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Bank of Japan chief Kuroda tells foreign media, April 11, 2013, that it will not implement monetary policy to achieve the 2% inflation target in 2 years mechanically. Other economic factors will be considered. The BOJ will be watchful and vigilant for asset bubbles. If this happens the 2% inflation target will be achieved in the medium term so that it is done in a stable way.

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David Brooks of the NYT comments on the Hillary Clinton interview by Goldberg in the Atlantic magazine, where she criticized U.S. president Obama for a weak foreign policy and failure to act in Syria. Brooks says Obama's failure to act in the robust manner Clinton is advocating only leads Obama into situations where he is forced to act later as the situation deteriorates with more serious consequences for the U.S. By not acting in a timely manner the U.S. may be forced into greater involvement later, which makes Obama's "don't do stupid stuff" less of a sound idea than it appears. As Clinton points out not leading to better decisions in the same manner as the Bush-Cheney jingoistic policy making.

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Samuelson discusses the differences between the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for June 2014 using the Payroll Survey and the Household Survey, each telling a different story. According to the Payroll Survey 288,000 jobs were added. The Payroll Survey is a monthly survey of 554,000 business locations, with firms asked to give the number of people on payrolls, pay and occupations. The Household Survey of the BLS asks households in monthly interviews with 60,000 Americans whether they have a job, is it part time or full time, are they looking for full time work, or jobless and for how long. The Household Survey showed June 2014 job increase at 407,000, using an estimate of 1,115,000 increase in part-time jobs and a loss of 708,000 full time jobs. Of the two the payroll survey is larger and considered by economists to be more representative. Other statistics show the parttime workers at about 3 million higher than 2007 before the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting the shift to part time jobs has been one negative result of the crisis....

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Cars rated high for quality made by U.S. automakers include the Dodge Dart, Chevy Traverse, Buick Enclave and Ford Fusion, Dodge Durango, GMC Yukon, according to the 2013 Quality Index of Strategic Vision consulting firm. Foreign carmakers had Kia Soul, Honda Accord Crosstour, Volkswagen CC, Hyundai Genesis, Audi A4 sedan, Lexus LS, VW Tiguan. Strategic Vision uses 442 variable in its study and ties the customer response to emotional atributes such as "I Love it," a new approach which combines the conventional counting of reported problems with how people feel about the vehicle. This Total Quality Index is based on responses of 17,658 people who purchased 2013 models from September to November 2012.

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 Donald trumps economic plan would worsen the country's economy through extravagant borrowing and lower economic growth in the long run. Because it lowers taxes by 15 percent without any paired cuts Trump's plan would worsen the deficit, so that large debt would hurt the economy in the long run. Clinton's plan would increase taxes by 4  percent largely on high incomes so as not to hurt consumer spending, with paired spending to help lower income households. Because Trump's tax cuts benefits go disproportionately to higher incomes the benefits in terms of consumer spending are slight or insignificant. In the current state of weak income gains of the last ten years it would take some time for the middle and working class to recover. Clinton's plan carefully nudges that recovery forward without aggravating the debt, so that as incomes and net worth recovers across broad parts of the population, the U.S. is poised to go forward with strong growth as in the postwar years. Trump's plan frontloads tax benefits to higher incomes at the expense of worsening debt and enlarging future debt. In the process it worsens income disparities already aggravated by the 2008 financial crisis. Reducing the chances of a broad based recovery for all parts of the population, necessary for a strong recovery.                       ...

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Caterpillar is asking workers at its Canadian plant to accept a large cut in wages and benefits. Wages and benefits at Caterpillar's rail equipment plant in LaGrange, Illinois, are less than 50% of the costs at the Caterpillar locomotive assembly plant in London, Ontario. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics U.S. manufacturing labor costs per unit of output were 13% lower in 2010 than in 2000. This compares with an increase of 2.3% in Germany, increase of 18% in Canada, and increase of 15% in South Korea. Caterpillar is also asking for more flexible work rules at the Canadian plant. The flip side of this is that U.S. workers are earning significantly less in manufacturing, especially considering inflation, and the middle class is shrinking in the U.S. At the same time wages in the U.S. that are more competitive with wages in Mexico and China with flexible work rules and use of automation and technology, is helping to reverse the shrinking of the manufacturing sector in the U.S....

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Ed Wallace is very much on target when he says the esteem and loyalty has faded with the new generation replacing the older generations in the U.S. automobile market. The two generations have completely different perceptions of GM and Ford. He gives the background and paints the picture of their world, the perceptions and feeling of the older generations loyal to Detroit cars. His conclusion that this is gone forever may not be entirely true, as nostalgia cars or cars which go back to an earlier era may still have customer appeal. The perceptions also vary across regions, and is true for the west and south and other parts of America which have a higher proportion of foreign brands.

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During the campaign and in the crucial Iowa primary Obama used newspapers, small and large, to get his ideas across. At one point he gave six interviews to one columnist for the Daily Times Herald of Carroll, Iowa, (circulation: 6,000). He chatted with reporters from papers like the Mason City Globe Gazette, Fort Dodge Messenger, and met with editorial boards of papers throughout Iowa. Some of these media may just be curious to hear a new kind of message, and Obama could use the communication skills developed in years of writing to express his ideas and his vision all in a casual setting, seeing faces, expressions, feeling the way the way people responded, and all the time listening to what they had to say. Now the same approach is to take world newspapers as another outlet through the Tribune Media Services which enables him to run an oped column in 30 papers around the globe. Here is the list: Arab papers are Al Wataan (Gulf States) Asharq Al Aswat (regional paper in Arabic), Gulf News (Gulf States), Saudi Gazette. European papers are: Corriere della Sera of Italy, Die Welt of Germany, International Herald Tribune of Paris, Eleftyropiea (Greece), Kristeligt Dagblad of Denmark, Le Monde of France, Lidove Noviny of Czechoslovakia, NRC Handelsblad of Netherlands, Svenska Dagbladet of Sweden, WPRost of Poland. South American papers: El Mercurio of Chile, Estado Sao Paulo of Brazil, Clarin of Argentina. South Asian and Asian papers: Hindusthan Times/ The Hindu of India, The News of Pakistan, South China Morning Post of HongKong, Straits Times of Singapore, Yomiuri Shimbun of Japan, Bangkok Post of Thailand. In South Africa the Sunday TImes, in Australia the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian, and in the USA, the Tribune papers which are Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun. These are all distributed through the connection and means of the Tribune Media Services. The key point inthis communication effort is to signal something that may not have sunk in, in many parts of the world. A deep and all pervasive truth that is emerging from this crisis. We are all in this together in ways you can't imagine, as were in one boat and we float or sink in it together. Leave language, culture, borders aside, its aprofoundly new world in which the Obama story itself of multiculturalism may just be scratching the surface of really deep pervasive changes that are happening. Obama may actually not have hit this point hard enough. "Once and for all, we have learned that the success of the American economy is inextricably linked to the global economy.There is no line between action that restores growth within our borders and action that supports it beyond. If people in other countries cannot spend, markets dry up- already we have seen the biggest drop in American exports in nearly four decades, which has led directly to American job losses." This is dramatically proven by the latest Commerzbank estimates that show the 2 largest export based economies, Germany and Japan will see a contraction of GDP of 7%, USA 4% contraction and China, Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia and Latin America will also be impacted severely by the same phenomenon of markets drying up around the globe. And Obama offers the simple message that the United States is ready to lead, and asks its partners in the G20 to join with a sense of urgency and common purpose. Obama goes on to say that " we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people." ...

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Reinhart and Rogoff, 2 eminent economists who worked together on a book on financial crises since 1300, think that the current crisis has much deeeper to go, and the slight recovery in financial markets does not suggest that the imbalances in the economy are corrected. They point to economic weakness as a mechanism by which these imbalances are corrected. For example the economic weakness may be corrected by the weakening dollar resulting in accelerating exports from the U.S. The 1987 crisis had overvalued stock markets relative to earnings as an imbalance, and the 1998 LTCM crisis excessive hedge fund borrowing. Once these underlying imbalances were corrected the economic recovery was back on track. But the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns has only put the financial markets on a safer footing. It has done little to correct the basic imbalances in the economy of over indebted consumers, and of lost wealth in housing, at the very moment that there is restricted access to credit. The financial market crisis only opened up the weakness from the extremely high leveraging used by the investment firms something like 1:30 by firms from M. Lynch to Goldman Sachs. The Fed's actions gave them time to shore up their finances and recover and the interest rate cuts and government checks help the economy, but not significantly enough to promote investment or increase consumption. The government checks would be used experts estimate for paying down debt and in this way it helps indebtedness a little, but does little to support consumption or promote investment, This the Fed's action also fails to do. The economy contracts and exports help the economy in recovering. The contraction itself say these economists is a necessary mechanism to make the adjustment in every crisis, until something else like exports helps create a recovery. Take December 1997, the Korean crisis. In this crisis the Korean companies invested heavily and were overextended , they borrowed heavily from the banks which in turn borrowed from overseas in dollars. When the Korean currency hit a record low against the dollar it became difficult for Korean companies to pay the increased cost of the dollar loans and many companies failed. As investment was slashed unemployment went up from 3% to 7.9%. Ted Truman, who worked on the Korean rescue effort as a Fed official, is now a scholar at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. He sees as similar to the overexpansion of housing and consumption in the U.S., the overexpansion and excessive borrowing in Korea's corporate sector in the years preceding 1997. After the rescue in Jan 1998, the Korean currency recovered by rising 63% in that year. Did this mean the crisis was over, just as the Bear Stearns bailout leads to gradually settling markets this year? During 1998 the Korean economy sank into a deep recession, the economy shrank 6% in 1998 when it was used to growing at 8%. Nouriel Roubini, another economist, who heads RGE Monitor, a financial and economic forecasting service, sees it this way. First, the mortgage loan imbalances are set into correction mode mechanism, then second, the economy contracts from housing and consumer debt going in reverse mode, then the third effects come into place as this feeds back into the financial system in the form of defaults on industrial loans, municipal bonds, and consumer credit. Additional sequences are in finacial system distress and government and Fed response to set the corrective mechanisms in place, but to also reduce the distress to the financial system and ensure that it is safe. We are where the first effects have ocurred, but before the second and third effects which should take place sometime in 2008 and 2009. The importance of understanding this cannot be overstated for business, planners, and investors because conducting business in this environment or planning or investing will require special skills and temperament which are different from the skills and temperament required in the expansion mode if one is to produce good results....

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Most of the sales increases in the U.S. market in the 2012 fourth quarter are seen as going to Toyota and Honda. The arrival of new models for the Accord and Camry and the new Civic are likely to boost the Japanese automakers.

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Jack Welch, former head of GE (General), says there is something that does not add up in the Labor Dept numbers for unemployment in Sept. 2012 showing that the unemployment rate declined from 8.1% to 7.8%, because experts estimate the economy has to generate more than 150,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. The number of jobs generated for 2012 are lower than this number. Another measure of unemployment which shows the underutilization of labor in America, which the U.S. Federal Reserve's Bernanke looks at because it is ameasure of how effectively the U.S. is using the productive resources of the country, is U-6. U-6 covers people in parttime jobs who cannot find full time jobs and this has remained unchanged at 14.7% for Sept. 2012 according to the Labor Department.

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The former CEO of GE (General Electric) says why he is skeptical about the decline in the unemployment rate to 7.8% as shown by the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He says the economy has to have grown at breakneck speed for unemployent to drop from 8.3% to 7.8% in 2 months. The dozen companies he is working with are seeing third quarter 2012 results worse than the second quarter. The labor force participation rate declined to 63.5%, the lowest since Sept 1981- fewer people looking for work accounts for the drop from 8.3% in July to 8.1% in August 2012. Other numbers that look implausible are the BLS figures of federal state and local governments adding 602,000 workers to their payrolls in Aug and Sept 2012, the largest 2 month increase in 20 years. And the BLS figure of overall 873,000 workers being added in Sept. 2012, the largest one month increase since 1983. All this he calls implausible. Part of the problem is the way the data is collected because someone who for example says he got a job baby sitting for from anywhere in the range of 1 to 34 hours is a parttime worker, so that working 1-2 hours would be counted as employed parttime in the BLS methodology....

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Fomer Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says America needs to take up a vigorous foreign policy in his book "Worthy Fights." Both Panetta and Hillary Clinton, and Gen. Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Petraeus of the CIA, supported U.S. taking a strong stand in Syria by supporting Syrian opposition forces in the summer of 2011 and were overruled by president Obama and his election advisers because of the approaching 2012 election. Here Mark Landler provides more insights into Hillary Clinton's deeply held belief shared with Panetta that the U.S. had to take strong action where necessary to deter foes, to get into the ring to use Panetta's expression. The U.S. support for action in Libya to support Britain and France comes from the efforts of Clinton, and any lack of followup one of president Obama's errors in foreign policy. In April 2016 president Obama said that he considered his failure to followup in Libya to help the new Libyan government his biggest mistake in his presidency. Here Mark Landler looks at Hillary Clinton's entire career as showing a conviction and belief on the need for action where necessary in the U.S. global engagement. Compared to the bluster of the candidates Trump, Cruz and Sanders, with little experience to back this up in their careers in real estate, law or the Senate , Landler says Clinton is the last remaining hawk. Here he describes Hillary Clinton's contact and empathy for the troops from her trip to the American base in Tuzla, Bosnia, in March 1996. In fact many have forgotten that Yugoslavia is what it is today after the Milosevic years and the ethnic wars with Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, members of the EU and Serbia negotiating to enter EU, because of the bombing campaign taken by Bill Clinton through NATO in 1999 to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and peacemaking following the Bosnian War using diplomat Holbrooke to negotiate the 1995 Dayton Accords. Here Landler describes the meetings with Gen. Keane who pushed for the troop surge that worked in Iraq under president George W. Bush. Clinton supported Keane's proposal made in April 2015, for a no-fly-zone in Syria that would help opposition forces till a settlement could be negotiated. Keane pointed out to Clinton that there was a flaw in Obama's policies- that negotiation would work only if the no-fly-zone was used to support opposition forces. By the end of 2015 Hillary Clinton publicly adopted this position. During a period when Americans are weary of foreign entanglements but understand the need to provide leadership where needed, Hillary Clinton, provides a balance between the pendulum swinging too sharply in one direction in the Bush years and in another direction in the Obama years, says Landler. A view also articulated by Leon Panetta, who was chief of staff for President Clinton during the Bosnian conflict and the Dayton Accords, where the U.S. showed strength of purpose in war and also in negotiating the peace without major entanglements....

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China's breakneck growth was enabled by housing construction, and coal in a way that created problems of climate change. Now China's largest housing developers Evergrande and Country Garden together have a staggering $500 billion in debt and in serious financial trouble in or near default. How will China's government respond? It let Evergrande who had defaulted on debt payments build 300,000 apartments last year, just to protect home buyers. Now it's founder Mr. Xu is taken in for questioning and "illegal crimes." Making sure that the apartments on which people made deposits are built would cost another $72 billion, says Nomura. Yet suppliers, painters, builders and brokers are owed another $390 billion, in one estimate. And foreign creditors are getting together for complicated restructurings. Evergrande had entered wealth management promising 8 or 9% returns and has stopped making payments. All this is affecting public confidence in the future and China's growth story. For decades China depended on housing construction for high growth rates. Now the process is unwinding with both in financial difficulties. This NYT report says that after Evergrande's default, Country Garden failed to make a payment on $200 billion in debt last week and has 400,000 apartments that it sold but has not finished building. ...