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Krugman says there is cause for concern from May's U.S. jobs report of only 38,000 jobs added- low even with Verizon strike jobs added back in- compared to the 200,000 a month average since Jan 2013. One cannot read too much into one months report, yet the political uncertainty in a election year adds to the problem. The low interest rates near zero offering little possibility for rate cuts, make it difficult to come up with a policy response. Under a Clinton administration the infrastructure spending option would face Republican resistance.  It is not clear how a Trump administration would respond. Krugman says the jobs figure reflects a stronger dollar- a result partly of the Fed's plan to raise rates- that is hurting U.S. exports.

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Airlines are placing placeholder schedules full of flights 6 to 9 months ahead of travel dates. The 2 months before the travel date the real schedule will be placed. At the time of travel some flights with few passengers will be cancelled. Airlines are also flying directly to travel destinations from smaller cities, new flights are setup for destinations such as Israel because of vaccinations, Reykjavik, and other destinations such as Greece that are opening up for vaccinated people in the US. In 20 years there has never been a time when airlines are planning flights in this way. A vacation surge is under way as vaccinations increase. Federal money to aid airlines recovery is helping airlines bring back planes and new flights, retrain pilots. Business travel is down and likely to stay that way, so that the surge is expected mostly from vacation travel. Delta has the unique situation where it can increase capacity by 30% by ending its block on middle seats on April 30, 2021. Delta's available seat miles are expected to be 80% of 2019 showing that a recovery is underway as more people book airline travel. ...

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Israel vaccination drive has now reached 2 million people for the first dose and 400,000 for the second dose. What do early results show? As the effectiveness is only 52% after the first dose, according to Pfizer for its vaccine, vaccination drive is only one part of the solution. The number of cases in Israel are high at 10,000 a day. There is concern about the ultra-Orthodox community following the protocols and rules for prevention. Ben Gurion International Airport may be restricted to only essential flights. A mutation variant of the coronavirus, a UK detected variant, is seen as making up about 30% of the cases and could make up the bulk of cases in the future. Lessons being learned are that Pfizer vaccine is effective at about 52% for the first dose. Only after the second dose are enough antibodies triggered to resist the virus effectively. This can be as much as 6 to 12 times the increase in antibodies for second dose, compared to what happens after the first dose says the Sheba Medical Centre at Tel Hashomer, Israel.   ...

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The inventor of the white LED bulb is the son of a Japanese father and an American mother. He invented the LED bulb by doing research in a small company which required courage to get the research funded for IGaN. Only a few researchers were following this route less than 1%, Nakamura had the confidence in himself, believed in himself to take this route that led to the white LED bulb. The more he was turned down the angrier he became and had it approved by the founder of the company. In 1992 he made the first white LED bulb. Why is this important. It shows what we can do when we pursue what our mind tells us and what comes from inside. Nakamura had to work very hard to do this. In a small company he says he had to do everything himself. So thats it the LED bulb. Amazing and what an achievement for climate change action. California uses 35% of its electricity for lighting alone. White LED cuts this in half. ...

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Andy Grove of Intel teaches a class at Stanford- he taught aclass earlier this year- and talks about his experiences. Some see Grove's disciplined management style as areflection of his experience escaping the Nazis from Czechoslovakia. Dr Grove says it comes from his experience at the CIty COllege of New York He recounts this in one of his books, where aparticular Professor helped mentor him but who was in the beginning very tough on the young Grove. Grove says that what impressed him most in those early years at City College was the way hard work and talent were rewarded and where students challenged their Professors without any attention to rank. Interestingly this is still true at many universities, and meritocracy prevails there. The opposite is true when one thinks of this at many corporations which gradually fall into astultifying mode where senior managers are not challenged and politics prevails. GM is a good example. Grove says he experienced this at Fairchild -where he worked with computer chip pioneers Moore and Noyce -with its elitist, back-stabbing and lax corporate culture. Senior executives at Fairchild walked in whenever they felt like, and younger employees were penalized or fired for similiar behaviour. When he took charge at Intel Grove imposed a strict arrival time of 8 am with latecomers forced to sign asheet. He also did not go along with trends like flexi-time and teleworking. He became known as ablunt and demanding manager, but afairminded boss who rewarded good ideas whatever the source. Asked about the strict arrival time Grove says that people don't understand that he was never that disciplined himself and he was not even amorning person. His view is that he wanted to avoid what he saw as aoutrageous double standard at Fairchild. With a better culture he was able to attract the best talent to Intel, and he used the strong discipline to improve the lousy manufacturing at Intel. Three decisions shaped Intel. The first, is the recognition of the strategic inflection point when current strategy is no longer viable, because unanticipated external forces make an existing business strategy obsolete. This happened when Intel got clobbered by the Japanese in the memory chip field it had dominated. And at such moments there are internal forces and inhibitions to overcome that make starting over or doing something totally different extremely difficult. For Intel this was the habit forming tendencies from having done one thing so well- the companies roots and the founders and engineering staff's knowledge and preferences lay in memory chips- such that that it became an emotionally stormy thing to break from this past. Grove made a complete U turn to go in another direction which he describes so well in his book -Only the Paranoid Survive. Timing is critical, and instinct and judgement is all that you have got to rely on. Its like a group of hikers in the woods and after suspecting that they are on the wrong track one of them says, "Hey guys I think were lost." Grove even describes the scene with acomparison to a scene in the World War II movie Twelve O'Clock High, where a new commander is called in to straighten out an unruly and undisciplined squadron of fliers in sel-destruct mode. The commander on his way to take charge, stops his car, steps out smokes acigarette while gazing into the distance. Then he he throws the cigarette down, grinds it with his heel and tell his driver "Okay Sergeant, lets go." Grove says he related to this scene in this decision at Intel, with every fiber of his being experienced this crisis personally, and learned what it takes to claw your way through a strategic inflection point, inch by excruciating inch. He says it takes objectivity, the willingness to act on your convictions, and the passion mobilize people into supporting those convictions. The second and third decisions was less gruelling but also courageous. The Intel Inside advertising campaign meant building abrand with customers even though Intel had never done this before. The decision to not have secondary suppliers and press the issue of manufacturing quality within Intel till Intel got it right also had never been done before. Andy Grove's strategic inflection point is what GM missed and set the process in motion towards bankruptcy. See the links in Intelilinks. The management style is also relevant to that discussion. Grove also provides insights in the Cross-Industry Insight Mechanism. He sees strategic inflectionpoints in autos and health care industries. He says the auto industry is going to be increasingly divorced from oil and the next big company will come in the auto battery technology field. He also believes health care and the pharmaceutical industry can learn from chipmaking. The clinical trials in pharmaceuticals take way too long, are slow-moving and bureaucratic. The pharmaceutical firms can learn from the fast "knowledge turns" in chipmaking, so that cycles of learning are accelerated....

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A hard look at the idea of the "Great Moderation" a peiod of stable prosperity that America has enjoyed for 20 or so years with low inflation, stable unemployment and smaller bumps along the road even in recessions such as the one in 1990 and in 2000 which had shorter durations with good rebound. The IMF report on the world economy for September looks at this period of stability and sees a continuation. This report takes a look at the current crises in housing and credit markets and takes a more cautious view wondering if things may be at a turning point where such stable growth cannot be taken as a given. In general the world economy has become more flexible and structural shifts to globalization and the shifts in manufacturing to other parts of the world such as emerging countries have made for a more resilient world economy compared to the economy that faced the oil shocks of the seventies. The three specific causes to which this stable period is attributed are the better handling of monetary policy, the better inventory management with Just in Time and manufacture to order, inventories literally being the shipments that are carried by Fedex or UPS on a particular day, and credit markets securitization of debt packaging it into marketable securities creating a large credit pool so thay companies could have better access to credit. Securtization has suffered because some of the basic rules were broken such as how securities are rated and not because of the basic concept. Have the markets and investors and households taken on more risk in their asset portfolios because of the belief that this period of 'Great Moderation' would simply continue. Its these kinds of behaviour that get tripped up until things get cleared up and return to normal. Is this simply a phase like the prior downturns preceding it that should see a similiar rebound or is it something different. One thing that is noted is that the period of relative prosperity has ocurred as in many countries in Europe and Asia. And the housing markets in many countries in Europe and Asia have also seen rising prices similar to that of the US. Can this turn into a worldwide recessionary situation? Comment made later on April 12, 2008 after the Bear Stearns crisis in March 2008 and the Fed meeting summary describing the downturn as expected to " be protracted and severe", and the emergency measures by the Fed itself made to prevent a possible global financial crisis. In hindsight the 3 reasons for the Great Moderation can be evaluated in this way. The first was the only real one to which researchers attribute about 50% of the Great Moderation, which is the revolution that Just In Time inventories have accomplished for smoothing drops in demand. The second financial innovation proved to be illusory just as mentioned here because it was gamed because the financial houses and other firms were able to get around regulation or the regulations were inadequate and the innovation fell victim to unrestrained greed in the manner mortgage securitization was done. The third wise better monetary policy as mentioned here did not get much credit from researchers and this turns out to be true. Keeping interests rate low was possible because of the disinflationary aspect of globalization specifically manufacturing in China which ended in 2007. Further the success of the US economy made it possible for the US dollar to remain strong and the USA to continue to attract capital for much of this period even while interest rates were low. But its the export of disinflation from China, and no pressures of inflation from globalization through commodities demand for much of this period, that kept inflation low and made it possible for the Fed to keep interest rates low without creating inflationary pressures. Of the three financial innovation and monetary policy may have in them in fact unlike the first Just in Time and information technology, may have in them the seeds of trouble as well as gain if not carefully managed, like fire a good servant but bad master, and this is really what happened in what turns out to be a very human world, greed subverted financial innovation without the necessary appropriate regulation to go with it and the Fed's libertarian instincts and complacency or lack of energetic oversight under a man past eighty years made it lose sight of its need to adjust interest rates to cool off excesses in the market and send appropriate signals to the financial and housing markets. The Economist was slightly ahead of the curve when it makes the observation here that this is likely to be a global housing crisis and a global credit crisis with all the implications of this for global economic growth. ...

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The New York Times editorial page on the day following the passage of the second bailout or rescue plan of $700 billion in the Senate after it was voted down in the House of Representatives. It points out that the bailout bill does little to prevent a wave of foreclosures which the NYT estimates at six million people expected to default in the rest of this year and 2009. It faults lenders unwillingness to reduce the loan balances amount. At a Congressional hearing for the Hope for Homeowners program in which the governmet wold insure upto $300 bilonin new affordable loans for troubled borrowers if the lenders voluntarily refinance delinquent mortgages by reducing loan balances to 90% of the homes' current market value, lending banks were lukewarm about taking these losses in exchange for bigger losses in foreclosures. These lenders include Wels Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. The FDIC's Sheila Barr has also advocated reducing loan balances in her proposal for tackling the housing crisis presented after the Bear Stearns crisis. She is taking this approach to banks that like IndyMac were taken over by FDIC. But the numbers are not large letters were sent to 28,000 delinquent borrowers of IndyMac recently to reduce loan balances. This is a serious problem and either Congress and Treasury are leaving this problem to the next administration taking office 3 months from now as there is no real consensus on this issue even today or they are missing the impact this has in dropping home price values even further in neigborhoods across the nation as foreclosures drive prices down even further compounding the problem. For the financial institutions it would appear that they are letting this drag out because their capital is at frighteningly low levels and taking losses at one time is harder than taking the foreclosure losses dragged out over 1-3 years and they are also looking for a way in which they can let the government bear the burden of losses as the crisis intensifies which can make sense from the point of view of each institution. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on September 29, 2008, Sheila Barr told Congress this month that in recent years troubled loan portfolios have yielded about 32% of book value, compared with more than 87% for loans in which the borrower is current. These are strong statistics in favor of lenders taking an informed decision to lower loan balances voluntarily with some government help along the way but the fact that this is not happening leads one to think that something is falling between the cracks, initial lender reluctance to take losses through voluntary balance reduction at the time of Bear Stearns crisis given taxpayer reluctance and lack of government initiative to help lenders in doing this, sort of what Martin Feldstein suggested in a series of articles during the time before and after the Bear Steans crisis. And then as the credit crisis worsened with collapse of Lehman, WaMu, Freddie, Fannie and Wachovia in September 2008 fear gripping the markets and LIBOR interbank lending rate at close to 8%, banks gripped by the fear prevailing in the market, frozen practically about any steps other than preserving their hammered capital, and reluctant to take losses which would further impair their capital. Also in the WSJ Sept 8, on help for homeowners, Deutsche Bank estimates 40% of homeowners or about 20 million households will owe more than their home is worth by the time the housing market stabilizes. This will lead to some homeowners making the rational decision as Martin Feldstein argued to walk away from their homes, leading to more foreclosure losses for th banks. This article Rescue Includes Steps to Help Borrowers Keep Homes by Ruth Simon also has some information that confirms the NYT editorial. An analysis it says of 144 mortgage modifications by the Massachusetts Attorney General's office found that none reduced mortgage balances and onoly a handful reduced monthly payments. Even with interest rate reductions, the study showed borrrowers wound up paying more because of missed paymmets penalties and fees. Another study by Credit Suisse mentioned in the same article points out that the percentage of borrowers who were behind 6 months after loan modifications dropped to 17% when lenders reduced the loan balances and 13% when mortgage companies froze the interest rate of adjustable rate mortgages. A bigger problem is the effect on consumption, if 40% of homeowners end up owing more to the bank than their home is worth as Deutsche Bank estimates, combined with higher unemployment and higher parttime employment, by the time things stabilize. And this is the big looming problem for a new administration in January even if the bailout plan passes Congress this week after revisions and eases the crisis in the credit markets. ...

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People of a new generation cannot imagine that India that they know today could not exist without the integration of 560 smaller kingdoms within overall British India that were allowed self rule under British conditions and law. They made up no less than one third of the British Empire in India. During India's 75th anniversary of independence and looking to India's 100th year a young generation born after 1947 growing up in post-British India cannot easily imagine the critical years after 1910, with Gandhi writing Hind Swaraj that year during a period when he negotiated for the rights of Indians in South Africa just to move freely. The years of the struggle for Swaraj between 1910 and 1931, the Satyagraha March to the Sea at Porbandar to protest the British Salt Tax, the elected assemblies that brought the first experience with self-rule in the thirties, and the "karenge o marenge" pledge to do or die with Quit India Movement in 1942 by Gandhi.  The dominant role of Jawaharlal Nehru after 1947, and that of daughter Indira Gandhi after him, wittingly or unwittingly had the intended or unintended effect of obscuring from view the role of many of the leaders around Gandhi of whom Jawaharlal Nehru was just one. No doubt about Jawaharlal who wore a prisoners badge number token around his neck and spent years in British jails. No doubt about his contribution. Lyrarc throws a spotlight on other leaders who made equally large contributions so that India's young people can get a better sense of what this struggle involved and how it was won by the  people of that time  under the most difficult conditions and trials. This includes Vallabhbhai Patel, Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, and the young Lal Bahadur Shastri. Others Naoroji, Vidyasagar, Vivekananda, from an even earlier period, Gokhale and Tilak, are people on whose shoulders Mohandas Gandhi stood on and fully accepted as his mentors, as do today's Indian leaders. This BBC report looks at the role of Vallabhbhai Patel of Kheda district in Gujarat state and of his assistant VP Menon. Gandhi was born in 1869, Patel in 1875 and Nehru in 1889. In 1947 Gandhi made the decision to go with Jawaharlal Nehru who was 14 years younger than Vallabhbhai Patel as the younger leader and prime minister who could take India through this critical first decade after independence with Patel as deputy prime minister. Patel died of heart conditions in 1950. Patel's assistant during the crucial period of negotiations for independence after the war ended in 1945 with Viceroy Mountbatten was V.P. Menon.  Mohandas Gandhi always believed that with hundreds of millions of Indians gaining consciousness of their rights even under British concepts of free men and free people, and a sense of their own dignity under God, the British would simply have to leave. His faith in the Bhagavad Gita that affirmed this right under God was firm and indomitable. This was true by 1947. He needed other leaders around him to structure the form this independence would take in terms of administration of the country and the constitution of the new nation. He also needed to bring those parts of British India that were not absorbed into direct British rule during successive wars between 1756 and 1857. These small kingdoms were retained under princely rule after the British decided to halt the policy of integrating them into direct rule following a war in 1857 that almost led to the downfall of the British in India. How large was this area is hard to comprehend when one sees that this was one third of British India in land mass from the Himalayan mountains to the Indian Ocean. Harder still it is to grasp that it would involve bringing in about 560 different princely states or kingdoms into the new India of 1947. It was the task of Vallabhbhai Patel and of his assistant V P Menon to do this. Southik Biswas of the BBC tells the story of how this was done with pictures from that period- click on Original Article to see the BBC report. It also shows how much modern India owes to Vallabhbhai Patel, as it does to Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Atal Bihari Vajapayee, to Tilak and all the people in the jails of Andaman, to Naoroji and Gokhale. And how much it owes to today's leaders who have made it their task to bring Har Ghar Jal, cooking gas, and electricity to every family in every village in India, never losing sight of that last poorest of men and women in the land that Vivekananda and then Mohandas Gandhi never lost sight of.   ...

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A year long study by the Washington Post of all shootings by the the police in incidents of law enforcement in the U.S. shows only about 4% of the incidents involve police killing unarmed black persons. Yet a disproprotionate number of unarmed men shot are black or Hispanic- 3 of 5 people. The large majority of incidents involved people who were mentally troubled most of whom carried a weapon, persons carrying a weapon, or persons running from the police when asked to stop. The WP has compiled every police shooting in its database for analysis, something even the FBI does not have and is only now starting to put together. For police the hard part is when to know a certain behaviour such as reaching into the pocket after a police chase was harmless or risking the officer's life, as shown in a video carried by officer Lisa Mearkle in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, for one of the shootings. Mearkle was acquitted by the jury.

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Criticism of the European Central Bank policies and Mr Trichet's role.

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Mexico's economy grew at 1.34% in the third quarter of 2011, according to the national statistics institute. Annual growth is estimated at 4% for 2011. The war against organized drug trafficking in Mexico cost the economy one percentage point of economic growth, according to estimates by BBVA Bancomer, Mexico's largest bank. Mexico received $20 billion in foreign investment in 2011, about the same as in 2010. Cars and aerospace have drawn large foreign investment. Mazda will invest $500 million on a new plant in central Mexico. Honda says it will spend $800 million on a second Mexican plant. In recent years with higher costs in China, higher transport costs, and a weaker peso with a stronger yuan, Mexico is becoming more competitive with China as a manufacturing investment location. The younger workforce, low inflation and technical education schooling, offer Mexico additional advantages. Mexico is the second largest manufacturer of flat screen television sets, and is now the fourth largest location for outsourced IT such as call centers. Axa CEO, Henri Castries, and Siemens CEO, Louise Goeser, have very favorable views of doing business in Mexico. Siemens sees sales increasing by double digits through 2015, and has located one of three global R&D centers in the state of Queretaro. Goeser says many parts of Mexico are safer than parts of the U.S. A large part of the violence is concentrated in a few states, and in border cities like Juarez, and affects smaller businesses more than the large manufacturing enterprises of overseas companies. As a result it is as if there were several economies in Mexico, with foreign enterprises largely insulated from the violence. ...

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Toyota's goal is to remain the preeminent automobile manufacturer in emerging markets and the IMV is part of its strategy for achieving this goal. The IMV series for emerging markets, with one million in manufacturing capacity coming off a single platform to lower costs, is designed to meet local needs from a price standpoint and rough road conditions. Sales of one million off of a single platform is an achievement only Toyota will have achieved. A minivan, a sport utility vehicle and 3 pickup trucks are all made from a single chassis, with localized production since 2004. The IMV series is expected to account for 10% of the 9.58 vehicle sales goal for 2012. CEO Akio Toyoda plans to increases sales in emerging markets to 50% of total sales by 2015, up from 40% in 2011. IMV vehicles are made in 11 emerging market countries- in Argentina, India, South Africa and Thailand, and are sold as the Hilux pickup, the Fortuner SUV, and the Innova minivan. Over the years Toyota has transferred more of the design and development to emerging market countries to meet local preferences and reduce the effects of a strong yen, leaving only core components to be designed and manufactured in Japan. As it recovers from supply disruptions due to floods in Thailand and the tsunami in Japan, Toyota is planning on sales of 9.58 million in 2012, a steep climb of 21% from the 7.95 million sold in 2011....

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The challenges facing Nokia as it has to come up with a full range of Lumia model smartphones at different price points to appeal to customers in the U.S. and emerging markets. Increasing price competition at the low end in emerging markets and competition with the Apple iPhone and Android based phones at the upper end.