LyrArc Article Gist
Biden's hard work and going into details and seeing that projects are delivered on time and in quality for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law will make him an enduring president in the 21st century. Tyler Pager gives this report on the Biden style of making decisions and of getting things done on time that are making a big difference for the ease of living for all Americans.  Of Biden using his 36 years of negotiating in the Senate more than any Congressman including LBJ who only had 12 years, and the hard work from someone who commuted by Amtrak for all those years and attended to every detail. For the president who started out as county councilman in Delaware details matter, he looks into the details of rebuilding infrastructure by delivering projects on time and on scale. In late 2022 Tyler says Biden checked into the details of delays and wanted specifics which projects were not delivered on time for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law passed a year earlier. Seeing this only one leader comes to mind prime minister Modi of India who is faced with a huge task of infrastructure projects and investments that are intended to make India the third largest economy in the world. Modi like Biden uses his experience of getting into details and checking that work is delivered on time, putting in the hard work in earnest, from Modi's work with state projects in Gujarat when he led the state for 15 years as chief minister. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
U.S. gasoline prices at the retail level have come down only marginally with lower Nymex crude prices. The reason is the large difference between world crude oil prices and the prices for Nymex crude. Oil demand is expected to go up by 6.1% in China and 3.6% in India according to the International Energy Agency. J.P. Morgan Chase expects oil demand to grow by 1.2 million barrels a day in 2011. The IEA estimate is for 600,000 barrels a day increase for 2011.

LyrArc Article Gist
This article gets a 2 red flags for what the report tells one about the German retailer Metro AG has done in India to ensure the proper storage and transport of food supplies from its source to the retail shelf. Its quite an effort and remarkably interesting effort by Metro in a new environment. Does Metro have experience like this before in other countries it operates. Its like making a sea change in the way things were done in a developing country to how its done in Europe.

LyrArc Article Gist
Plastic use has increased with the tripling in parcels delivered in the last 4 years, up to 64 billion parcels. As much as 93% of the growth in trash in major cities in China in 2018 comes from this one source- an astonishing 850,000 tons of plastic waste in 2018 from the e-commerce and delivery sector. Food deliveries and Alibaba online deliveries add to plastic waste. The government is cracking down with new rules from the Environment Ministry. By the end of 2020 non biodegradable plastic bags will largely be banned from cities, and single use straws banned in restaurants across China.  This ban will extend to all cities and towns by 2022 and to markets selling fresh produce by 2025. Restaurants will have to cut use of plastic by 30% by 2025. In 2018 China stopped taking imports of plastic waste. China is beginning to realize the costs of letting single use plastic grow. The last regulation was in 2008 banning the giving of free plastic bags at retail markets and banning production of super thin bags. It has taken the sudden jump in use in package delivery and in food delivery for the government to finally act. Experts say China uses too much plastic. India has taken strong action against single use plastic in 2019 under the leadership of prime minister Modi. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Peter Hessler was a teacher in Sichuan province of China before living in Tibet and writing this article for The Atlantic.  It gives some insights into both the thinking of Chinese people and Tibetan people and the changes happening around them. Inevitably changes would have come to Tibet from outside or without China's takeover of Tibet in 1950, would have come in some other form, as it has in neighboring Nepal, Afghanistan, says Hessler, without some of the loss of some of the positive aspects of culture and of Buddhism.  Even in India feudal system of zamindars prevailed in villages into the late British period and the early Nehru period but has gradually disappeared over time, so that change has potential over time to happen, and comes inevitably.  Here he shows- the immigrants from Sichuan province, over 120 million people in the province, and part of a floating population of migrant workers in China, looking for jobs or economic opportunity, and some taking up life at the high Himalayan altitudes for 2-3 years or even 8 year terms. The belief Hessler says among Sichuan immigrants that high altitude was bad for the lungs over long periods and shortened life. The lack of women with a disproportionate number of men making the journey to start a new life in Tibet, the hardships, the enterprising nature of Sichuan immigrants in the shops and retail that Tibetans lacked the enterprising skills to do, the difficulties living with two cultures side by side, the lack of any incentive to learn the local language. The feelings of Tibetan people that they are somehow losing their culture and identity. The sense among immigrants that this is not their first choice of place but somehow would have to do till they go back and find someone to marry during brief trips back home to Sichuan. There is something timeless about this essay, as changes unfold, no one unambiguous trend, a more complex situation.  China's sense that the west has violated its sovereignty under the British and foreign powers in the nineteenth century. The feeling that somehow Tibet is part of this sense of China regaining what it had lost to the foreign powers. Without the realization that Tibet has served as a gift of nature, a given mountainous buffer that helped two Asian civilizations prosper in the Ganges and Yangtse river valleys, thousands of miles apart. And both having the similar experience with the British and foreign powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and both recovering modernizing at the same pace.    The sense China has, says Hessler, that it is about China's sovereignty following a Qing dynasty entry into Lhasa in 1792, even though the Qing saw Tibet as a buffer state running its own affairs separating it from the British Empire on the other side of the Himalayas. Very little contact between China and Tibet for centuries simply because using yaks and mules it would take several months from northern China to Tibet crossing mountain ranges at 15,000 feet. The British saw this as a buffer state in the same way as happened also with the Mughals in the 15th to 18th century, and the Empires between the 11th and 15th century in India.  Because opium was shipped from Bengal under British colonial rule causing great poverty in India against the will of the Indian people, the same sense of violation of sovereignty existed in exactly the same way in the perception of foreign powers in India, so that the notion of violation of one's self respect being shared was serving no useful purpose in this context between China and India.     ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Lego chief executive, Jorgen Vig Knudstrop, sees strong growth in Japan, S. Korea and China, and weak growth in India because of a lack of a developed retail distribution system. Sales increased by over 50% in Asia and 23% in the U.S. in the first half of 2012. Lego benefitted from a new product launch called Lego Friends, which is construction toys for girls. Product introductions based on movie themed sets also helped increase sales. Knudstrop says in an interview that he sees weaker U.S. sales in the next 2-3 years because of higher taxes to reduce the deficit and less consumer spending.

LyrArc Article Gist
Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka resigned saying he was responding to criticism which he called "a continuous drumbeat of distractions and negativity." The company's founders including Narayana Murthy had serious differences with the new CEO. Vishal Sikka was hired by the founders in 2014, bringing in an outsider for the first time in the company's history. Sikka worked for SAP before joining Infosys, and was in charge of innovation and development at SAP. Issues of concern to the founders including Murthy were the size of executive pay and the culture changes at the company under Sikka. A similar situation happened at the Tata Group when long time CEO Ratan Tata selected Cyrus Mistry to succeed him. Serious differences about the culture and the changes made by Mistry led to Ratan Tata moving to oust Mr. Mistry from the Tata Group. Narayana Murthy's response to Sikka's statement was that he was concerned "by the deteriorating standard of corporate governance at Infosys." Having an element of public service is part of the tradition at Infosys, and a focus simply on executive pay and shareholder returns to the exclusion of other values may have troubled the founders. In 2009 co-founder Nandan Nilekhani left Infosys to lead the Unique Identification Authority of India at the request of prime minister Manmohan Singh.  Both Ratan Tata and Narayana Murthy are leaders in the business community in India and may have misjudged in their selection of a successor, putting other factors ahead of tradition, governance and culture, leading to this separation in a short time of 2-3 years. This may become part of the broader debate about culture in Indian companies as the country modernizes and moves forward, what aspects from outside to adopt and what aspects of the culture of the founders that are valued to retain and preserve. In the case of Tata the culture goes back from Ratan Tata to legendary figures JRD Tata during the post independence period, and Jamshedji Tata under the British, and is taken seriously. Ratan Tata even considered joining the Quit India Movement during the British Raj , according to biographer R. M. Lala. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Elected to the Politburo in 1980, Gorbachev became president of USSR in 1985. In the six year period to 1991 he launched a movement to free the USSR from the rigid constraints of communist party rule called Perestroika to improve productivity, freedoms and quality of life. He came from a peasant family with Ukrainian origins and was born in 1931 during the period of upheaval in Russia. The rapid removal of Soviet rule was something Russia was not able to adapt to in the early years with no experience in democratic process. By 2000 after drop in life expectancy and fall in the standard of living Mr. Putin emerged as president.  Russia's economy recovered under Putin's three terms till the miscalculations in the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that were itself a result of a sense that Russia had lost something with the fall of the Soviet Union and the advancement of NATO and the European Union. Gorbachev's sense in his memoirs was that Russia would do best under democracy. Even in 2017 he wrote that Russia and its people were "ready for a real multiparty system, fair elections and a regular rotation of government." Yet he was too much of an optimist and not enough hands on to grasp that Russia was a large economy and safeguards had to be put in place for the rule of law to prevent lawless elements that could control companies, safeguards for the vulnerable sections of society such as pensioners and older people, and limited self government through elected assemblies and parliaments were needed for a decade before democracy to take roots. Gorbachev's knowledge of American and British democracies, constitutions and parliaments and their evolution over centuries was non existent, with little contact and education of this sort under the Czar or Soviets. The democracies in Germany and Japan were established with American power and extensive education, the Marshall Plan, and unlimited imports by the US from Japan to prevent economic catastrophes of the kind experienced by the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920's. No plan from western aid and assistance, limited self government of the people was introduced as training ground as in India. In India the British introduced limited self-government or Swaraj in the 1930's with elected assemblies in Indian states, in the pattern of Dominion states such as Canada and Australia. Mohandas Gandhi negotiated the rights of indentured Indians in South Africa in this arrangement and studied British law and constitutions. This led to the catastrophic failure of the rule of law in Russia after 1979, lawless elements emerging under Yeltsin  that controlled companies and the state, high unemployment, failure of the economy, and drop in life expectancy between 1979 and 2005. How this led to the Putin years and now led to the war in Ukraine is covered in more detail under the Lyrarc article on Gorbachev and how he is seen in Germany. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
WSJ's Amol Sharma and Paul Beckett interview Chandrasekharan of Tata Consultancy Services. TCS underwent a reorganization to be customer centric and to listen closely to customers. It sees opportunities in financial services as banks berge, in retail and in pharmaceuticals for knowledge intensive work such as analysis of clincial trial data. His vision is to expand development centers around the world, to meet the global tech needs of customers. He also wants to develop a complete suite of services so it can sell end to end offerings, covering software application outsourcing to infrastructure management to consulting and products. He says he can't serve aBrazilian company or a Chinese sompany from India, there are language, cost and culture issues. TCS plans are to pick a strategic location and then scale it up, with some like Mexico scaling faster than China.

LyrArc Article Gist
The US is on track to bring back 350,000 jobs in 2022 that were taken overseas during the two decades of hyper growth in China, according to the Reshoring Initiative. A false idea was created mostly by economists and business that shifted jobs to China during two Democratic and one Republican administration, the Clinton, Obama and the Bush administrations, that this would benefit the American workers and families through lower prices at the retail level. It ignored the severe damage this would do to jobs, incomes and whole communities when factories on which they depended for a living were shipped overseas. It damaged labor in ways that destroyed much of the American working class and the families built during the years of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Business failed during this period to meet the challenge of higher American wages and productivity issues by using innovation and other steps to keep manufacturing at home.  This led to the hyper growth that did not benefit China, because a moderate pace of growth would have helped China control the rampant contamination of its air, water and soil. It also was leading China to a dead end reached during the 2016 election campaign with the election of president Trump with deep discontent from workers in midwestern states. The pandemic simply underscored the need for supply chains that were close to home and reliable in crises. By 2020 president  Biden was committing to a restructuring of the supply chains and pushing forward with it with legislation in the $369 billion Climate bill, and SCIENCE and Chips Act, to make solar panels, semiconductors and other products in the US. Reports from China showed that growth was slight or flat during 2022 and youth unemployment at 20%. The policy was to shift people back from the cities to the rural areas and support the informal economy, a sense of nationalist sentiment, and preparing for a future where the supply chain for the US and the European Union had moved away from China. In the long run the policies now look as ones that benefitted neither the US, the European Union, India or China.  ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Wal-mart focusses on helping farmers with improved agricultural practices to get high quality lower cost produce into its stores in India. Only 5% of India's retailing network has stores that use modern retailing practice, and this leaves plenty of room for Wal-mart to grow in this market.

LyrArc Article Gist
Don't let the current holiday season retail sales fool you as they have held up reasonably well. The impact of the mortgage and housing crisis will be felt in a delayed manner. It won't be till 2008 that the impact will really be felt. And the impact is expected to be lasting and deep, could take the rest of 2008, 2009 and into 2010 for this protracted tightening of credit. About $300-400 billion contraction in credit is expected when banks tighten their credit lending because of losses they are taking in the mortgage crisis. This will happen in an environment of falling house prices and consumers will not have access to the $340 billion in cash from home and mortgage equity financing that they took out in 2006, estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Auto, retail, apparel, and luxury items would be hit the most. On the jobs side not all the jobs will be lost in the USA. The USA imports about $740 billion in consumer goods and autos each year, which is one third of consumer spending excluding food and energy. The lower consumption in auto and apparel would affect exporters in Japan and China and South Korea. But Chinese exports have reached a point that they are causing trade tensions and a call for strengthening the yuan. An increase in American exports and lower imports could help bring down America's trade deficit. This could give China an opportunity to build its domestic market and markets in Asia and Europe so that it is not so dependent on the US market. For the US where the savings rate is near zero this is an opportunity for consumers to build their savings and reduce debt. Europe and India and the Middle East are expected to continue growth and China may see slower but continued growth in 2008 and 2009. In the US industries like aircraft and infrastructure promoting companies that sell to countries like Russia, India Brazil, the Middle East, and China will continue to grow. And because rates are still low large nonfinancial companies still have access to funds for expansion and capital investment. In a global economy the US consumer may be one part of a much larger picture. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
IKEA's plans announced in June 2012 for opening 25 stores in India with an investment of $1.9 billion. IKEA says it will meet the requirement that 30% of its products be sourced from small scale local industries, as it plans to increase its purchases in India from $450 million currently to $1 billion in a few years. It said the government should be flexible in its defining of small-enterprises. For India the entry of large scale retailers will help modernize its supplier base in a number of areas. India's current account deficit has increased to 4% of GDP making it important to send a strong positive signal to foreign investors.