LyrArc Article Gist
The limited options the US has to get China to appreciate the value of its currency, the yuan. Some of the options depend on getting the IMF or the WTO to prod the Chinese, others depend on a Plaza type Accord.

LyrArc Article Gist
Roger McNamee, an early investor in Google and Facebook, writes this opinion piece in the Guardian newspaper saying that there are very serious problems in the way the "addiction" created by Facebook and Google products is affecting children. Lyrarc.com also points out that the reading and literacy scores in the U.S. and other countries are affected by how the new technology is used by digital gatekeepers. See our FAQ. Tim Berners Lee calls this a massive distraction for learning and youngsters. Melinda Gates has cited this as a problem she has faced in her own effort to raise her children.  Here is the main problem as stated by McNamee- of the millions of content pieces that can be shown the digital gatekeepers show only the content that is fit for their business model, and the best content from an educational point of view whether literacy, reading skills, civic literacy, all types of literacy and knowledge, is not only not the priority but is for the most part absent. He points out that that if not for the advertising business model this would be different- the focus could shift to experiences that educate, enrich and inspire users to better lives and better lifestyles. The smartphone has become pervasive in everyday lives to an astonishing degree- about 150 times a day with 2000 swipes and touches- to the point that it is changing the way people live and think without their realizing it. With it come new risks to the way we live and what we believe, like never before in history. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The Home Affordable Refinance Program's (HARP) gradual success in 2012-2013 in reducing foreclosures, after struggling in 2010-2011. From about cumulative 1 million who refinanced loans under HARP for relief in home payments the numbers went up to close to 3 million by the end of 2013, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Of this a major proportion were people who owed less than 105% of their home's value. The performance of the program improved with a revamp of HARP at the end of 2011.

LyrArc Article Gist
More than one in four houses in Australia have solar panels on the rooftops. In Queensland and New South Wales half of homes have solar panels. This includes Sydney. This is more than most places, including California, Germany, U.S. Britain, France. In California less than 10% of utilities customers have solar panels in their homes. Rooftop solar provides 5% of its electricity in Australia, compared to 1% in the U.S. 

Much of this is because of states offering incentives and it saves money for homeowners. Australian conservatives see this as a way to promote their rugged individualism.

LyrArc Article Gist
Median paycheck at Amazon is $28,000 compared to $50,000 at IBM, and much more at Google. Most of the half million people at Amazon work at fulfillment centres and logistics centres and make much less than computer software coders. The median pay works out to be about $14 per hour- the kind of pay for warehouse workers. Even though software is at the core of what it does Amazon is a retailer and is shown as such on the S&P 500. Logistics engineers make $50,000 in average pay at Amazon, and software development engineers make $107,000.

LyrArc Article Gist
In a meeting at 10 Downing Street on July 25, 2016, British prime minister Theresa May and Ireland's prime minister Enda Kenny, said there was strong will on both sides to maintain the Common Travel Area, which allows passport free travel between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Ms May also stated that Brexit should not affect the gains made by the Ireland peace process. Kenny said that it is in all our interests to see a "prosperous and outward looking UK which retains a close relationship with the EU."

LyrArc Article Gist
Chancellor Merkel popularity dips after the attacks in July, with the CSU's Seehofer's popularity going up. The AfD and Greens remain steady. The CSU and CDU still draw 34%. About 70% of Germans are opposed to the migration agreement and lenient visa terms for Turkey after the crackdown by prime minister Erdogan in Turkey. Kurds are also coming to Germany in this situation. About 76% of people fear further attacks in Germany, and the DW.com editorial says Chancellor Merkel should be paying attention, even though it also appears that there is no one to replace her.

LyrArc Article Gist
Losses to Britain and the EU are high in the event of no-deal Brexit, where Britain simply leaves the EU without any plan, called hard Brexit. The losses come from higher prices and lower wages. EU citizens would have income losses of 40 billion euros every year, British citizens suffer 57 billion euros of losses or 873 euros per capita in annual income losses. People in Germany would suffer income losses of 10 billion euros per year.  Germany exported 85 billion euros of goods to UK in 2017. 100,000 German jobs would be affected.

LyrArc Article Gist
Japan's new prime minister told the Japanese Parliament in a policy speech, that a crisis like that in Greece was possible in Japan, if trust in national bonds was lost and the policy of public spending to lift the economy was not reversed. This speech followed the resignation of Shizuka Kamei, as banking minister. Kamei was seen as an advocate of continued public spending. He cautioned that a policy of relying heavily on issuing debt could not be sustained for long. Japan has government debt of $9.7 trillion, which is close to twice its gross national product in 2009. Much of this debt is held by the public in Japan, but analysts have cautioned that with the aging population, it is possible that people who retire will need the cash from bonds, requiring the government to turn to the debt markets for financing. Among the proposals Kan suggested is raising the 5% sales tax to pay for rising social welfare costs for an aging population. Satoshi Arai, the new national strategy minister, says the government will draft a plan by June 22 to address the public debt. He said the government would not exceed $500 billion in bond issuance for fiscal year ending March 2012....

LyrArc Article Gist
A sense of indifference towards mainstream parties in Italy and enthusiasm for the maverick party of Beppe Grillo. Gillo appeals to younger voters who are looking for something that makes a break from the past in Italian politics.

LyrArc Article Gist
Slovenia is a small country of 2 million nestled in the mountains between Italy and Austria, part of the former Yugoslavia. Problems of bad debt at the major state owned banks, including Nova Banka Ljubljana, stem from a series of large management buyouts for home improvement chain Merkur, supermarket chain Mercator, the largest brewer and a major construction firm. Easy lending by state owned banks, corruption, cronyism and fraud have led to a large number of non-performing loans after a credit boom during 2000-2010. The bad debt at 6.8 billion euros is 19% of GDP in 2013. Protests in the capital Ljubljana in 2013 led to the fall of the centre right coalition government, the resignation of the opposition party leader and the appointment of a new opposition leader to run the government. Cuts to benefits and austerity measures have left the public in Slovenia seething about the economic mismanagement. This is another example of how the shift to a market economy after decades of state run economy in communist controlled countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has run into serious trouble because of opportunistic behaviour of politicians, bureaucrats and business....

LyrArc Article Gist
Kia Motors is pricing its models on average $8000 below other carmakers in the US market. It is also using a new advertising campaign featuring human hamsters that rap to the song The Choice is Yours to attract attention to its models. Kia's sales gained 15% in 2010 through October. The image of Kia's models still suffers from poor quality. Its rankings dropped to 25th place in J.D. Powers recent surveys.

LyrArc Article Gist
Canada's Conservative party leads in 166 constituencies, and is likely to win the 155 seats for a majority in parliament. The NDP is leading in 100 constituencies and will have the second largest bloc of seats. The Liberals were likely to win only 33 seats and the party Quebecois was ahead in only 3 constituencies. The NDP's gains came at the expense of the Liberals and the party Quebecois.

LyrArc Article Gist
How GM would benefir from VEBA and possibility that GM would look to discount its obligations for as much as 25% in exchan ge for guaranteeing these obligations with its contribution to VEBA from the $15 billion it has set aside for this purpose. GM's stock would benefit significantly from this. GM would also not be responsible for inflation in the health care costs after a VEBA is organized.

LyrArc Article Gist
Honda's showing a drop of 86% in profits for 1st quarter shows the weakness in the auto business as higher raw material costs and in the case of the Japanese maker higher yen make a dent in profits. Ford's stock up almost 15% in a day after release of is quarter earnings of $100 million is down almost 9% in one day after the profit guidance from Honda looked grim.

LyrArc Article Gist
Financial squeeze on automobile dealers as GMAC and Ford Credit and Chrysler's financial arm see a deterioration in their condition and can no longer provide the favorable financing and loans to dealers. Bill Heard Enterprisesone of the largest Chevrolet dealers in the USA with 2007 sales of $2.1 billion faces financial losses and GMAC has stopped doing business with the company which has a chain of 14 stores.

LyrArc Article Gist
Senators in the US Congress, Rubio and Schumer, have asked the US government to look into Apple's plans to work with Chinese semiconductor company YMTC. As a result the Commerce Department has placed export restrictions on YMTC. This NYT report looks at the two decade long rise of China and of Apple after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and shifted manufacturing to China. When Jobs returned to Apple he found major quality issues at Apple's manufacturing facilities, a demoralized workforce, and financial losses, with CEO Michael Spindler running the company into the ground. Jobs had to start with afresh model for Apple and decided to shift manufacturing to China under the engineering leadership of Tim Cook. Alabama native Cook went to Auburn University for his engineering degree and Duke for his business degree. Cook joined Jobs in 1998 at Apple and for ten years till 2007 the two cut costs, shifted to contract manufacturers and rebuilt Apple with new products, iPod, iPad and the iphone. By not manufacturing Apple avoided quality control issues, and the costs of maintaining inventory. It was Tim Cook who ran operations worldwide, and he gradually built up the manufacturing relationships in China with Foxconn, which makes most of Apple's products in sprawling Chinese factories that employ 20 years later about 3 million Chinese workers. Foxconn was chosen by Apple in 2000 to manufacture the Apple Mac laptop. Before that it was a parts supplier to Apple. Increasingly Apple relied on Foxconn to make its new products including the iPhone. Both companies growth relied on the manufacturing of Foxconn to the point where Apple was dependent on Foxconn and had intertwined its operations with Foxconn in China. Today the whole relationship is being called into question after two decades in which American workers suffered the effects of the outshoring of manufacturing jobs. It should be noted that though Mr. Trump raised the issue of manufacturing exclusively in China with Apple, the Trump administration did little to change the practices of the company that pioneered this type of massive manufacturing role for China. That surrendered the entire supply chain to foreign suppliers in the interest of cutting costs and maintaining huge profit margins, with which it financed an array of new products and reached $1 trillion in sales from $10 billion, hundredfold increase over 2 decades. American workers and families for the first time in American history got very little from this Cook-Jobs project. American infrastructure in communities that would have been supported by American factories including the services and infrastructure in communities financed through local taxes, a practice throughout the Industrial Revolution in the US, was sharply disrupted over 2 decades. It caused a rupture in social relations and increased inequality in the US, and defunded infrastructure that comes with manufacturing.  It is the task of the Biden administration to now correct what Mr. Trump simply talked about but never induced or required Apple to do- lead the resurgence of American manufacturing, and make its major investments in the US, invest in its workers and families, invest in America. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The world is too dependent on one semiconductor manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC. Companies in Taiwan make 65% of the dollar value of the world's chips. How did this happen? It poses a threat to the US and to the world economy. Finally the US is making an effort to correct this. The European Union already has plans to produce 20% of the world's next generation chips in 2030. Intel plans $20 billion investment for 2 chip factories in the US. Only months earlier this report in WSJ says Intel president Bob Swan was giving more contracts to TSMC for next generation chips.  It shows how much the pandemic has changed views on supply chain security. Intel ousted Mr. Swan for missteps in relying too much on TSMC as this dangerous policy became evident during the pandemic. Such was the culture that existed before the pandemic on supply chains, on investment allocation, and related issues. As a single semiconductor factory can cost $20 billion, the Biden administration is getting involved with Congress to rebuild America's semiconductor industry and independent supply chain. TSMC is built on subsidies from Taiwan government. Morris Chang founded TSMC in 1987 after studying at MIT and working 30 years at Texas Instruments. At founding half of the investment for TSMC came from Taiwan government. The US to rebuild will require the government to support the chip industry in many ways. In this sense the US manufacturers who ceded manufacturing to TSMC were shortsighted- AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Apple. They without realizing it built the model on which TSMC would thrive and invest and grow. Take just one example- to meet Apple's first order TSMC spent $9 billion with 6000 people working round the clock to build a factory in 11 months. Yes Apple did not have to worry about chip manufacturing and quality by contracting it out. Yet over the years it was ceding the manufacture of the most important chips in its products to an exclusive supplier. It was also ceding away the technologies that went with it. Americans were told not to care by the best universities and professors, by economic departments and scientific educational institutions for two decades leading to the situating facing America today. Meanwhile Taiwan is supporting its chip industry even further as it relies on the chip industry to provide protection in its struggle to maintain its independence from China. A situation no American manufacturer understands or had planned to create, but is now left to the Biden administration and president Biden to solve. After twenty years of unchecked capital allocation and investments by the leaders of American manufacturing based on an inadequate and incomplete understanding of the role of manufacturing and manufacturing technologies in the life of America since its founding two hundred years ago, president Biden faces the task of restoring confidence in America. And this at the time of a pandemic that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.      ...

LyrArc Article Gist
For anyone trying to understand the Middle East read the gripping story told in Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's own words-"The Great Speech- Nutuk," it is on Kindle Amazon. It shows week after week  Mustafa Kemal as he fought the colonial powers  the British and the French, and then turned a Caliphate into a modern country. If the Vietnamese who fought the French were seen by JFK in the way he saw Ataturk (hear JFK's words on Ataturk in Lyrarc.com) then there would be no Vietnam War. Ataturk's Republican People's Party in opposition for 2 decades wins by a landslide in Turkey's main cities- in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa and Antalya. In Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu wins by a margin of 11.5 percentage points. In Ankara Mansur Yavas wins by a margin of 28 percentage points. Voter turnout was 78% surpassd only by the 87% turnout in the presidential election. Imamoglu is now the contender for the presidency. This is a delayed reaction by voters to the economy with inflation having reached 86% in February and a slowdown in growth, with hardships for ordinary families. Ozgur Ozel, 52 years, replaced an aging civil servant Kilicdaroglu who hung to leadership for 13 years losing repeatedly to Mr. Erdogan and not able to exceed a 25% of the votes. Imamoglu supported Ozel to change leadership of the party founded by Kemal Ataturk in fighting for Turkey's independence from foreign powers in the 1920's. Under Ozel-Imamoglu leadership the Republican party won 38% of the vote to 35% for Erdogan's Justice Party. This is a historic win and sets Turkey on a new path, which could also set a new path for the Arab nations in the Middle East because of the tone of moderation and modernization, good governance, scientific mind, set by Kemal Ataturk. Hear JFK's remarks on the 25th anniversary of Ataturk in Lyrarc.com. If JFK had said the same for another nation building effort in Vietnam similar to that of Ataturk there would be no Vietnam War but a negotiated peace- that is if Kennedy was alive and his life not cut short in 1963.  Few people in US and Europe even know how Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic in the place of the Caliphate type of structure in Ottoman Empire, and defended his homeland from the French and British colonial powers who sought to dismember Turkey, then the remaining parts of the Ottoman Turk Empire. It is told in his own words in the Kindle book "The Great Speech Nutuk," and it is a story that is gripping in its detail of the fight against colonial powers effort to dismember Turkey in the 1920's and even maintain the old Ottoman structures to their benefit. The story is told as if it was happening right in front of our eyes. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Liz Whitehurst is one of many young people who are giving up jobs in offices to take to farming. They are not from farm families and bring a new way and exciting way of looking at farming free of the pesticides and other practices common today. Only 2% of U.S. land is being used for growing fruits and vegetables, according to the Union of American Scientists cited in the Guardian newspaper, and this needs to at least double in acreage if American needs are to be met. Only 15% of Americans get the daily requirement for fruits and vegetables- so desperately needed is this  to lower the BMI of the 70% of overweight Americans with BMI over 50. In the light of this crisis the shift of young people to farming is an encouraging sign.  In 2015 Liz, 32 years, decided to buy a 3 acre farm in Upper Marboro, Md, giving up benefits and better pay at nonprofit jobs in Washington state.  Here she is shown picking up Aragula leaves in the November chill. She is not alone. She is joining a movement that is bringing highly educated, former urban first time farmers as the demand for better food, for local and sustainable food, especially fruits and vegetables grows in the U.S. Year on Year there is a 20% increase of farmers in states like California, Nebraska, South Dakota in the 25-34 age group. In the 2014 USDA Census this group is growing at 2-3% just when other groups are shrinking by double digits. These farmers are more likely to connect with the community supported agriculture (CSA) prorams and markets, to grow organically and limit pesticide and fertilizer use. They tend to have farms less than 50 acres. Liz leases the house and the fields from a neighboring couple in the 70's, growing organically certified peppers, cabbages, tomatoes and salad greens kale to aragula, rotating fields. On Tues, Thurs. and Fri. she and two friends are to be seen waking up in the early hours of darkness to kneel in mud and cut the greens. What motivates them is having a positive impact, to do that so it is immediate and you can see it making a difference, says Liz. Still young farmers face many hurdles, including student loan debt, and finding ways to meet the larger needs for online grocery service or the grocery chains. Yet a trend is taking shape for small and middle farms that provides some optimism as the number of farmers shrink significantly overall. Most alarmingly it is the lack of national and local policies to meet the health crisis of rising BMI's right at this level of local farms and community farms for local produce. Lack of any consciousness about this, even though good health in the U.S. as in other countries has always rested on what you are eating, long before processed foods became the norm this is the way the world met nutrition needs.    ...