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Thomas Piketty is France's and Europe's best trained economist today with highly popular books, one on Capital, and one on Capital and Ideology. Piketty was trained at the London School of Economics, where Greens leader Annalena Baerbock of Germany was also a student, and today he is professor at LSE. His research has shown that for economic growth to happen after the pandemic European societies need to take the lead and build fairer societies where everyone has a decent living and a fair share of the pool of resources in each country. Piketty is respected by leaders that range from Biden and Scholz in US and Germany to president Xi in China. Biden's Families and Workers plan and Scholz's plan for dignity of workers and working class, and the Common Prosperity campaign of president Xi for greater investments in education, healthcare and housing are all inspired by Piketty and by the socially conscious background of these leaders. Prime minister Modi's plans for Jal Jeevan, cooking gas, to ease the burden on hundreds of millions of Indian women, for farmers with small land holdings in agriculture to improve output and use less chemicals, and for investments in infrastructure projects, housing, are also coming from similar concerns for growth and fairness. ...

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US Representative Katherine Tai sets out the policy of the Biden administration on trade with China. The policy is simply to keep Trump administration policy on tariffs in place and seek dialogue with China. This report in the WSJ explains what this means.  The Biden administration is preparing a long term policy to restore American leadership in the world in technology, trade and industry. This means as in semiconductors providing $52 billion to assist US firms to make semiconductors at home. The US will build a new supply chain that is resilient and brings more of the critical technologies in manufacturing back to the US. Where Mr. Trump was the initiator of a new policy on trade but lacked a long term vision Mr Biden is giving the Trump policies new vigor and shape and a long term vision of belief in America's role in the world. He is doing this by building on America's key strength - its people. The only way to do this is to invest massively after three decades of disinvestment under previous administrations. This comes in the shape of the $3.5 trillion plan for infrastructure and the Families and Workers Plan. Biden is also building stronger relationships with allies Australia, Britain, Japan, India, and Germany for trade, supply chain, and defense.   ...

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A video view of the damaged oil facilities of Aramco in Saudi Arabia. A proxy war waged between Saudis and Iran with Houthi rebels in Yemen have worsened the situation in the Straits of Hormuz. Tensions were high, an attack on oil facilities was not expected. About half of Saudi oil production was put out of use in the attack by low flying missiles that evaded radar defenses. Saudis plan to meet oil export commitments by importing oil. President Trump imposed sanctions on the Iranian central bank, and at the same time said he would meet with Iran's president Rouhani for talks if arranged.  The European Union called for talks to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal considering all issues nuclear, oil, and political issues in the region. The effect of Trump administration sanctions on Iran's economy have led to worsening relations. Japan, South Korea, India and China are affected by the U.S. effort to limit imports of Iranian oil. As tensions rose Japan with limited reserves made efforts to reduce tensions and bring the parties together. Mr. Trump fired his National Security Adviser in an effort to open up ideas for a renegotiation of the Iran nuclear deal on a comprehensive basis including oil and political issues in the region. ...

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Cyrus Mistry, who is 43 years old, head of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, a construction company, will be the new CEO of Tata Sons. He was a board director of Tata Sons for several years. His father is the largest shareholder in Tata Sons with an 18% stake in the company. Mistry, who comes from the same Mumbai based Parsi families as the founder and previous heads of Tata Sons, studied civil engineering at the Imperial College in London and management at the London Business School. He is an Irish national because of his father's marraige to an Irish woman. The previous chairman of Tata Sons before Ratan Tata, J.R.D. Tata, who ran the company for most of the postwar period, also had a similiar background, as J.R.D.'s father married a French woman. By virtue of its acquisition of the steel company Corus Group, and the acquisition of Jaguar-Land Rover, Tata Sons is now the largest manufacturing company in the U.K., in addition to being one of the largest and most well known companies in India. About 58% of sales now come from overseas. Companies in the Tata Group include Tata Consultancy (IT), Tata Motors (autos), Tata Steel (steel), and a range of other businesses in India. Ratan Tata will remain chairman till Dec. 2012, to give time for Cyrus Mistry to assume his new role....

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As India's growth rate improves, one weak area is agriculture which is growing at about 3% a year, and contributes only 13.7% to GDP. Of huge significance is that about 600 million people depend on agriculture. Lagging development in this area leaves the nation backward as a whole. Farming practices are still backward and have not changed significantly. Agricultural markets, infrastructure, is still backward and needs improvement. Decline in the size of plots since 1970 from about 6 acres to about 3 acres today, and low productivity on farms is a problem. Farmers fear being pushed off the land and politicians look to the rural vote to preserve the status quo. Poor monsoon rains can increase problems for farmers as three fifths of farmland is still without irrigation. Agricultural markets are fragmented, so that apples from Himachal Pradesh in the north are not easily shipped to Karnataka in the south, and coconuts in the south not easily shipped to the north. State marketing boards in India called Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMC's) control trade in fruit and vegetables. There are about 3000 fragmented agricultural markets in India, and markets can be fragmented within states. Laws from the 1950's to prevent hoarding are still on the books reducing incentives to invest in cold storage and warehouses, a significant problem in India leading to much waste and rotting of agricultural products. This hurts farmers because it leads to cuts in price. The distribution chain also hurts farmers with middlemen and commissioning agents taking as much as 6% in commission compared to the international level of about 0.5%. This review of the state of agriculture by the Economist says that 25 years after the first reforms opening up India's economy in 1990, agriculture as one area which touches the life of about half the population has not seen much change....

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As OPEC members met again in June 2015 for the first time since the meeting in November 2014, there is a sense that OPEC no longer exerts the same influence on oil prices. There are 4000 oil companies in the U.S., says one U.S. State Department official, even if OPEC were to cut production the cuts could be matched by shale oil producers in the U.S. quickly increasing output. This is the new reality, say experts. OPEC expects to keep production at the same level of the current production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day in place for the 7th meeting in over 3 years. Algeria and Nigeria, both hurt badly by the drop in oil price, have called for cuts but failed to persuade the Saudis. With Russia unwilling to join a coordinated production cut, there is not much talk about doing this. The Saudis and Iraq have continued to pump more oil, with April 2015 production of 30.84 million barrels a day the highest monthly average since 2012. Other factors also remain in the minds of the Saudis and other producers such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar- policies on climate change, use of less energy and more from friendlier sources for the same amount of economic output demonstrated by countries such as Germany, advances in technology, energy saving transitions in emerging markets such as China and India....

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Xiaomi, a maker of smartphones in China, traded for about US$2.15 per share on the Hong Kong stock market on July 9, 2018 after its IPO. Xiaomi was valued at US$43 billion, about half of the value that was expected. Reasons given by experts are that Xiaomi is one of a number of smartphone makers in the highly competitive Chinese market. Xiaomi has about half of its sales in India and other countries where it sells low cost smartphones with more value based on features included. Problems that it experienced in Brazil in connecting with national carriers made investors cautious about Xiaomi's market position in other developing countries. Limiting its profitability is its position as a hardware maker in a competitive market, without the profitability of other internet companies. Xiaomi surged in the last decade in China as a local producer of smartphones that provided features of more expensive brands at a lower price. It built a following as a quality local brand in China. ...

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After carbon dioxide at 40%, black carbon at 18% is the No 2 cause of global warming on the planet earth. This black carbon is generated from thousands of villages in the develooping world and from countries like India, where village women cook food over stoves that burn twigs and dung, not having stoves to cook on. If they are provided with stoves that use fuel these black carbon emissions can easily and quickly be cut. This is also cuasing dense smoke to fill their homes and black grime to stick to the thatched huts and thatched roofs, and it puts ablack cloud over stretches of landscape in these villages.

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Bhattacharjee since becoming Chief Minister of West Bengal has some significant accomplishments in drawing foreign investment to West bengal. Tata Motors is to manufacture it low cost car which would sell for less than $3000 at a factory being built in Singur near Kolkata. IBM is planning investment in Kolkata and so are many foreign companies. He has run into problems on the issue of dispossessed farmers at Nandigram where 22000 acres were promised to the Salim Group of Indonesia for building petrochemical plants. But he is rated highly by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Azimzi Premji of Wipro as the best chief minister in India.

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Even though volatility is high in stock markets, the U.S. stock market has rebounded to levels in August 2019. The level on March 10, 2020 after effects of the coronavirus on the global economy was for the DJIA average in the U.S. to be at the level it was on August 14, 2019, as shown on the graph in the WSJ, in the neighborhood of 25,000. In the last quarter of 2019 there were steep gains in the Dow Jones averages that could not be fully explained, these gains have disappeared. Considering the suddenness of the crisis from the coronavirus in China, and the double whammy of impact on global manufacturing supply chains of first the tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S., followed by the coronavirus, the impact on stock markets seen in this overall context is comprehensible. Particularly the sharp gains in the last quarter of 2019 which now appear to be muted. There is also some good news for economies such as China and India, which are large oil importing countries, and the rest of Asia, in the sharp drop in oil prices that helps cushion some of its impact on the global economy. For the U.S. this also happens at a time when the economy is in much stronger shape than at any time in the last ten years. ...

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Give that information disclosure is not rapid enough or transparent in India, this writer says there are probably more Satyams out there in India's listed companies. He finds that the company's outside auditors, its Board with Krishna Palepu, a Harvard Business School Professor, and Vinod Dham one of the brains behind the Intel Pentium chip, and stock exchange regulators, all failed to exercize the due diligence and supervision that they were expected to perform. Only outside institutional investors acted and forced the company chairman to make the disclosures about its practices.

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Philip Clarke has spent his whole working life at Tesco from stocking shelves when in school to other assignments. He takes over as CEO from Terry Leahy. He was store manager, product buyer, marketer and then joined the upper management ranks. Tesco is now one of the top retail chains worldwide, with 472,000 employees, and revenues of 56.9 billon pounds. As head of international operations he started Tesco in S. Korea by acquiring the 38 discount stores under the Homever name. And also made the move into India.

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Unitech, DLF, and other builders in India, are switching to affordable housing to meet demand at lower prices of $27000 to $100,000 for a one or two bedroom apartment. This shift means lower margins in the 30 percent range compared to earlier 70 percent margins of DLF. It can make up for profits in volume as there is a growing demand for affordable housing, and prices of raw materials and interest rates are coming down. Buyers are looking for even better prices and some are holding back because of uncertainty about the economy and jobs.

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Any Asian conflict involving China would in a few months destroy Apple's value, CEO's would change quickly, and Apple policies change to shift entire production to India and the US in a rapid shift. Tim Cook would be seen as having gambled against America's interests, unresponsive and failing after repeated warnings.  Apple's goal of sourcing from India by 2027 a mere 26% of its iphones, means that a decade after USTR Lighthizer and DJT started the task of reshoring manufacturing to US and allies in 2016, the No. 1 outshoring company would still be making 75% of its dollar value iphones in China. A degree of overconcentration that would make no sense considering that Apple's 75% of manufacturing would be entirely at risk in 2027 after repeated warnings and inaction. The only option for Tim Cook in 2025 is to come up with new goals of shifting a minimum of 50-60% of its dollar value product manufacturing for iphones to India by 2027. . Tim Cook as Apple CEO has done little to prevent the overconcentration of manufacturing in China since 2016. About 10 years after DJT was elected to bring manufacturing back to India or close allies the simple idea of diversification was not implemented. Why? Having set up this system starting in 1998, a system that did not exist before that tiem when Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook with a winning formula to Make in China, a country just emerging from its Communist phase of failed state economy. By 2008 in 10 years the infrastructure was built in a backward largely agricultural economy that was rapidly modernizing under a market economy with state run capitalism under the Communist Party experiment. The Bush Obama 16 years were ones with America not responding to the challenge posed by this new system which could create huge surges in production capacity with focus on key technologies and flood markets. The next decade after 1998-2008 was one of rapid growth of this experiment which combined with design and engineering in the US generated few jobs in manufacturng in the US, but huge profits with huge margins fro a low cost base with a high image and technology innovation product. Lighthizer, Navarro, Jamieson had already sounded the alarm for American manufacturing and loss of jobs in 2016.  America's deindustrialization was becoming a bigger challenge by 2020 so that president Biden continued the policy of reindustrializing. In 2025 China 2025 Plan that was a warning in 2016 is already a reality with China flooding the world in solar panels, and ready to flood the markets overseas with electric cars. Apple may only get a reprieve, this exemption is not the same as the last one. National security is an issue, key technologies need to be protected. There is only one more opportunity to rebuild American manufacturing and keep promises.     ...

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A whistleblower's revelations in the US Congress on Facebook, and the WSJ Facebook investigation, both show that the social media and news information products have at toxic effect on young women and children. Congress is in a bipartisan mood to take action. One solution is removing algorithmic news feeds, removing the effect of algorithms in information that is put out. Another solution is the breakup of the company and removing the algorithmic feeds. Keeping social media organizations out of the news and information business is an effective solution, as coming up with solutions that accomplish this would remove the social ills that affect American, European and Indian society today. It would restore the situation that existed before the emergence of social media such as Twitter and Facebook that distorted news and media information and improperly took much of the space that long established news organizations had carefully developed for a hundred years.  ...

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Oxford Biomedica is the company that is part of the consortium making the coronavirus vaccine being developed by Oxford University's Jenner Institute.  Her Mr. Dawson describes the challenges he faced and cash crunches 4 times in 12 years, the last 4 years ago. The turning point he says was in 2012 when the cell and gene therapy was validated with a new drug developed for a form of cancer using this method. Oxford Biomedica is setting up a facility for manufacturing the vaccine in England at a 84,000 square foot former Royal Mail sorting facility in the city's business park called Oxpark. Dawson says cell and gene therapy is going to be big in health care. He did not see it coming till 2012. In 2014 he says during a cash crunch they had realized that what they had to do at Biomedica was to get to the time when it was going to be big. Today Astra Zeneca of the UK is organizing the effort and includes the use of British and Indian facilities for manufacturing, and Oxford University for research effort. ...

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Over 100 women scientists are part of the Chandrayan moon missions of Indian space agency ISRO. Many are leader of project teams and head key parts of the scientific efforts of ISRO. Prime minister Modi says the moon mission shows the strength of women or 'nari shakti' and the potential of the younger generation of women for careers in science and technology. About 25% of the 16,000 employees of ISRO space agency are women, and Modi says "they will inspire women for generations to come." Women make up 43% of graduates in STEM scientific fields, yet when it comes to being part of scientific institutes or universities this drops to 14%, an imbalance that prime minister Modi and ISRO women seek to address. DW.com looks at the work of women in the moon, mars and solar missions including Ritu Karidhal, Nidhi Porwal, Reema Ghosh, Kalpana Kalahasti. Kalahasti is deputy project director and has overseen the satellite imaging that will be done from Chandrayan 3. Reema Ghosh worked on the "Pragyan" rover that is now exploring the moon's surface. ...

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Vivek Wadhwa visits India's IT sector companies to take a first hand look at new developments in 2011-2012. He finds innovation in areas ranging from printer ink to medical diagnostic tools, all at low price points suited for India's large population and lower incomes.

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The Pakistan army and its anti India mindset is at the root of the problem Pakistan faces. The army has factions that support the Taliban. Its intelligence agency, the ISI, helped create the Taliban as a way to get strategic depth (as they called it) in Afghanistan, for it sees as a necessary perpetual conflict with India. And the failure in Pakistan, the crisis of Pakistan, lies in the failure of elected politicians, the failure of the army, to provide responsible government and peaceful relations with India and with Afghanistan. By pursuing a Hindu-Muslim conflict agenda, and a anti-foreigner agenda for Afghanistan, Pakistan has ended up undermining its own government, institutions, and sovereignty over tribal areas and the North West Frontier Province. The US by getting involved in the Hindu-Muslim conflict agenda, and the anti-foreigner agenda during the Cold War, by supplying weapons and aid for this to successive Pakistani military governments, now finds itself as the foreigner in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistan army's anti-foreigner agenda, now that the Americans are the foreigners, is not something that even the army or the civilian governments can control. The only thing the army knows, and its raison-de-etre, is the protection of the state of Pakistan and an antiIndian, Hindu-Muslim conflict agenda. After 60 years of doing this since its founding the Pakistan army knows no other way. Failure to do what it is doing would remove it from its critical role as the most important institution in Pakistan, and relegate its officers and the army to a smaller role, with smaller committments of resources, a smaller army, and the loss of its privileged role in Pakistani society. This is the answer to Holbrooke's question to Pakistani businessmen, and civilian leaders, in Lahore recently, what is the crisis of Pakistan? And these businessmen and civilian leaders also touched on the army's role. For America as it sees the need to build a new economic partnership with Asia that would help revive economic growth, there is the need for deep soul searching. The Pakistan military sucks up resources that are so badly needed elsewhere, for the kind of construction the Obama administration sees for America, of roads, bridges, schools, new energy infrastructure. How can what is good and planned for America not be whats good for South Asia, for India, Pakistan, SriLanka and the entire region? The resources that are sucked up by the Pakistan military and its actions to foster aconflict atmosphere merely adds to the way resources are sucked for the military in India, when they are badly needed for development, economic growth, and the same kind of infrastructure building and education that the Obama administration plans for the US. Without correcting this flaw in its policies in South Asia the Obama administration cannot create a partnership with Asian countries that could play a critical role in America's own economic growth....

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India's largest oil refiner, state owned Indian Oil, had a loss of $4 billion in the June 2012 quarter. Analysts say prices have to go up by 26% for sales to be profitable. The government mandates fuel prices at below market rates. Below market prices for diesel are estimated to cause 60% of the loss at refiners.