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More proof that China's real estate prices resemble the period of the bubble in real estate prices in Tokyo in the late 1980's. One parking space goes for $760,000 in Hong Kong in a luxury development.

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There are more women drivers in the U.S. than men. In 2011 50.5% of licensed drivers were women. This is an increase from the 39.6% figure in 1963, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Part of the reason for this is the decline in young men getting drivers licenses, and the larger share of older drivers with more women in that age group. Even though women still earn less than men the numbers are increasing, with women making 81 cents to every dollar made by men in 2012, increasing from 62 cents in 1979. In educaton levels achieved women are doing better- Labor Dept figures show 30% of women born in the early 1980's with bachelors degrees, and only 22% for men. That suggests their earning prospects will continue to increase. Studies by R.L. Polk show women prefer more fuel efficient cars. A study by RDA Group shows women buying the average new car in 2012 at a price 12% less than the average car bought by men. Only two of the top ten cars purchased by women in 2012 were U.S. brands- the Ford Escape at No.7 and the Chevy Equinox at No. 9. This shows that Ford, GM and Chrysler have more work to do to attract women customers....

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Douglas Tompkins co-founded outdoor clothing company North Face and women's dresses company Espirit. He started North Face as a small shop selling high end European climbing and camping equipment in San Francisco. He sold the company in 1969 and later started Espirit. A 1968 trip to Patagonia led to the movie "Mountain of Storms," and a life long commitment to preserving the Patagonia wilderness. A book by Sessions and Devall "Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered," had a profound influence on Tompkins. For $600,000 Tompkins bought 40,000 acres of land in Patagonia as part of apreservation project Parque Pumalin, which would grow to 700,000 acres of pristine wilderness. Tompkins married Kristine McDivitt, a former CEO of outdoor clothing firm, Patagonia, and the couple dedicated their life to Patagonia through their foundation the Conservation Land Trust. Often misunderstood by skeptical Chileans, and opposed by salmon farming interests, Tompkins set forth his views citing a line from Abraham Lincoln- "Laws change, people die, the land remains." He died kayaking on a lake in Patagonia in 2015. A new generation of Chileans, Argentinians, and others can now appreciate his work in the national parks he helped establish like the work of Teddy Roosevelt in the U.S. a century ago....

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Kevin Rudd maintained a strong relationship with China when he was prime minister of Australia, He writes this piece in WSJ on the internal debate on policy taking place inside China at the China Central Economic Work Conference. Discussions are carried out in a vaguely referenced manner leaning to one side or the other in these dialogues inside Communist party circles since the 1930's. Here the discussion is on how quickly the idea of reducing social and economic inequality, or Xi Jinping's idea of a common prosperity should be implemented.

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China's handling of the surging stock market, and use of the market for debt ridden companies to reduce debt loads, is based on an erroneous assumption of how equity markets work. China's lack of experience with declining equity markets during China's experiment with its form of capitalism since 1990, is a serious handicap in 2015.

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Speaking at a fireside chat at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington D.C. Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman describes the task of lifting hundreds of millions from poverty in India done over the last 10 years. When China did this for about 400 million people by 2000 it had the support of the people of the US and Europe and the US opened its doors to favor China in its supply chain. How will the US and European Union respond to the same situation in India? This was accomplished in the US and Europe by the 1930's building on the work in the 1900 period. "We are reaching near saturation in providing the basic facilities to the people of the country. Have we removed these many number of people from poverty and lifted them out." "And that is to give them some good house to live in which is made of concrete and not of thatched roof with toilets in them, with drinking water reaching them through pipes, electricity, and a good road, not just the village, but also to streets in the village, and then connect them to the nearest highway; connect them with good transport facility and so on. And financial inclusion so that each member of the household has a bank account and they get every such benefit, which has to reach them, but directly into their bank account rather than through a middle agency. On skilling people "We are now focusing very much on skilling people, each according to their level. Skilling centers are now spread all over the country. The gradation of the skilling varies according to the individuals. Businesses and private sector entrepreneurs are also tied into it so that there is a link between the kind of training businesses want and actually those who are getting the training so that immediately they can get recruited. There will be a lot of skilling emphasis. On expanding the formalization of the economy getting rid of "the grey layer" India's digitization programme will be going on at full throttle and it'll cover most aspects of our lives. Today it covers health, education, and financial transactions. We expect it to move on to other areas as well so that there is greater ease of living and transparency, the economy gets even more formal. And therefore with that, you find  the economy gets its full strength coming on board, rather than having a second layer, which remains in the grey area. ...

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Shown here and in the adjoining WSJ interview by Ben Cohen of Morris Chang, 1985 founder of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), is the story of how as textile and other lower technology industries were shipped to China in the 1990's the advanced technology manufacturing industries that were to replace them for the American workers and their families were also taken away through the back door by companies such as TSMC- leading to the dislocation of the American worker and poorer manufacturing communities across the US. Hille and Sevastopulo in the Financial Times take an inside look at the situation of TSMC as an advanced chip manufacturer that has taken 92% of the world market for advanced chips by using Taiwan's manufacturing advantages in chip yield that was in 1985 about twice that in the US when Morris Chang founded the company. Morris Chang was an immigrant who came to the US after 1949 with the founding of the People's Republic of China. After gaining decades experience at Texas Instruments by age 52 in 1982 he felt he had reached the glass ceiling at the company. See the adjoining WSJ Ben Cohen interview with Chang on this part of his life. He was recruited  by Ki Li, a technology planner for Taiwan to  build Taiwan's first semiconductor company. Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in 1985 and based on his work in the US and seeing the cost advantage in engineering talent coming out of Taiwan and Chinese universities, and the willingness to work long hours in the zealous drive for modernization, he made the bet on Make in China (Taiwan + People's Republic of China.) It succeeded, and succeeded, and succeeded, just as it took advanced manufacturing away from the US, and deprived the US by replacing the cotton mills and textile factories, the less advanced industries that were being shipped to China by being replaced with modern more advanced manufacturing in new technology products, as it was how it was supposed to work. Economists and politicians and business failed to see this for two decades. It left America without both the old industrial manufacturing base and at the same time took away from the American worker the new manufacturing in advanced technology base that was supposed to give him new opportunities to replace the old. It has left America poorer in ways no economist, politician or business person could see when through the benevolent hand of friendship the US advanced a helping hand to China through WTO negotiation, WTO membership and foreign investment in China following the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1970's that dislocated China's industry. ...

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The Zeitenwende speech by chancellor Scholz in the German parliament came 3 days after Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Zeitenwende means turning point in history- and Scholz's speech changed the mood in Germany to take on responsibilities for defense of Europe with a $100 billion fund. Chancellor Merz has expanded this and Germany's defense budget is expanding to $160 billion a year. Germany under Merz will invest 5% of its GDP on defense in future years making the Bundeswehr the largest army in Europe.

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China adopts a two child policy nationwide in October 2015, abandoning a one child policy adopted in 1980. Experts had warned for years of a policy that would lead to fewer young people, and a rapidly aging society. UN forecasts show China will have about 400 million people over the age of 60 in 2030, 25% of the population in 2030, compared to 14% today if current trends continued. Growth of elderly people would burden the pension and health care systems. The birth rate of 1.4 children per woman is lower than in the U.S. today.

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Tariffs policy is part of a renegotiation the US is conducting with China similar to that started with Japan by Lighthizer in the Reagan era as Deputy Trade Representative. It does not in any way have anything to do with the tariffs of Herbert Hoover in 1930 that gave tariffs a bad meaning. This is because tariffs were reduced since Harry Truman's efforts in 1945 by 2017 to 1.47% on average on total imported goods into the US and world trade makes up 63% of world GDP, so large is world trade today. What are Lighthizer- DJT tariffs trying to accomplish? As with Japan in the 1960-1970's it is intended to reverse the trends for China in 2000-2017 that allowed it to game the world trading system to gain an unfair advantage by dumping specific products into the US destroying American manufacturing and communities dependent on it. The US tariffs on Chinese goods proposed in 2024 by former USTR Robert Lighthizer come at a time when US tariffs are in 2023 only about 2.2% of all imported goods, $33 billion on 2333 billion of imported goods. In 2023 the total import duties or tariffs as a percentage of US total imported goods is about 2%, with total imported goods into the US from European Union 3%. and with total imported goods into the US from China about 19% matching China's about 19% on American imports into China. By the time the first tariffs were taken up by the DJT administration in 2017 the total tariffs the US had imposed on imported goods were down to an all time low of 1.47% of imported goods value, $33 billion out of $2333 billion in total imported goods. Compared to the 29-40% under Hoover Act of 1930 raised to 60%.  Today world trade makes up 62% of world GDP, in 1930 it made up 9% of World GDP.  In 2023 the total import duties or tariffs as a percentage of US total imported goods is about 2%, with total imported goods into the US from European Union 3%. and with total imported goods into the US from China about 19% matching China's about 19% on American imports into China.   ...

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Japan's energy efficient industry is a role model for the western world and for India and China. For years Japan has had a national consensus on consuming less energy an industry has focused on developing energy efficent technologies and investing in it even when oil prices were low. Japan wants to now contribute to the world in this area at the G8 summit on the island of Hokkaido. According to the International Energy Agency in Paris, Japan consumes half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as India or China in 2005. According to the Japanese Economic Ministry data corporate Japan has kept its energy consumption annually at a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970's even as the country's economy doubled in size during the 1970's and 1980's. The Japanese steel industry invested $45 billion dollars between 1972 to 2006 in developing energy saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation. By capturing heat and gases that go into waste JFE Steel at its Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay uses it to power generators that produce 90% of the plant's electricity. The Japanese government is now pushing an initiative that sets Japan's level of energy conservation as targets of global industries. For instance the group leader of JFE's climate change policy group says that by adopting Japanese conservation technologies the global steel industry could reduce carbon emissions by 300 million tons a year. The sector approach advocated by Japan means setting the same numerical goals for all companies in an industry, regardless of location. At next week's summit meeting Japan willl back an initiative that sets its conservation induced energy levels as the new standards for global industries. This will also promote the sale and use of Japanese energy saving technologies around the world....

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43% of children under 5 are underweight in India, according to nutrition experts. This compares with 5% for China. China made its biggest strides in combatting malnutrition between 1990 and 2002, say experts by reducing malnutrion for children by two thirds. This suggest that malnutrition must have been much higher than 21% in China in 1990. And during the period between 1949 and 1980 China had focussed under Mao and his successors on the bread bowl, making sure that hunger was no longer a problem. This suggests the Indian middle class that thinks of the poor as there but not so worse off as to require a sense of urgency, or feeling slighted by the comparison with China need to do some thinking. From the perspective of progress the economy can only do well if rural and poorer areas are also part of development and share in the benefits of development. The other aspect of this is that the government can setup a program, and other countries like Brazil are also faced with the similiar problem and are tackling it aggressively. This is already takng place with a Right to Food Act in the Indian Parliament. Drafts of this Act call for a government subsidized minimum of 25 kilograms of food grain per family per month. But atttitudes in India need to go through a big change to take this problem seriously and with the urgency it requires from a developmental point of view, not only a moral point of view. What good is demographic devidend that many Indian leaders in many fields talk about if that demographic dividend is stunted by malnutrition, is the question all have to answer. Even software leader, Infosys's Nilekhani, in his book Imagining India talks about the large changes affecting India in the rural areas, the economic and technological progress, but fails to mention this aspect of malnutrition....

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Civil rights song of Rutha Mae Harris of Albany, Georgia. I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote I'm going to vote like the spirit say vote And if the spirit say vote I'm going to vote Oh Lord, I'm going to vote when the spirit say vote. Says Miss Harris who participated in all the civil rights struggles since 1961 of Obama, "he's of a different time and place, but he knows whose shoulders he's standing on." At the time in 1961 fewer than 100 of Georgia's Dougherty County's 20,000 black residents were registered to vote. Literacy tests made a mockery of due process, one field worker remembers being asked by a registrar how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap. And bosses made it clear to black workers that registration might be incompatible with continued employment. Repeatedly civil rights workers draw connections between their work and the colorblindness of Obama's candidacy. Says 103 year old Daisy Newsome who was in the early civil rights struggles, "it ain't because he's black, because I've voted for the whites. I know he can't be no worse than what there's done been. I think he would be just as good a President as one of those whites ever made."...

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The real author of a favorite quote of Martin Luther King Jr. was from Theodore Parker, an abolitionist, Unitarian preacher, who died in 1860 on the eve of the civil war. It was the work of people like Parker which made it possible for Lincoln to sign the Emancipation proclamation. Parker wrote in 1853: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one.... But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice." He also wrote, says researcher and author Jamie Stiehm, the words: "A democracy-- that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." Dr King loved to paraphrase Parker by saying- "How long? Not long. Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is a long one, but it bends towards justice." Stiehm says Obama attributes it to King, but King made it clear that he was borrowing from a fellow preacher, and Lincoln's contemporary, named Theodore Parker.

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A son of a Pakistani immigrant who came to England in the 1960's and was a bus driver, is elected Mayor of London in May 2016. Sadiq Khan founded a human rights law firm in London.

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Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar makes a 3 day visit to Saudi Arabia. He addressed diplomats at the Prince Saud Al Faisal Institute of Diplomatic Studies in Riyadh. He will co-chair with Prince Faisal bin Al Saud the first ministerial meeting of the Committee on Political, Security, Social and Cultural  Cooperation (PSSC), established under the framework of the India-Saudi Arabia Strategic Partnership Council. What is happening here is that the Saudis can build their own ties in the region as they choose what is best for the future, compared to the relationship in the past which was as a state mainly dependent on the US but which sorely lagged behind in educationally, culturally, in developing its own scientific and technology institutions to transition into the modern age. The relationship in the past also appeared to be rooted in the colonial period that had transitioned only half way out of the colonial period into the relationship built by America's FDR and succeeding presidents with the royal family and monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Under Mohamad Bin Salman it now gives Saudis an opportunity to make its own choices with the help of neighbors such as India, Japan, and other countries. It also strengthens the relationship with the US and the EU in unseen ways through the Saudi relationship with India, Japan and other countries. Bilateral trade is at $30 billion for FY22 April to December. India imports 18% of crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia. Indian imports worth $23 billion, Indian exports worth $7 billion to Saudis. About 2.2 million Indians are living in Saudi Arabia. During the pandemic India was the closest health ally of the Saudis.   ...

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Saudi Arabia signed a series of agreements with India at the G20 Summit with $100 billion in investments planned including digital, rail, energy  and other connectivity for the IMEC corridor for India through Middle East to Europe. Saudi prince MBS announces the IMEC Corridor and talks about its significance at the G20 Summit.

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IMF research by Ocampo and Erten shows that when adjusted for inflation since the 1970's, the prices of metals have remained about the same, food prices down 58%, and energy prices up 163%.

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India and the race in Himalayas road buildup on both sides with China and India responding to each other's efforts on ground that is 11,000 to 14,000 feet high. In the latest buildup India in 2026-2028 is building the Zojila Tunnel in Ladakh to cut travel to 20 minutes across mountainous terrain for supplies to frontier outposts in some of the most forbidding terrain on earth. Much of this region of Ladakh and Kashmir is tens of thousands of miles from Shanghai and Beijing, Tibet is far far from China proper, yet the experience of the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930's and the attempted colonization of China by Japan is alive in the minds of the PRC's leaders, see Tibet as a buffer region. Who see India not as as the land of Gandhi and the Buddha Land that has remained that way since the year 1000, see instead a legacy regime of the British Empire of the 1800's that attempted partial colonization of China.

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Stancati and Walker report from Rome on Italy's latest election and the change in government as Giorgia Meloni wins 26% of the vote to form a new government. Her Brothers of Italy party has links to 1930's Italy, which Meloni is attempting to transform into a modern version that speaks for mothers, the Catholics and Italy. Italy has seen 70 governments in a short period with a highly fragmented and changing political scene. The analysis in BBC says this government could last only as long as it retains the support of people as governments have changed so quickly in Italy. Her partners in her coalition Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini have also won and lost public opinion in different periods in the last decade.

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The Guardian looks back at 2023 and covers the work of scientists from US, Germany and Brazil showing the damage. NASA scientist James Hansen tells The Guardian that with the current stage of politics and inaction on climate change young people in the world need to take over. Scientists at the Japan Meteorological Agency measured temperatures at 0.53 degrees centigrade higher than the global average 1990 -2021. This was higher than the previous high reached in 2016 of 0.35 degrees centigrade. Over the long term the world is considered to be 1.2 degrees hotter than preindustrial times, by experts. Included is the report "Hothouse Earth" by the Potsdam Institute of Climate research and other experts on the speed of the global warming.

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A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows an alarming and unsettling gap in the life expectancy of men vs. women in the US. The JAMA study shows life expectancy of women at 79 years, and of men dropping down to 73 years. Combined with lower educational opportunities for men to go to college compared to women these numbers are difficult to grapple with. The pandemic hit men harder, the opioid epidemic also hit men harder, men also have higher rates of suicide, heart disease and diabetes. Action is needed. Looking back at the turn of the century in 1900 the difference was 2 years. Decline of smoking has improved the life expectancy of men- action was taken for this to happen. 

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Gregory Zuckerman report in the WSJ on Jan 15, 2008 commented on the bets against housing that netted $3 billion to $5 billion for a financial firm that bet against subprime mortgages at the right time. It also commented on Alan Greenspan who joined the firm as an adviser after engineering a period of low interest rates that created conditions in the housing market for such speculative boom bust behaviour. The 2009 financial crisis marked a period of 10-15 years when the US lost its competitive advantage against China as a result of such speculation and poor leadership at the central bank. And leadership from the Reagan presidency in 1980 through 2009 that defunded infrastructure, manufacturing and public goods services in favor of deregulation and financial firms.

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"Humphrey's Executor" is a precedent that bars firing by the president of FTC NLRB etc officials. "Humphrey's Executor" precedent is  being challenged by president DJT before the US Supreme Court and with it the independence of the Fed in 2025. Humphrey was an FTC official who was fired by FDR in the 1930's but died before his case went to the courts. It set the precedent that the president cannot simply fire officials he does not like. DJT challenged this by firing offfical at the National Labor Relations Board. When the US Supreme Court takes up this case it will look sceptically at this precedent, yet will find some way to protect the Fed's independence, says WSJ.

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American cartoonist Charles Schulz and his creations Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Schulz says he drew children because that is what editors liked.

In a 1977 BBC interview Schulz says-

"I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."  

Charles Schulz drew every cartoon himself from 1950 to 2000.

He says he described the human condition. He once said- "I am dealing with love and hate, mistrust and fear and insecurity."

The cartoon strip was put in 2600 newspapers worldwide.