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Milan will host the World Cities Culture Summit in 2020, and the Winter Olympics in 2026 shared with the Alpine town of Cortina. The international book fair of Turin is moving to Milan. The left of centre Mayor Giuseppe Sala has promoted the city to increase tourism by 50%. And foreign investment is increasing for new construction projects with $21 billion to be taken up in the next 15 years. Experts are asking if this is coming at a price as the rest of Italy has stagnated for 20 years, and the rural large city gap is increasing throughout Europe. The flow of professionals to cities such as Milan, Paris, Munich, Berlin, from other towns and cities is creating a huge shift that experts at the Centre of European Reform see as a problem because of the political turmoil, and rising inequality with ever widening gaps between smaller cities and towns and rural areas with the big cities. This is compounded by ageing and demographics such as seen in the eastern part of Germany, and parts of France. Experts call it The Big European Sort, where a sifting or sorting process is increasingly transforming the demographics of European countries and driving polarisation. This process is also happening in the U.S. Experts say the big cities benefitted from the change with the European single market and the European Union. Places where working class people live are not seeing and increase in wealth which is disproportionately going to professionals clustered in big cities. Deindustrialisation has turned places like Mezio only 20 miles from Milan into industrial ruins. Towns that once voted socialist are now voting far right in these hollowed out industrial places. In the U.S. and in Europe the process was exacerbated by the flow of cheap imports from Asia hollowing out factories in regions around big cities, and by the growth of services industry in big cities with globalization in finance, legal, and other professional services. Fro 1980 to 1995 Paris region lost about $5.5 billion in industrial output and gained $20 billion in services output that also aligns with globalization in areas such as finance, according to CER, Eurostat. The process had accelerated in 1995-2020. By telling this story about Milan and the Lombard region around it like Mezio, The Guardian is saying it is time to look at how everything works together rather than breaking apart- citing the Finnish architect Saarinen about how a chair fits into a room, a room into a house, and a house into its environment, an environment in a city. So the question is how can we build the future by seeing that the city fits into a region, and a region fits into a country. As a young professional described this on BBC television interview recently this is a difficult period with the ability to design the future seemingly snatched away by the times, but also an opportunity to rethink and take the actions today for a better tomorrow for all. This is part of the coverage on Cities in The Guardian looking at how cities can work, and how cities can become part of healthy regions, for organic growth. ...

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Inflation in China and rising wages are pushing up costs for American manufacturers. The pressure on China, most recently in Congress, is helping to push up the value of the yuan. This combined trend is making it attractive for some manufacturers to bring factories home to the U.S. A trend in the U.S. towards non-unionized labor and the new trend to a two-tier wage level- with lower wages for entry level workers- and the shedding of legacy health care costs, is creating a more cost competitive labor force in the U.S. This extends from older industries such as furniture and auto components to newer industries and technology. The new factories setup in the U.S. use technologies that require a smaller number of workers, in most cases less than half the number of workers that were employed earlier. This adds another element in cost efficiency, though it means fewer jobs are created with new plants.

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Bradsher, Tankersley and Cohen say in this NYT report- US industrial policy under president Biden corrects the failures of the past. Chinese experts in Hong Kong say the US and Europe deindustrialized their economies with pursuing of policies called "neo-liberal" but basically Reagan era policies that Democratic presidents Clinton-Obama imitated. As they deindustrialized it created disaffection among the struggling lower and middle income classes making $35,000-$106,000 that were big losers in the process, creating threats to democracy as financial and tech, plus pharmaceutical sectors took control of the economy. China's success comes from three decades of mastering the ways of practicing industrial policy that it can support private companies with low cost land, additional subsidies that reduce the cost of production and provide a buffer to absorb losses so that it could dominate key industries. Policies where textbooks and economists trained in the US failed utterly and completely leading to dangers to US democracy that we see as opportunities for good paying jobs in manufacturing disappeared for middle and lower income households from 1980 to 2020. These economists trained in the US always said see lower cost Chinese made goods means lower and middle income people pay less, never saying that this means all opportunities for better paying jobs in manufacturing will be lost for these classes in society. The tech and financial sectors had close ties to the new arrangement that turned manufacturing over to China from the Reagan era to the Obama and Trump era. Apple and Tesla and many industries benefitted from manufacturing mostly outsourced to China. ...

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Boeing plans to have a new facility in China complete assembly of its 737 jets by the end of 2018. The finishing center is being built near Shanghai. Boeing's order book is up to 5800 jets at a value of $518 billion. About one fifth are in deliveries planned for China. Inflight entertainment systems, seat systems and other finishing for aircraft will be done at the new facility. Boeing continues to see this a a part of doing business in China even as tensions have increased with China over tariff issues and market access. Boeing says it will continue to assemble 737s at its plant near Seattle, and send some planes for completion to China. Sales to Iran will require following Trump administration guidelines.

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The Trump administration suspended all flights from Europe on March 13, about one month after suspending all flights from China. This report in the NYT says there were about 10,000 estimated undetected infections in New York on March 1 when only 1 case of coronavirus was confirmed. It also says that researchers have tracked the mutations of the virus in all American states and found that most of it came from New York. Could the Trump administration have acted earlier than March 13 to stop flights from Europe? The state and city authorites in New York did not take the threat seriously by March 13, making it not clear that they would have acted earlier.   In places like Michigan which has Italian Fiat owned Chrysler operations, and automotive connections with Munich, Germany, reports show the virus coming from Europe. Munich based auto companies have extensive operations in China. In Louisiana the Mardi Gras celebrations around Feb. 25, received large numbers of visitors from New York, with research showing the virus mutations in Louisiana originated in New York. There was little awareness of the seriousness of the virus because of lack of past experience as happened in Asian countries. So that these kinds of public events bringing huge numbers of people in close contact were allowed to happen, and people who were cautious were likely to be ridiculed or shoved aside. New York continued to hold public gatherings at Madison Square Gardens and sports stadiums well into March, with complete disregard of the dangers, a decision made by local authorites.   ...

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Gerard Baker in The Times of London looks at California as some kind of dystopia, a malfunctioning place with rolling blackouts from PG&E the electricity company, drought and water shortages, housing costs soaring making it affordable only to the few at the top, and high taxes. He cites an expert from Chapman University who compares it to some sort of medieval feudal place run by nobility at the top, the investors, lawyers and people in entertainment, with the academy and the media as a kind of clerisy who propagate the ideas that this nobility supports, a small middle and the rest as serfs or minimum wage workers in logistics, retail and farms. Median costs of housing are about $613,000, and the affordability index of people who can afford housing is 32% compared to 56% in the country. Hispanic immigrants now prefer Texas, though with a loss of 6 million people in the last decade and gain of five million, it sees increase in population with high birthrates from the existing population to about 40 million. Half the population of homeless in the U.S. are now in California though it has only one eighth the population of the country. High housing costs and high cost of living hurt people at the low end, the lower middle and the retired the most. With low wages at the bottom and extremes of wealth, homeless, housing zone restrictions, drought and rolling electricity blackouts, this is not what the future should look like.  ...

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The Seattle area, Bay area, Denver show slowing in rent and housing prices with improvement in affordability, increasing vacancies for rental housing. The housing and rental part makes an outsize part of the CPI index -35%. As prices of housing decline this has an effect on inflation. Fed chairman Powell says activity in the housing area has flattened out and remains well below levels in 2022. One reason Powell says he may cut interest rates next year.

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Unemployment claims held steady at 21.5 million in the U.S. at the end of May 2020, according to the Labor Department. New applications for unemployment claims dropped below 2 million a week for the first time.

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Mr. Donald Trump paid little or no tax for several years, and reported negative income for four of the six years 2015-2020, says this report in WSJ. This is according to tax documents released by a House committee. The tax returns for that period shows adjusted gross income of a negative $53.2 million. The Trumps showed income tax liability of  $750 or less for three of the six years these documents showed, says the WSJ.