS crisis in 2003, Dr. Harlem Brundtland acted when she faced China's lack of cooperation during that crisis by saying openly that this was a danger to world public health and millions. Could CDC in the U.S. and the other connected health authorites have taken the responsibility and filled Dr Brundtland's role in this crisis, that the WHO failed to perform?    ...

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Robert McFarlane, national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, describes three qualities of Reagan that made him a great President. He looks back at the President on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan. The first is belief in America's core values: a sense of right and wrong, tolerance for risk, and compassion for the less fortunate. The second political courage, the committment to do the right thing, regardless of how it would affect one politically. And the third the ability to take his case to the American people and inspire confidence. He cites Reagan's courage and committment to do the right thing in the case of nuclear deterrance strategy. Reagan viewed the nuclear strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction as immoral and one that would ultimately lead to the annhilation of mankind. And he decided to change the entire strategy and move it towards protecting Americans and the free world, with the ultimate objective of doing away with all nuclear weapons. McFarlane says today the development of defense against ballistic missiles is accepted wisdom but not at that time, when it was seen as risky, costly and not likely to work. At the time in 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative was criticised by nuclear experts and respected senators. One could add that this applied also to Reagan's looking at the Berlin Wall and sizing up the situation in one line- "Mr Gorbachev tear down this wall." One in which Reagan combined courage with simple straight talk to Russians, Germans and people in the free world, in a manner that struck a chord with millions of people....