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Miyuki Hatoyama describes the problems Japanese women face working in government and business with a lack of adequate child care, and the attitudes in Japanese society limiting the role women can play outside of the home. This makes it harder for women to contribute to society with their own creativity, talent and efforts, and pursue careers. Her husband was elected DPJ party's head and prime minister of Japan in 2009. The couple have a very natural way of meeting people and blending together with other people, bringing new ways in a traditional culture.

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Anna Fifield of the Washington Post provides this exceptional piece on Yuka Ogata, a 42 year old municipal assembly member of the Kumamoto Municipal Assembly. Yuka sat in the assembly seat with her 7 month baby in the front row to the men looking on in amazement. Ogata has a Masters degree in conflict resolution from George Mason University. Ogata was earlier reported to have created a stir by sitting while pregnant while asking questions.  Yuka Ogata says she wants to draw attention to the struggles of women as they seek to work so that they can raise a child and work happily. Japan's government has announced the key goal of "womenomics" to increase participation of women in the economy as a way to increase growth. Earlier Yuka had asked the Assembly authorites to open a day care center or let mothers bring their children to work. Both requests were denied and Ogata's child was removed from the Municipal Assembly. Here Anna Fifield gives other examples. Larissa Waters who according to new rules nursed her baby in the Australian parliament. Licia Ronzulli, an Italian member of the European parliament takes her daughter to the chamber in Strasbourg sine 2010. Yuka Ogata says it helps to know what other countries are doing as she makes her own efforts to get the same opportunities in Japan. ...

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Some of the hrdles Blu Ray is facing are the price of Blu-Ray disc players priced by Sony at $399 vs. $60 for a standard machine, and BluRay discs priced at $11 more than regular DVD's. Sony has said that the price of the disc players won't fall below $200 till the end of the year by which time consumers in the USA may further tighten their spending. An April report by Sanford Bernstein & Co. predicts sales of BluRay discs will add only 1% to sales of DVD's this year, so the outlook is very uncertain for BluRay. Part of the problem is that its a discretionary spending item and consumers may ask themselves why spend so much on the discs when there is not a signifcant appreciable difference in performance? Blu Ray discs do not provide that much of a noticeable difference except for action films.

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The Labor Department report shows U.S. nonfarm payrolls increasing by 165,000 in April 2013, and the unemployment rate declining to 7.5%. The housing and auto sectors showed gains. Private sector jobs increased by 176,000, and government jobs showed losses of 11,000. Professional and business services sectors added 73,000 jobs, including 31,000 temporary workers.

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Bittner describes the problems facing the Merkel government in handling the refugee crisis and the terrorism threats with the bombings in Paris and Brussels, including the need for better coordination of intelligence in the EU.

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A study by professors Kane and Reardon from Harvard and Stanford show kids have fallen behind and not recovered by mid 2023 from the effects of school closures and pandemic illness in families. On average kids have fallen behind by half a year in math and a third of a year in reading by mid 2022 for 7800 communities in 41 states in the US that are in the study. Disturbing is that in the poorest 10% of districts children have fallen behind by one and a half years from the national average average for the year in school making existing inequalities worse. Another finding learning loss was similar within communities for both lower income and higher income students.  Some of the hardest hit communities- Richmond, Virginia, St Louis, Missouri, New Haven Connecticut where students fell behind by one and half years in math. At 150% of teaching effort it would take 3 years to make up for the loss. The $190 billion in pandemic money from president Biden's programs to add tutors and school staff  has helped recover 25% of the loss. They suggest using other help including summer camps, an optional fifth year of high school, summer learning, museums, and online learning. "If we fail to replace what our children lost-we not the coronavirus will be responsible for the most inequitable and longest lasting legacy of the pandemic" say Kane and Reardon. ...

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After a severe financial crisis that could have snowballed into a Depression type situation and the credit rating agencies playing their critic-for-hire role in causing the crisis, there has been very little done to reform or correct the basic way in which credit ratings are made. Other than small patches to the system that failed the country badly by 2008, it has been left alone by Congress, the Obama administration, and regulatory agencies. The Attorney General of Ohio, Richard Cordray, says the "rating agencies total disregard for the life's work of ordinary Ohioans caused the collapse of our housing and credit markets and is at he heart of what's wrong with Wall Street today." Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's Attorney General says he plans to join the suit against the credit rating agencies, Fitch, Standard and Poors and Moody's. Cordrays suit was filed Nov. 20, on behalf of Ohio's pension funds. It seeks billions of dollars in damages from these ratings agencies and accuses the agencies of negligence and fraud. About the failure of Congress to make even the basic change to the system of ratings, Joseph Grundfest, a professor of securities law at Stanford says ; "What you see in these bills are Botox shots, for a little while everyone is going to be frozen into a grin, and then the shots are going to wear off.'' A deputy dean at Yale Law School, Jonathan Macey, was a member of a bipartisan task force on credit ratings reform and met with lawmakers in Congress on this issue. He says its mortifying to see that this problem which is different from other complicated issues like water shortages around the world has been left unsolved, as it could be easily solved if there was even a basic degree of political will to do so. Congress looked at the option of creating an independent fee financed credit rating agency along the lines of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, established after the Enron, but did nothing with this idea. Rep. Kanjorski and Senator Reed have led the efforts to look at the credit ratings agencies in Congress and have basically decided this to leave the system very much the same as before the crisis, with the conflict of interest problem and incentives to improve profitability at the expense of the integrity of the ratings process still intact. Bills in Congress give more oversight powers to the S.E.C. and require companies to strengthen their compliance teams. In the period leading to the 2008 crisis the internal compliance teams did not get top management support at the credit rating agencies and there is skepticism about the effectiveness of compliance teams. S.E.C. regulatory efforts face push-back from the credit ratings agencies and the effectiveness of S.E.C. regulatory supervision is uncertain given the critical role that is given to credit ratings in bond and securties issuance....

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Citigroup remains extraordinarily leveraged, with tangible leverage at 47 times tangible common equity. JP Morgan's is 26 times and Goldman's is 21 times. The government's two preferred shares capital injections of $45 billion does not reinforce the common stock, which fell 20% on the 14 January, 2009, and the discarding of the universal bank structure this week does not adequately address the root problem of problem mortgage related assets and excessive leverage. The government's agreeing to to take a large share of losses on $306 billion of problem assets helps, but with the leverage being so high significant problems remain. So what are the options. Reducing leverage to where J.P. Morgan Chase is would take $35 billion in common equity, something that would make the government the owner of Citibank, as Citibank's market capitalization on January 14, 2009 was $25 billion. The risk of doing this would be that other large bank stocks also fall steeply as the market prices in a similiar outcome. And there are political considerations as giving capital to banks is not popular with so little bank lending to show constituents. The capital needs of Bank of America as it completes the acquisition of Merrill further complicates the picture. But stopgap moves like additional loss sharing agreements will leave Citbank's problems still unresolved. ...

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Citigroup is bleeding even as the government has ringfenced $300 billion in bad assets and its not likely to go under. The next step may be to get these bad assets into a bad bank as Bernanke has suggested. Citigroup is now divesting many of the assets like Smith Barney that were hastily put together by Sandy Weil as some kind of financial supermarket. None of the companies with their separate cultures melded together, and managing this was a huge undertaking which never really got off the ground. Now its all coming apart and Citigroup will go back to its core assets.

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The terms of the debt restructuring deal with the bond swap in Greece become clear on March 9, 2012. In the deal with private bondholders -using collective action clauses to force remaining bondholders into the deal- about 96% of the 206 billion euros of Greece's bonds will be exchanged. Private bondholders held out throughout most of 2011, delaying the inevitable as Greece's economic situation became increasingly hopeless. This created a logjam with the German government, which insisted on serious private sector participation and bondholder haircut as the cost of poor lending decisions of the French, German and other European banks that made loans to Greece out of proportion of the ability of Greece to payback loans. Charles Dallara of the Institute of International Finance, negotiating for European banks, offered a 10% average loss on the bonds in July 2009. It was not until German Chancellor Merkel told Dallara at a late night meeting on October 27, 2011: "this is my last offer," for a 50% loss on the face value of the bonds, was agreement reached. The Greek debt swap that now takes place will give private bondholders a loss of 53.5% from the face value of 200 billion euros of bonds that they hold. The new Greek bonds issued in place of the old bonds include short-term bonds issued by the eurozone rescue fund at 15% of the face value of the old bonds, and a series of Greek bonds with maturity ranging from 11-30 years valued at 31.5% of the face value of old bonds. That even this 53.5% bondholder loss will not be adequate, as Greece's economy looks irretrievably damaged as it spirals downwards, is shown by the value of these bonds already trading in a hypothetical "gray market." The new 30 year bond is quoted at 17 cents and the 11 year bond at 22 cents. The questions remain about the stalling by the banks in taking the losses earlier- was this the wisest move considering the losses beyond Greece as the eurozone economy as a whole has suffered from the prolonged negotiations stretching through 2011, lurching from one crisis to the next? Even if the stalling was designed to give time for banks to repair their balance sheets, was this the best strategy, considering the damage inflicted on European economic growth. John Taylor of Stanford points out that the European banks delayed the unavoidable serious debt restructuring for too long, when insolvency was the real issue not illiquidity, and exaggerated the effect of contagion from the beginning- in John Taylor, WSJ, 2/22/2012, A Better Grecian Bailout. And John Cochrane of the University of Chicago, points out that French and German governments if they bailout French and German banks should do so openly and frankly rather than cover this up as bailouts of countries, because this would lead to serious questions about the poor lending decisions of the European banks and government supervision of the banks- in Cochrane, WSJ, 12/2/2010, 'Contagion' and other Euro Myths. As early as Feb. 2010, Cochrane was suggesting the forced exchange of new bonds with long debt maturities for exisiting bonds with short debt maturities, as short term debt was the major issue here. ...

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About Azim Premji who leads one of India's largest software and outsourcing companies. He was educated at St Marys school in Bombay and later at Stanford as an undergraduate, has roots going back to the 1940's in Bombay, and has run WIPRO from Bangalore in southern Indian state of Karnataka which does not have much of a religious orientation of Hindus and Muslims that is found in northern India. So it may not be so unnatural for him to keep aside religion from the rest of his life and in doing business and also for him to embrace the secularist basis of India's constitutional and moral fabric. Just as a Nehru who was one of the founders of the Indian Republic and one of the people involved in drafting its constitution and governmental structures remained aloof from religion Hindu or Muslim even though he was born in a Kashmiri Hindu family that settled in Allahabad. Nehru was widely described as agnostic and was educated at Harrow an English school and went to Cambridge for his undergraduate education. Upbringing and education from school days can have a significant influence and Premji's success may be due to the fact that he must be a very well educated, sharp and mature person just like Narayan Murthy of Infosys, so much so that he would stay out of the political and religious quarrels that plague any region and because of the depth of ignorance and hostility brought about by religious groups stay completely aloof from them....

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Belgium's justice and interior ministers acknowledge the error in not taking action after being alerted by Turkish authorites of Islamic radicals suspected to be a serious terrorist threat. Turkey's president raised this issue in the media about the Belgian officials failure to act on a Turkish request to take into custody a radical arrested in Turkey for trying to enter Syria. The individual was one of two brothers who were suicide bombers in the attack at the Brussels airport and subway in March 2016.

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GE is moving head offices of major operations overseas like GE Healthcare moving from Wisconsin to outside London, England, where a company GE acquired Amersham is located. GE Money will move it head offices to London, England from Stamford, Connecticut. And GE Transportation moved its annual sales meeting from its head offices in Erie, Pennsylvania to Sorrento, Italy. GE now generates over half of its sales overseas and its fastest growth businesses are in infrastructure and turbines that are in Asia. With the slowing USA economy this point has simply hit home. And IBM which gets 65% of its revenue overseas has been a clear proponent of this strategy of locating where the growth opportunities are greatest, a poin not lost on Immelt at GE who sees it essential to be part of the culture you are selling to. IBM operates most of its software and services business from India. This is also true for things like Training and R&D increasingly moved overseas to places like Bangalore, Beijing and Shanghai. Another aspect of this is to expose Americans to working overseas and to avoid he insulation of becoming too immersed only in American culture and not be able to operate effectively in other cultures, languages and environments, where increasingly most of the action is....

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Money managers, including AllianceBernstein's Daniel Loughney, say months of difficult negotiations and brinksmanship on Greece have affected the euro currency and may appear negatively in the euro's future in the coming years. The euro declined at one point in the negotiations to $1.05 in March before going back up to its current value of $1.12 in June 2015. This compares to the value of $1.40 in summer 2015. Compared to 2012 the markets in Southern Europe and the euro currency are largely protected from the situation in Greece, as little of the Greek government debt is held by banks and the private sector outside Greece. Some money managers (Franklin Templeton Inc. and SLJ Macro Partners) are even saying Greece's exit from the euro may be a good thing. Extraordinary liquidity is available from the ECB's bond buying program started in March 2015, protecting the eurozone banks and markets.