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Argentina and Repsol agree to a settlement of $5 billion in Argentine bonds for Repsol's 51% stake in YPF. The deal is brokered by Mexico's Pemex, which has a 10% stake in YPF. Argentina is seeking foreign investment and technology to develop its large shale oil and gas reserves. The settlement with Repsol is a step towards attracting large western oil companies to invest in Argentina.

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This year 2025 is the 75th year since the invasion of Tibet by Communist China under Mao in 1950, and the 66th year since the uprising in Lhasa in 1959. The new book by Tibet Dalai Lama will be out in March 2025- Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle With China for My Land and My People.  The Dalai Lama calls for preserving Tibet's Buddhist civilization and culture within China. Bringing China's borders to the borders of India was a serious mistake as the mountains of Tibet and Nepal acted as a buffer zone between China and India. The invasion was a result of seeing India as India under a colonial power the British and independent India still run in 1950 under a system modeled on Britain- what Mao fought against since the 1920's.  In 2025 India has emerged as distinctly Indian and China has emerged from the 1950's communist state into a market economy state. The old colonial period systems no longer exist and only a reversion to the old Buddhist periods since the 5th century in terms of borders makes sense. The Tibet invasion after millenium in which Tibet had relations with Nepal, China and India has created other issues in this region. In the centuries before the colonial powers entered Asia in the 15th century, the Portuguese, Dutch and the British, there was contact, commerce and other relations between India, Nepal, Tibet and China. The earliest contacts were with Bodhidharma prince from from India going to China through these Tibetan mountains to convert China to Buddhism in about the 6th century AD. China reverting to its Buddhist culture is a serious possibility because it is so intertwined with a sense of being Chinese and the culture of China. And with this the borders of times past.   ...

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The first year of the Modi administration in India brings a sense of moderation to high expectations following the election, considering the many problems that need to be tackled. It also brings some help in the form of lower oil prices coming at a critical time for the Indian economy, which is overly dependent on oil imports. This enabled the government to cut fuel subsidies and control its budget deficit. By April 2015 inflation declined to 4.87%. Foreign direct investment increased by 25% to $28.8 billion in 2014-2015 fiscal year. Major steps include deregulating prices of diesel, petroleum and cooking gas, increasing foreign ownership limits for defense and insurance sectors to 47%, and opening 125 million new bank accounts for poor households. Coalfield leases and telecom spectrum allocations which suffered from lack of transparency and sold at low prices under the previous administration were reallocated in a transparent process.

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James Stewart of the NYT looks at the outlook for U.S. and international stock and bond markets in 2016. In 2015 stock and bond markets in the U.S. and international were affected by the huge fall in the price of oil and the sharp slowdown in the Chinese economy. This affected commodity producing countries and the oil industry worldwide including the U.S. The slowdown in China affected stock markets in other countries including Germany.

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GM and Chrysler will face a tough market in the years ahead. The last year as seen GM's image with the American customer erode even further. Reputation Institute surveyed 70,000 people worldwide, and found only Mitsubishi and AvtoVAZ have a worse image. This inspite of improvements in quality at GM, which shows that management errors and its image matters a lot in buyer behaviour. Worse still GM and Chrysler, both are not favored by the younger generation of customers. The new demographics show that 73 million 21-33 year olds will be customers in the next few years, and they have shown little interest in Detroit brands. These people says one expert on atitudes towards automotive brands at AutoStrategem, can't see heir friends in these brands, and so can't see themselves in them. Perception matters a lot to these young people who are better educated. Studies have shown that college graduates and better educated Americans favor overseas brands by a wide margin. Chrysler is pervceived as having poor quality according to JD Powers and Consumer Reports. With $21 billion in debt Chrysler is more burdened with costs, needed improvements are less likely without investment. Chrysler may shrink to 6% of the market says BW, and GM will probably go down from 19% in 2008 to 14% in the next 3-4 years, as competing with Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, VW and new competitors from China and India makes for a very tough environment. Worse still there is about 90 million car production capacity worldwide, and the worldwide market has shrunk to 55 million cars and is still shrinking. ...

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President Obama picks Dartmouth College president, Jim Yong Kim, as the U.S. choice for president of the World Bank. Kim is a physician who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization for providing health care to the poor. He was a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization. Working with Partners in Health in Lima, Peru, mid-1990's, he helped establish a large scale treatment program for drug resistant tuberculosis. Such programs are being promoted in 40 countries since then. Under the leadership of Mr. Zoellick, the World Bank provided $57 billion in assistance to low and middle income countries in 2011. About $90 billion was raised in a fund to be used for aid to the poor in developing countries, including China and India.

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Legal experts say Lufthansa faces significant liability claims from the 150 persons killed in the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, beyond the $150,000 per crash victim established by international airline rules. The claims could be much higher in countries such as the U.S. and lower in Germany. Lufthansa's insurer Allianz would pay out the claims, with Lufthansa incurring higher future premium costs. Lufthansa said it was initially paying out 50,000 euros per person to relatives of victims. Airline insurance premiums were about $1.65 billion for the industry in 2014, according to Ascend Worldwide, with premiums down by over 50% since the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks, and were not affected by the loss of two Malaysia Airline aircraft in accidents recently.

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Elections to France's 13 regional councils is showing weak support for president Macron's En Marche party that was newly created by Macron. Macron's party won less than 10% of the vote in the regional elections. The Republicans, former president Sarkozy's party were written off after Macron's win. Instead the Republicans who are conservatives and represent the Gaullist tradition have revived under Sarkozy's health minister Xavier Bertrand. Mr. Bertrand now remains the main candidate with Macron for the French presidential election in 2022. Terrorist attacks, the sense of a lack of law and order, and the pandemic, have revived the conservatives in France. Brexit nationalism, the failure of the socialist Labor party and a shift of laborites in the north of England to the conservatives under Boris Johnson led to a Johnson win in British elections. A similar situation is unfolding in France. Xavier has served under presidents Chirac and Sarkozy, both in the Gaullist tradition. He was Sarkozy's spokesperson in 2007 and helped run Sarkozy's election campaign. He was Health Minister from 2010 to 2012. ...

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Hong and Inman describe the deep experience in capital markets that Hong Kong has and Shanghai lacks, which China needs for further development. Even before the handover capital markets in Hong Kong have helped China, and many of China's largest companies have listings in Hong Kong. Hong is also the laboratory for China to make financial innovations for the last three decades, because of capital account controls on the mainland. A bad bank Cinda Asset management Company only recently raised $2.5 billion for buying non-performing loans from Chinese banks. Hong Kong's separate status within China, its Briain based legal system which has credibility in the international community, the rule of law, independent judiciary and independent police are critical to how it developed into an international financial hub for Asia. Any crackdown on protestors would disturb this arrangement. As China has already promised universal suffrage in 2017- which implies free elections not limited by restricted nominations as is now proposed in a change in 2014- and the Basic Law passed before the handover by Britain in 1997 also ensuring this, any retraction is only going back on past promises. A crackdown would create fears about Hong Kong's future autonomy for international financial institutions, and the bad publicity for China would affect Hong Kong and China adversely. ...

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$5 Billion for Highway EV chargers under 2021 Infrastructure Act paused in Feb 2025. More than half of the funds were awarded to highway truck stops and travel stops. 940 locations had awards for building the EV charging stations and 56 have completed work.

It was designed to overcome "range anxiety" of EV car drivers.

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Walmart comes out in favor of requiring employers to provide health insurance to all workers, a central feature of President Obama's effort to provide near universal coverage in the USA. As the country's largest private employer, employing 1.4 million Americans, this change is significant. In a letter to the President, Walmart CEO Mike Duke, joined by Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union, and John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, who also signed the letter, say they are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage. Walmart had a couple of reasons for doing this. For one Walmart needed to join the negotiations, as the Senate Finance Committee is considering other proposals that are less favorable to Walmart than employer mandate. Already Walmart is covering 52% of its employees, and has improved health benefits in recent years in response to criticism of the company. The industry average is 45%, according to a 2008 Kaiser Foundation study, and some companies do not provide the health benefits that Walmart does, so this helps level the playing field by requiring all large companies to share the burden. Walmart wants to see effective cost controls to keep costs down, and Rahm Emmanuel, the President's chief of staff, assured Walmart that "cost control and employer mandate are heads and tails of the same coin." Under the plans considered by the Senate Finance Committee under Max Baucus, small businesses are exempted from the employer mandate. Republicans have opposed employer mandate. And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has opposed it saying it would make companies lower wages and cut jobs. Walmart's shift has been gradual. From a company used to providing skimpy benefits, it has evolved as it improved benefits, and two years ago it joined the SEIU union to call for affordable health care for all Americans by 2012. It has Mr Dach as its governmental affairs vice president, and this is significant, as Dach is an advisor to Democratic party politicians....

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The discussion on whether it is feasible to achieve any significant cost savings as long as middle class consumers are not cost conscious about their employer provided health insurance. This would be so as long as their health insurance benefits are not taxed as income. America suffers from a particularly strong case of not minding the price increases imposed by the health care industry as long as its not out of pocket cost. But Obama seems stuck on his insistence that the middle class not take on any burden, that there be no middle class tax in the form of this tax on health care benefits. Critics say even FDR did this by having the middle class pay with payroll contributions for Medicare and Social Security. And even if the 5% of Americans who make more than $280,000 are taxed it will not generate by itself the money to pay for the $1 trillion cost of the plan, as the prospects of cost reduction are uncertain- especially when the basic nature of America's health care system are not changed, like the lack of cost consciousness of consumers of health care when its perceived to be free and employer provided....

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For passengers air travel nowadays is travelling on planes that are often totally booked. This is because airlines are cutting flights. And with fewer passengers after the economic crisis hit, airlines are having a difficult time cutting flights enough to meet the continuing drop in the number of passengers. Before the crisis business and international travel was a good source of revenue, now this is fading as there is more competition on transatlantic routes with about 50 airlines offering flights between US cities and European cities. The liberalization of air travel between the two continents with the 2007 "open skies" agreement is keeping downward pressure on prices. The International Air Transport Association says the number of passengers travelling on business and first class tickets between N. America and Europe was down 18.4% in April 2009, compared with same month in 2008. Traffic between N. America and Asia was down 26%, for the same period. This is hitting Lufthansa ansd KLM-Air France hard, but is helping Easyjet, Ryanair, and Air Berlin. As demand drops airlines will continue to cut capacity, and this will be done by cutting the number of flights on a route and using smaller planes. After all this capacity cutting takes place by September, OAG Aviation estimates that the seats on domestic flights will drop to 66.5 million from a peak of 84 million in 2001, a drop of 21%. Some airlines which rely less on corporate travellers will not see as steep a drop. These airlines are Southwest, JetBlue and AirTran. Airlines that may not survive the effects of the economic crisis, with tight credit and drop in air travel, and volatile oil prices, are United Airlines and US Airways. United relied heavily on corporate and trans-Pacific fliers before the economic crisis. Fitrch Ratings cites this in reducing the credit rating for United to junk status, as well as the heavy debt maturities in 2009 and 2010. In June 2009 United raised $175 million by issuing new debt, but at an interest rate of 17%. At US Airways the combined airline with America West after a$1.5 billion merger is struggling. It has the thinnest cash position of any airline according to a Morningstar research analyst, and may need further borrowing to meet debt payments. With all assets already mortgaged US Airways may have little borrowing capability left....

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The new coalition government in Britain has cut direct state funding for teaching in universities by 40%. The current cap on tution fees of 3,290 British pounds a year will be removed The universities Minister, Mr Willetts, suggested a cap of 9000 pounds a year. Students pay after graduation and after earning more than 21,000 pounds, at a rate of 9% of income above that level. Graduates in future will pay 3% interest above retail price index of inflation, compared to zero percent before this. But the interest rate drops to zero if the graduate loses his job or enters lower paid work.

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There has been a cautious improvement in relations with Russia, not the marked improvement that was expected in the early enthusiasm when Medvedev met Obama in Washington. Russia is a priority for Obama, but if he does not see much progress he will move on to other priorities.

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Views of East Germans in the city of Erfurt on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Germany's reunification. Disparities remain after over a trillion dollars were invested to improve conditions in East Germany, yet the positive changes are visible. In this city of Erfurt the burning of lowgrade coal for heating homes made the air less breathable. It could take years just to buy a car. Still Germans in the east are disappointed, as their expectations were high during reunification. Wages in the east are 80% of wages in the west and unemployment is 12%, and the average wealth of east Germans is 40% lower than west Germans. Young people have immigrated to the west, leaving older people and retirees. Because of this the term reunification is less used than the term "die Wende"- meaning the turn or the change. A sense of the loss of the old values forged in a socialist state is still felt deeply by some east Germans and the change has been largely positive but wrenching in terms of a loss of identity, a sense of being treated as immigrants in their own country....

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Guardian Bikes in Indiana factory was shifted in reshoring to the US in 2022. By 2026 it hopes to change the situation from 90% Chinese parts to 60% of the parts made in the US and prices still within reach for American buyers of $199-$399 for childrens bikes. Other bike makers are hesitating, and some have moved to Taiwan from China.