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The remarkable composition of the most vibrant immigrant filled city in the world, with 47% of the employed being immigrant and foreign born, mostly from developing countries such as Dominican, Chinese, Mexican, Guyanese, Jamaican, Ecuadorean, Haitian, Trinidad and Tobago, and Indian. The city's immigrant population is 3.1 million, 37% of the total population of 8.2 million. The report is written by Joseph Salvo, director of the population division of the City Planning Dept. and Arun Peter Lobo, deputy planning director. Dominicans are 380,000, Chinese 350,000, and Mexicans 186,000. During 2002 to 2011 Chinese population went up 34%, Mexicans 52% and Dominicans 3%. Queens has 1.09 million immigrants, half of that borough, Brooklyn 946,500 or 37% of the borough. The 37% immigrant foreign born population of the city compares to 27% for the New York Metropolitan region. Other interesting details- the growth in the Chinese population of about 89,000 in the city is greater than the entire population of Indians of 76,000, and the large growth in the Ecuadorean population by 22,000. The Indian population went up by 8000 or 12%. Indians in the New York Metropolitan region were in the upper income groups in neighborhood income comparable to people from UK, Germany and Israel, with Chinese being from lesser neighborhood income groups. Median income for Indians in the city was $84,000 compared to Chinese of $43,000, with 28% of Chinese immigrants having a college degree compared to 65% for Indians. This suggests immigrants from China are from poorer areas....

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Indian PM's address to the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament) in February 2024. The prime minister covers the changes that have happened in the last decade to lift 250 million out of poverty and the plans for the future for Vikshit Bharat, Developed India. He covers the long period after 1947 when after over 60 years the economy had stalled by 2014. India was not able to break free from underdevelopment and lacked the investment effort the country desperately needed. He gives the example of public sector corporations that were left to languish as loss making enterprises. Projects were not completed on time and suffered from mismanagement and leakages.The PM says in that period if one rupee left the nation's treasury in New Delhi only a small fraction reached the needy because of leakages in the system. British laws were left on the books and the nation suffered from a colonial period mindset about what India could or could not achieve. The Indian Budget was put out at 5pm last day of February till 1999 because this was the time the British budget was put out. The PM says India was barely able to reach No. 11 in the size of its economy in that period. In a decade the economy is now No.5 today, and plans to be the third largest by 2030, transformed into a modern economy for 1.4 billion people.  ...

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The work space company WeWork is valued at $47 billion then 4 years later in 2023 it is filing for bankruptcy. In 4 years FTX a cryptoexchange founded in 2019 collapses and by 2023 its founder is convicted on 7 counts.  Huge amounts of capital continue to be wasted in these schemes when America needs to Build Better Faster and Better to meet infrastructure needs, and in education and healthcare.

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William Galston in WSJ points to the failure of governance as the cause of so much of the uncertainty and sense of unease felt by people in America, not decline in religion. He looks back and sees wars in the Middle East under Reagan, Bush, Obama and Trump that wasted resources while neglecting the rebuilding of infrastructure and investing in education and healthcare. Tech monopolies have not led to better educated citizens, and instead lowered the literacy required for a democracy to function well, leaving sites like Lyarac.com with the hard work of doing this. The 2009 financial crisis led to financial speculation by Banks and hurt the middle class. The shipping out of manufacturing destroyed hope for workers in America's factories. The pandemic caused about a million deaths.It is only now that America is coming out of it. Supply chain disruptions have led to higher cost of living. President Biden is taking action on each of these problems and the plan is bringing hope to the middle class, restoring America's manufacturing base, investing in infrastructure in a way that has not happened since the 1950's and 1960's, and investing in healthcare and education.  This not looking to religion is what would restore faith in the Nation and the democracy that America is, for the US and no less for the world, says Galston. Behind the cultural issues is a deep sense of ignoring the needs of the middle class and the workers in America's factories, and the people in lower income groups. It is now about restoring the spirit of the New Frontier of John F. Kennedy that was our misfortune to be cut short in 1963, about an America ready to meet the new challenges it faces from now on to 2050. ...

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Heathrow was built haphazardly as traffic increased since its opening in 1946, with a capacity to handle 45 million passengers at its 4 terminals it was congested and handled 68 million annually. The building of Terminal 5 will ease congestion and increase capacity by 45% making a big difference for British Airways which will operate out of T5 and a big difference in baggage handling ( a million bags weren't ready for passengers at destination in 2006), in the lounges and lounge environments for waiting passengers 2500 at a time) ., and after an annex is built by 2010 passengers will not have to be taken by bus to waiting planes. other airports like Schipol with 4 runways compared to Heathrow's 2 and built with a better layout and plan, and airports in Asia of Singapore Airlines and in the Middle East at Doha are upgrading so BA will only be doing what places are doing. Because the terminal hangups have been costly for British Airways leading to a shrinking of about 20% of its flight network, as it concentrated more on upscale customers, and lost passengers to more efficient airlines., ithe cost will likely be paid off quickly for BA. Demand. is so high at Heathrow that a pair of takeoff and landing spots can cost as much as $50 million and would be going up as Star Alliance and Skyteam member airlines move ito BA's old facilities. Considering the losses from th inefficient setup at the old terminal BA's estimate that T5 savings would cover its cost of 330 million pounds ($660 million) to equip the new building in in the next 10 years may even be understated. Of this 62 million pounds was spent on the new lounges. BA leases the T5 Terminal from Heathrow's BAA owned by Spain's Ferrovial SA, which spent $4.3 billion to build T5. ...

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China has two ports in Panama and significant investments in port and maritime activity that give it an advantage over the US in its own backyard. The Panama Canal was one of the bold endeavors of the twentieth century. In Path Between the Seas, David McCoullough describes this feat of engineering, the lives lost to malaria, the efforts it generated to find a cure for malaria, and the indomitable spirit of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt that every American can rightly be proud of.  It was handed over by president Carter to Panama, in the way Clinton handed over entry into the World Trade Organization without protections and written agreement for level playing field in trade in the 1970's and in the 1990's when US had no idea that American business would create from these beginnings in phases supply chain partner, competitor, and adversary for America.  In 2025 Americans can look back and see that American interests were not protected in a period of so called "American triumphalism" under Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama that has since disappeared with the loss of American manufacturing and destroying the small factory towns across America- and also France and EU nations- that depended on manufacturing for jobs and standard of living.  DJT is simply charting the long road back for America to the Bold Endeavours and Spirit of American adventure that Americans see in themselves as a nation founded on the frontier since Washington's days in the Pennsylvania country in the 1750's. The Spirit the led to the founding of the new nation through a protracted war on the frontier with the British. ...

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Feldstein's thoughts in April 2009, on Treasury's Public-Private Investment Plan. First, he says this plan will only remove $500 billion of impaired assets. The banks he says now own $3 billion of residential mortgages, $1.5 trillion of corporate real-estate loans, and $1 trillion of consumer debt. Not all of this is impaired but the banks will have to sell much more than $500 billion to regain confidence in their solvency. And with one third of all residential mortgages exceeding the value of the houses, and thie many homeowners under water, likely to default, the negative feedback loop of foreclosures begetting falling prices begetting foreclosures, threatens the whole effort to shore up the defences. If no workable solution is executed quickly to prevent this then even larger pools of mortgage debt will be impaired irretrievably. Feldstein suggests that the Obama administration seriously look at his plan suggested in March 2008 to provide government loans at low rates of interest like 1- 2% for 20% of the principal amount of the mortgage and then reduce the mortgage principal by 20%, thus keeping millions of homeowners above water. But this needs to be done quickly. All voluntary efforts have failed and have become asmokescreen for banks and lobbying groups with support from Congress to make it appear that this problem is being addressed. Thirdly Feldstein says that if banks sell these impaired mortgage assets at a loss- say 40-60 cents on the dollar on the upside with government and the FDIC picking up alot of the risk and financing for private investors under the new plan- they will now have to show the loss whereas they could have previously shown these assets at unrealistic price levels but still not taking losses. This might push banks into insolvency, so banks will need more injection of capital by the government to make this possible. What are the risks in this situation? Without an effective plan to prevent the negative feedback loop of foreclosure waves and falling houseprices, the quantity of impaired assets will simply grow larger. In effect even if some private investors take out some of the impaired assets from the banking system, it is possible that a new set of assets equal to or larger than these assets that are taken out are added to impaired assets in the banking system as house prices fall steeply from new foreclosures. That only means the economy is in the same hole as before, or in a slightly larger one, even with all the well intentioned steps. At some point the private enterprise argument has to be seen in the correct light. It is not that there is any argument that private enterprise can function better or far superior, it is only that the banks as private enterprises are in such an enormously stressed situation that the bank executive's cannot execute a way out of this mess. ...

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The US is supplying Europe with liquified natural gas so that Europe can cope with a threatened cutoff or slowdown from Russian gas supplies. Much of the LNG that normally would go to Japan, Taiwan and other Asian countries is being diverted to Europe with a threat of Russian invasion of Ukraine. The US, is with Qatar and Australia a major LNG producer. This WSJ report shows LNG tankers entering and unloading at the Gate Terminal in Netherlands, a key point for sending liquified natural gas to Germany. Italy has its own entry terminals for LNG tankers. This will help Europe deal with its winter needs, even though things will be very tight if a Russian cutoff happens. One aspect of this supply of LNG will cause economic hardship in Germany and this is the price of LNG gas which has soared to five times when delivered in the Netherlands compared to US prices. LNG in gas forms shrinks to one six hundredth its size in volume as a liquid, making it possible for one LNG tanker that is about the size of 4 football fields to hold enough gas to power 70,000 homes for one year. Most LNG tankers can be unloaded in one day and go straight into port because some LNG is lost as ships wait. Most of the bottlenecks are further upstream in the reconversion into gas of the LNG liquid and in connecting to the gas grid.  ...

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Spiegel Online's interview with Emmanuel Macron, on the TGV 8434 train from Bordeaux to Paris. He is joined by Mrs. Macron. Macron says he is aware that he does not have a bloc of core support like Ms. Le Pen, yet he says this means he will try that much harder for voters on the right and the left. He says their is no political renewal in the political class in France and that it remains closed. He says particular attention must be paid to rural France outside big cities like Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and Paris, where people have had a different encounter with globalization. On the European Union he sees the need to revitalize it by having a closer union focussed on countries that are interested in this. He sees the need for a joint finance minister and permanent head of Euro Group. This might be a smaller EU without countries such as Britain, and others who are not interested in a closer union. He does not agree with the idea that any member state of the EU can stop other member states from proceeding. Macron does not believe in moving to the right as in the Dutch election because he says people are "not idiots" and in France this has not worked for Nicholas Sarkozy, which has some truth to it as authenticity (and humility) matters to French voters. A personal approach worked for Fillon early on till the scandal over payments he received. Macron brings to this personal approach and relative youthfulness, his sense that he must appeal to all segments, rural and urban, educated and less educated, and at the same time be true to core values such as preserving the European Union, and authenticity in terms of views on Algeria. He also says he is aware he faces risks but that this is something he believes in deeply.   Macron has not hesitated to express his views on topics such as Algeria, calling it a crime against humanity, and later elaborating on what he meant. Macron says his movement En Marche is different in style and manner from the closed nature of French politics. He believes in transparency, term limits, and removing conflicts of interest in French politics, as a way to make a fresh start. The first round of voting is on April 23, 2017, followed by a second round of voting between two candidates.  ...

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Emissions from China of ozone depleting chemicals such as from this refrigerator factory shown in NYT, have hurt the earth's ozone layer. This has been stopped says this UN report cited in NYT, CFC-11 emissions were a major issue at one time - the stopping of such emissions is a move in the right direction to allow the ozone layer to recover by 2040 say experts. NYT says that small factories in Eastern China were the source at one time.

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How the whole foreclosure market is working in March 2008, prices of homes, the buildup of inventories of lenders and the problems getting properties sold.

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China's growth will slow to about 3% in 2022 as the decisions made at the Central Economic Work Conference that ended on December 10 were to emphasize economic stability as the overriding goal. The goal of discouraging speculation in housing with the slogan housing is for living will remain in place in 2022. The goal of controlling surging debt that poses a serious risk to the economic future of China will also remain in place. The external environment remains uncertain and getting complicated with a change in the US and German governments in 2021 and shifts in policies.

A party congress will take place in 2022 in addition to the Beijing Winter Olympics. 

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Heat domes such as this one are rarely seen in the northeastern US. This week mid June 2024 is seeing a heat dome develop over areas from Albany, New York to Pittsburgh and Chicago. A heat dome is an area of compressed air like a lid on a pot that stays that way over a vast area with the sun heating the air at the surface till air flows in from another part of the US. Thus seen in the summer in the south and southeast rarely in the north and northeastern US and is one more sign of the cha nges in weather patterns coming from climate change. Itself a result of business and industry operating over decades on fossil fuels coal and oil without any oversight over consequences.

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$5 Billion for Highway EV chargers under 2021 Infrastructure Act paused in Feb 2025. More than half of the funds were awarded to highway truck stops and travel stops. 940 locations had awards for building the EV charging stations and 56 have completed work.

It was designed to overcome "range anxiety" of EV car drivers.