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A government report gives a second by second account of a high speed train collision in China on July 23, 2011. It shows major equipment failures, human errors, and confusion in communications.

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A big hurdle for local brands in China is the Chinese consumer's interest and respect for foreign brands. Asked about local brands buyers say they can't think of any, or say Chinese brands are shoddy in quality and value. Brands such as Haier in consumer appliances and Lenovo in tech are an exception. During the big surge in consumer sales in the last two decades Chinese companies producing local brands thought it adequate to simply imitate foreign brand names rather than take the difficult route of establishing the credibility of their own brand- an effort which might take years. Often the foreign name was changed slightly to keep the resemblance but mean something positive to Chinese consumers in the local language. Common are names such as Adidos, Hike, Cnoverse and Fuma for sneakers. Clio Coste keeps the connection to Lacoste with its crocodile logo. Coca Cola in Chinese is Kekoulele, translated to mean Tasty Fun. Only now are local companies giving serious attention to creating long term brand entity and image. The serious attention to brand names and branding comes at a time when China increasingly depends on consumer sales to power the economy with the decline in real estate and slower manufacturing. For the 11 months of 2014 retail sales were up 12 percent over the prior year period to $3.8 trillion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. ...

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A brief history of Xinjiang which translates as New Frontier in Chinese. Its the western frontier of China and a vast area that comprises the desert region of the Tarim basin. It has 13 sizeable ethnic minority groups and borders eight countries. Because of the lack of irrigation technologies these arid expanses were settled very late in history, says Victor Mair, a Professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Even the Uighurs were tribes from the Mongolian steppes who settled Xinjiang in the 10th century. For China it was mostly aplace for havin border military garrisons. Around the 10th century and the Tang dynasty in China, trade on the Silk Road- with places like Kashgar oasis towns on the fringes of the desert as hubs- was at its height. It was not until 1760 under the Quing dynasty of ethnic Manchus, that this area was annexed by CHina and serious effort made to settle it with demobilized troops. A civil and military administration encouraged immigration, say scholars Millward and Perdue in a 2004 book of essays by 16 scholars, "Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland." About 50,000 demobilized troops were offered benefits, seeds and land if they stayed. A similiar situation seems to have been repeated after Mao annexed Xinjiang in 1949. In the early 1950's the Chinese government established the Xinjiang Province Production and COnstruction Corps, which was setup to manage large farms and construction projects called bingtuan and provide jobs for demobilized troops. The bingtuan are profitable enterprises and an estimated one of every six people in Xinjiang are employed in bingtuan, or 1.3 million people. THe HAn who were 6% of the population in 1949, now comprise 40% of the 20 million population of Xinjiang. Another source of employment is in the oil and gas industry, with the Communist party secretary of Xinjiang for the last 15 years being aprotege of President Hu Jintao, from his days in the Communist Youth League, coming from the oil industry province of of Shandong. These jobs are mostly all reserved for Chinese which causes resentment among the local Uighurs. Wong quotes a Uighur university student as saying, who is the foreigner here and whose culture, language and way of life should be protected. This may be the crux of the grievances of the Uighurs, as their use of the language and religious practice is restricted, and they feel they are second class citizens in their own land. Other articles in the NYT and Economist go to point out that the links with international terrrism are not a source of the problem, and the unrest among the Uighurs is more about a feeling of loss of culture, language, religion and identity, and jobs. And the idea that the best way to work with minorities, or regions with different language, religion and culture, just as the British did in South Asia and India is doing now is through tolerance. See the links to NYT and Michael Wines on 7/11/2009 about the Communist party secretary for Xinjiang, Wang Lequang, whose policies in Xinjiang and now in Tibet through a protege, may be worsening this situation. ...

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The Fed announced that it will review compensation policies of 28 of the large complex banking organizations in the USA. The review will be an horizontal one that compares them to each other. The other significant move is that the Fed wants to see employees who take greater risks and use large amounts of borrowed money, to receive negative points in evaluating how well they have done, and consequently to be compensated less than other employees who earn money for banking firms while controlling the risks associated with transactions. This ties in with the discussions at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where the Europeans pushed for tighter regulation on bonuses and pay, to control the excessive risktaking of banking firms. This is because the prevailing culture in global financial institutions is a high risk high return culture, which ignores the social consequences of bad decisions. There is no cost to individuals taking the risks on other people's money, and regulations discouraging risk are not in place. The question remains, is this an adequate response to prevent future crises, or too little too late? If the banking community does not see it this way, and financial regulation is watered down in Congress- see the links to this- then it will much like Don Quixote swinging at windmills. In this sense the title of this piece is a misnomer, as the Fed has not hit banks with sweeping pay limits. It only said it would review pay practices. It is jawboning of the mild kind to show the public something is done. See Paul Volcker's point that pay practices would adjust and desirable goal of less risktaking and reasonable salaries would be achieved by separating deposit taking banks from banks engaged in trading activities. Similiarly, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, made the point recently that the biggest banks should be broken up. That is supported by the intuitive sense of experts that banks engaged with depositors should be engaged in the social functions of society, lending and supporting economic activity, and the trading desks of investment banks should operate entirely separately from this. One should be insulated from the other. In this sense there is a bit of evasion in these actions. A Wall Street capture of regulatory activity continues, of regulators and senior economic advisors in the administration, as the coziness between the two lingers on from a previous era of deregulation. This has the potential to cost the country and the global economy dearly in another crisis, and the jobless and young jobless people especially. In this economy both in Europe and the USA, the jobless young have been left with the least hope. ...

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Here are 11 big infrastructure projects that are planned across the country. They are part of the $2.2 trillion of projects to build or repair infrastructure, that is estimated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as needed by America today. But there is only $100 billion for infrastructure spending in the Stimulus Plan, and much of this will go to keeping existing infrastructure, a dilapidated bridge here or road there in repair. Only $50 billion is available for transportation projects. The rapid transit planned for California with trains twice as fast as Acela for a 800 mile track is estimated at $45 billion, but there is only $11 billion in the Stimulus for mass transit aand cities like Washington DC for Dulles airport with its need for a airport train, and other mass transit projects around the country wil compete for the same money. As a result most will go unfunded. The Second Avenue Subway in New York at $4.35 billion, Miami Port Tunnel at $1 billion, Bridge to Canada from Detroit for $1.8 billion, Hudson Rail Tunnel for New York at $8.75 billion, Seattle Highway Tunnel at $4.24 billion, Gulf ports at New Orleans and Gulfport, Mississippi at $2.04 billion, tens of billions for new California aqueduct bypassing the delta around Sacramento to bring water from north to arid Southern part of California, NestGen Air Traffic Control for $15 billion to $22 billion, are the other projects on this list. Many of these are badly needed and have been waiting for years to get the necessary investment. This is only a partial list, and suggests that there are a lot of projects that can productively use government investment, so that wasteful spending does not occur. It appears that the projects are there because these areas were neglected for a long period, more like the situation faced during the post Thatcher period in the UK, where infrastructure and services had been neglected for so long that Labor governments could productively channel new investment in these areas to avoid wasteful spending. And it appears that the situation is very different from Japan where the Liberal Democratic Party had a vested interest in keeping its farm and rural base happy with new projects, like a bridge to nowhere, that led to wasteful spending for a decade or more, leading to rising deficits and investments that did not create productive returns in terms of economic growth. By contrast these projects have potential to generate productive returns for years into the future and also are large enough to create jobs and be spread out over a number of years. This could end up being a real bright spot in the current situation. Felix Rohatyn, who helped New York rebuild its finances afte a crisis, has a new book "Bold Endeavors: How our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now", using examples like the rebuilding of the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, and the Interstate Highway System, and says the US needs to build for the future with more ambitious, better planned projects today. He says, that infrastructure is not an expense, it has to be seen as a vitally needed and productive investment. People like Rohatyn and others see the Stimlulus plan as a missed opportunity because a lot of these projects mentioned here and the numerous others not shown here will simply not see much money from the government to support them and get them off the ground. The idea that this is wasteful government spending that is spreading, may be a danger to this vision and opportunity. At the same time the reality is that if all this was happening during the time of the Erie Canal or the postwar period of the Interstate Highway System it would have been much easier to support. The banking crisis fix is taking away so many of the dollars that could have gone here, that this may be the missed opportunity, the lack of room for visionary investments because of the danger of pushing the government deficit to 60% of GDP with the current spending plans. ...

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Modi's success in tackling problems of electricity development in Gujarat state and the model for India, as a new Modi administration is elected for India in 2014. Other areas that are the focus for development include high speed rail and transportation, other infrastructure development, creating new jobs in manufacturing. Modi made three trips to China in the last decade as a four term chief minister of Gujarat state (similiar to a governor of a U.S. state), and has adopted a China type focus on infrastructure development and manufacturing for the western state of Gujarat, which was part of the old Bombay state in British times. Mumbai, the new name for the old British settlement of Bombay on the west coast, is about 300 miles south of the major Gujarat city of Ahmedabad, at one time a major textile manufacturing center. Mumbai and commercial minded people from Gujarat occupy a role similiar to Shanghai in India's economic development. Under British times trading minded Gujaratis settled on the east and southern coast of Africa, in the Persian Gulf, with retail businesses. Of India's two largest companies the Reliance Group made its early start in textiles in Gujarat in the seventies, set up by a young emigrant who returned from the Persian Gulf. The Tata Group which owns Land Rover was set up by a Parsi immigrant community in Gujarat. Its founder Jamshedji Tata set up India's steel industry under the British at the turn of the century. The Parsis settled in Navsari, Gujarat, immigrating from Iran and other parts of the Persian Gulf centuries ago. When the media talks of Modi's origins as a tea seller's son, one has to take this in the context of the origins of people such as Reliance founder Ambani who was the son of a schoolteacher from a rural village in Gujarat. With about a 1000 mile coastline facing the Persian Gulf, Gujarat has been known to engage in the textile trade long before the arrival of the Portuguese and the British in the 1600's, and before the Muslim period from the 1300's. Many Gujaratis settled in Mumbai and are a key part of the commercial, financial center in the city. Just as Britain with its commercial centre of London evolved over centuries with commerce affecting attitudes towards democracy, free media and capitalism compared to more feudal France, Gujarat and Mumbai has evolved in a similiar manner compared to other states in the north of India. With all the media infomation and misinformation on Modi's mishandling of communal riots little has been said of the unique position of Gujarat and Gujaratis in the industrial development and modernization of India. Compared to other parts of India historically there is a greater degree of tolerance in Gujarat for other communities, similiar to Britain's compared to France and Spain, because of this commercial outward looking orientation for new ideas. ...

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The language and tone of the leaders says something about what is likely to be the outcome of the G20 summit. Its a first for significant participation, as countries as diverse as Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands are represented. The credible positions of both sides, the US, UK and Japan, and the European side of France, Germany and the Czech Republic, well presented, provide for some serious discussion and negotiations. France's Sarkozy and Germany's Merkel want to see a global regulator that would reach inside the borders of the US with stricter regulation. Sarkozy calls this "nonnegotiable." And he said that he would reject an agreement that puts off stringent new regulations on banks, tax havens, and hedge funds. He said "the compromise has to come from all countries around the world." US President Obama said that if there is going to be renewed growth it can't just be the US as the engine, everybody is going to have to pick up the pace," at the same time saying that the US had to be concerned about its own deficits. The fact is that the US stimulus will mostly help a severely impacted domestic economy recover with social safey net payments to local and state governments and unemployment insurance, as well as targeted investments in infrastructure, education, energy and health care. It will not mean anywhere near the kinds of imports the US made from other countries, especially China. And Obama made that clear when he said the US will never return to that situation, where the US had become a "voracious consumer market." For the Germans the major market for their middle companies is China, and China has its own stimulus spending on infrastructure spending, which should provide for continued imports of machinery from Germany at a much lower level. Thus Germany and France see a strong tendency to call the source of the crisis and repeat that call till the US listens, and refer to the failure of free market capitalism in its unregulated form. And to insist on fixing it through a global regulator with strict and systemwide rules. So you hear this in Merkel's words, "the foundation for this finacial architecture must be laid now, that is why we seem to be so tough." While the vivacious Sarkozy talks of compromise, and a US gesture in regulation in return for Franc's gesture of joining NATO, the mild mannered Merkel is clear and focussed about her concern. She rejects the idea of linking stimulus spending demands of the Anglo-Americans with the Franco-German demands for global systemwide regulation. "This is not a bargaining chip," she says. The media may mistakenly report lack of consensus as a failure of the summit. But in the long run in the presence of good positions on both sides, it could lead to some tough negotiations even if continued at another meeting. And result in something serious, credible and lasting in its impact, rather than something that was easy and did not in Andy Grove's useful words involve "constructive confrontation." ...

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The tensions that exist in Australian society, as a result of the large Chinese investments and imports of infrastructure building commodities such as iron ore, natural gas and other commodities. Australia's Pilbara region in the northwestern part of the country, has become one huge quarry for China, as an estimated 1 million tons of iron ore raw material is loaded onto 2 story high trucks each day- with automated driverless trucks system being implemented- and shipped by 2 mile long trains to waiting ships on the coast. Australians remember this done on a smaller scale in the 1980's by Japan. At the time Japan brought in Japanese workers. The same is true today but on a bigger scale, with China bringing in workers with lower pay. The concern now is what it was then, as one local leader put it- are we going to have towns with mines or mines with towns, he asked. The mining companies are looking at it purely as a commercial venture, and not investing in the towns. The towns now fear they will find the boom times gone someday and nothing tangible to show for it, no schools, hospitals and no infrastructure. And because the mining project companies fly people in and out, the 8000 aboriginal people in Pilbara- the original people of this land- see little of the mining expansion's benefits. Wandoan, a small place with 300 homes in the outback in Queensland, in eastern Australia, is an example of the gut wrenching change taking place in the mining areas. The lives of the people from the local pharmacy, the local supermarket, and the local ranchers, depend on the mining decisions made in China. This area was part of a planned, on again off again, $6 billion coal mine -part of a A$150 billion complex of natural gas and coal projects for exports to Asia in Queensland- and involved Xstrata buying 70,000 acres of the best grazing land for 7 coal mines. With the locals selling off, the mining uncertain, the supermarket closing, the whole town has the feeling of being up in the air, and fading out someday. Australian public sentiment recognizes this feeling, and at the same time is ambivalent about the impact. Polls conducted by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, show 73% of Australians feel Chinese economic growth has a positive impact, and at the same time 57% feel that there is now excessive Chinese investment, and 46% feel China will be a military threat in 20 years. Australians remember the same feeling about Japan's investments in raw material sources in the eighties. In 1988, polls then showed 70% of Australians saying there was too much Japanese investment, even though they also recognized that Australia had benefitted. The difference now is that there are also fears of China's influence, and foreign investment guidelines limit investments in Australian mining companies to below 50%. China's investment in Australia's natural resources comes in several ways: in the year upto July 2009 A$42 billion in export demand, A$3 billion in direct investment in Australian companies, and about A$5 billion in project financing. Iron ore sales to China amount to A$22 billion each year, and about one fourth of Australia's exports went to China, growing at a rate of 31% in 2009. According to the chief economist of Austrade, the government trade organization, Australia benefits from the economic relationship with China- this adds A$3,400 per year to every Australian household. Efforts to use some of the profits made by mining corporations for infrastructure and other public purposes, by increasing the mining tax have failed; as the mining industry launched a campaign against the government of Kevin Rudd, who was removed from office by his party. In the recent national elections, the ruling Labor party lost its majority, after losses in the resource rich states of Western Australia and Queensland. In the meantime the Australian currency has become the currency used by currency speculators who cannot use the yuan to make a bet on the currency- as the yuan is pegged to the dollar- and instead use the Australian dollar as a proxy. This makes it volatile, with the Australian dollar losing 10% of its value in a single day, when pessimism increased about China's growth forecasts. It also shows how much of the good story of employment and gdp growth in Australia is tied to the story in China, and the extent of the negative impact a reversal in this area can mean for Australians; especially now that the bad debt in the post-2008 explosion of bank lending poses risks to China's banknig system. ...

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The system of using performance evaluations for "forced" or "stack" ranking of employees started with Jack Welch at General Electric. Microsoft adopted the system under Ballmer till 2013, when it decided that the need for teamwork was more important and discontinued the practice. Welch used it to get rid of "underperformers" or managers who did not conform to his requirements when he became CEO of General Electric. It was his personal style and way of bringing change to GE. The practice of "forced" ranking increases competition inside the company instead of teamwork, say managers, and leaves a lot to the caprice of individual managers. In December 2013 Ballmer facing criticism from his Board for missing some of the disruptive technologies in the information tech business and falling behind Apple and Google, sought the advice of Alan Mulally of Ford Motor Company. Mulally had to fight entrenched Japanese competitors and pull Ford out of a crisis in which even Ford's logo had been put up as collateral for loans. Meeting for 4 hours on Mercer Island in Seattle Mulally told Ballmer that he focussed on teamwork and simplifying the way Ford did things. Ballmer phased out the "forced" ranking system as one of the last major steps before he leaves Microsoft. In today's environment for tech companies of intense competition worldwide and disruptive technologies without teamwork and employees looking to come up with new and exciting products the future is surely lost. Having the "bottom" 50% of the employees compete for limited positions can be dangerous or suicidal without the dominant position in markets that GE and Microsoft had. It also makes no sense to substitute internal competition and capricious manager behaviours for teamwork. It is the responsibility of managers to do as much as possible to make good hiring decisions, and then motivate and help employees to achieve their best performance with frequent helpful feedback, and to promote teamwork. This is the lesson Ford learned through its crisis and Microsoft is now learning....

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Southwest's culture under its founder Herb Kelleher was eager to define itself a being different from the rest and giving people more opportunity to express themselves, be happy and work together as a group of people who wanted to take the customer in and give him a pleasant flying experience. The culture and the company's flying strategy both went hand in hand to attract the right kind of people for this enterprise to succeed and Kelleher pulled it off. His successors have tried to keep up this culture in as many ways as possible and CEO Gary Kelly continues this practice including dresing up in odd costumes for Halloween as Kelly did when he bacame a mom Edna Turnblad from the musical Hairspray. But this fun does not mean theey don't work hard at Southwest. In fact workers from other airlines who joined Southwest have quit because the work is too hard. One might say that the culture of having fun and the close feeling that is promoted among the workers at Southwest enables he airline to get a lot out oits workers, promote teamwork and helps its strategy of keeping the costs down so that its competitive with other cost conscious airlines. Southwest wages are some of the highest in the airline industry after pay cuts at other airlines but its still among the lowest cost airlines per mile a plane is flying. The flying experience can still be cheerful on Southwest even though Southwest has been making changes like flying more people on a single flight, no frills, a different boarding system and so on. Southwest has been consistently profitable and it has helped that Kelly devised a fuel hedging plan in 1999 that has saved Southwest about $3 billion since then and may save it another $2. billion in coming years....

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Entergy is one of the largest energy companies. Its CEO for nine years, Wayne Leonard, talks to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal. Its the No.2 generator of nuclear power in the USA, and uses coal for only 7% of its energy. He has made his name in nuclear energy, and here he talks about the government's cap and trade program and nuclear energy. He points to today's technology as far superior to the technology that was used in the Failed Three Mile plant, that put back nuclear energy plants in the USA for decades. He believes that price signals are needed for CO2, and the cap and trade program helps to do this, so he supports the cap and trade program. He admits that self interest colors perception of Entergy, compared to coal using utility producers like Duke Energy and American Electric Power. With coal only 7% in its portfolio of plants, and big in nuclear energy, it stands to gains from a cap and trade program, whereby Congress will set a ceiling on emissions, then allows businesses to sell any of its extra allowances that stand for the right to make emissions. And in doing so creating the largest commodity market, in carbon backed securiites. He and the government agree on the point that the allowances should be auctioned off, rather than given away as the companies with many coal plants believe. And the billions in new revenue from these allowances would be returned to the public. He understands that the view of companies like Duke and AEP, that use coal and would have to increase rates, and face the anger of ratepayers as they pay more for the allowances. He also thinks the bill should be written with a fine pen, so that if Congress mandates 20% of energy come from renewables. That it should specify replacing coal not natural gas as what this replaces, to get rid of the most polluting sources. He points to the real need for looking at things globally, as doing things locally, even to show responsible leadership in the world community, can lead to no progress in the global picture. The reason is that China is going ahead with the rapid construction of conventional coal plants. It has surpassed USA coal capacity, and is on track to double it sometime in the next decade. If the USA closed down every single coal plant, and all the time new coal plants are going up in China and India, then we would have ruined our economy, and it was'nt making much difference globally. And he says, if we just say lets lead and people will follow us, "its silly", because China isn't going to follow us, especially when they have $2 trillion invested in their coal plants, and they still aren't feeding feeding all their people. So how to deal with this? Develop the new technology for carbon capture for existing conventional coal plants, and help the Chinese with retrofit technology to curb emissions in a realistic manner. At this time most current funding is devoted to technology for second generation systems, that are still 10-20 years away....

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After 5 years at 130,000 miles per hour, the NASA Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter's orbit. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. An earlier spacecraft Galileo spent 8 years over Jupiter, but lacked the technology to survey the planet that Juno has. Information about Jupiter could reveal the origins of the solar system. A titanium valult protects Juno's critical systems from the volatile atmosphere around Jupiter. On the 37th orbit in Feb 2018 Juno will dive into Jupiter ending the mission but providing critical information on Jupiter.

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A large number of Syrian migrants escaping war zones are reaching the shores of Greece. Italy, Greece, Malta are destinations for the migrants. Greece is struggling to cope wih the flow of migrants.

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NYT's Landon Thomas gives this exceptional report on how Deutsche Bank changed from a lender to the German auto industry and safe banking practices to enter the derivatives business and other opaque financial products that led to taking on huge risks. Deutsche Bank has agreed on Dec. 22, 2016 to settle with the U.S. Justice Department paying a fine of $7.2 billion for practices relating to faulty mortgage securities. This report says the problems started in 1995 with Deutsche Bank's leadership hiring Edson Mitchell of Merrill Lynch to promote the investment banking business at Deutsche Bank. Mitchell hired two derivatives traders Broeksmit and Anshu Jain. Mr. Mitchell died in plane crash in 2000 when he was 47 years age, Mr. Broeksmit committed suicide in 2014, 58 years in age, Mr. Anshu Jain, 53 years old, is the only surviving person of the three. Under Mr. Jain Deutsche Bank assumed more and more risk, and was involved in complex and opaque financial products leading to the toxic mortgage crisis, and manipulation of the lending rate for London banks.  It also lent $300 million to Donald Trump's businesses. Most of the profits generated from this venture have evaporated, with analysts estimating $15 billion in fines and penalties owed of the $20 billion that these ventures generated. Not counting the serious damage to the bank's reputation in Germany and the U.S. This report points out the role played by the CEO from 2002 to 2012 of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann, in encouraging these ventures converting the bank from its original loan as a contintental lender to business to a bank selling opaque financial products for most of its profits. Landon Thomas also describes the events and days leading up to the suicide by Broeksmit, including a visit to a psychiatrist and Broeksmit's facing enormous stress about the investigations underway in Germany and the U.S. looking into the opaque financial products and practices of Deutsche Bank. This is also a cautionary tale about what happened in banking from the late 1990's leading to the collapse in 2008, leading to the problems of today- the need to rescue the economy in 2008-2009 and the low rate world that ensued damaging the savings of ordinary people, the infrastructure that was never built, the parallel crisis of the hollowing out in manufacturing as a false prosperity boomed in banking and finance. In a sense it is also a story of everyday lives that were damaged in the high flying boardrooms of finance in New York, London and Frankfurt. The revolving door between regulators and the banks made it harder to monitor and control banking risk letting this story unfold over decades, damaging the credibility of governments and the established political parties without clear alternatives from outside; as the dominance of Wall Street executives in the new outsider Trump administration shows.  ...

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Deborah Liljegren, a 49 year old accountant working for an advertising firm, was laid off during the coronavirus first wave. She now works as a warehouse worker in 12 hour shifts at a warehouse near Lake Geneva in Illinois. She gets up at 4.50 am for a 30 mile drive to the Kenosha, Wisconsin, located warehouse, a 1 million square feet Amazon warehouse facility. She is by herself most of the day in a 10 foot long area where she takes hundreds of items an hour from containers and puts them in tall shelves on a robotic run container production line. During the lunch break she eats a 30 minute lunch of a sandwich and cup of Cheetos inside her Focus car in the parking lot. This is the only time she gets to herself. At 12.00 pm she starts a new shift till 6 pm. At 2.45 she gets a 15 minute break.  Liljegren says it is a totally different experience going from a white collar to a blue collar job. On a typical day she may sort 2000 items. The pay is $15 an hour. She decided to take the job  because it looked like it would take a long time for another job to be available. Liljegren is one of the millions of workers whose lives have changed after the coronavirus. While a small section of society of professionals continue to work from home and do not feel the economic effects of the pandemic, much larger parts of the people of each country are vulnerable to the impact of the first and second waves of the coronavirus. With the second wave comes more economic uncertainty, loss of jobs as some businesses close, and others layoff employees.  Government budgets are strained in November 2020 to provide the kind of stimulus provided in March 2020, leaving businesses of all sizes vulnerable.   ...

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What oil analysts would like to know about the Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia is can it deliver. This is the Saudis big effort to sustain and increase oil production as other fields are aging and declining. The Saudis would like to see it add 1.2 million barrels a day to its current production of 11 million barrels a day. no date is set for when this oil field will come on stream and how much of the 1.2 million barrels a day will become reality. The Khurais field has been sitting there for many years while the Saudis tapped the Ghawar field just 60 miles away because of the complexity of the Ghawar field which situated deep within the rocky layers of the earth and dunes. Its been described as a hard sponge compared to the wet sponge that Ghawar is. The natural pressure is not enough to bring the oil up so natural gas or filtered salt water would have to be used. As natural gas is needed for soaring power generation needs filtered salt water will be brought from over 120 miles away from the Persian Gulf through pipes to Khurais and more than 100 injection wells have to be drilled so that 2.3 million barrels a day can be pumped down in a manner that would push the oil up but not kill an oil wellby going through a rocky fissure. All this has to understood through geologic mapping of 2700 square miles down to the microdetail for an area the size of Connecticut so that nothing goes wrong. 2.8 million 3-dimensional images of underground strata to trace any fractures in the rock that might cause trouble and building of models to simulate how the oil field may respond to water injection. The production would have to be monitored from Dhawan where the central monitoring facilites are for Aramco. Aramco the Saudi Oil company brought in for oil field services Foster Wheeler as project manager, Halliburton for drilling wells, Eni SpA's Saipem unit for water injection work, in the plan developed in 2005 with estimated cost of $6 billion. Halliburton is drilling more than 300 wells that go over a mile deep and then branch out horizontally, and 125 water injection wells. Nansen Saleri who heade reservoir management for Aramco and headed the Khurais revitalization effort is now running his own firm in Houston. He described it - the trick is to understand Khurais down to the smallest detail. This is a picture of the complexity and the resulting uncertainties of Khurais. A former head of Aramco oil exploration Mr. Husseini who retired 5 years ago says its quite possible that Aramco may achieve its target of 1.2 million barrels a day but isn't sure that production can be sustained at this level and what it might cost. Khuransiyah project was expected to generate half million barrels a day by 2007 en but is a year off schedule and many projects are running late from a shortage of steel and manpower. It used to cost $4000 to add one barrel of capacity through the 1990's now its estimated by experts to cost closer to $16,000 for a barrel added. So when will Khurais come on stream? And will the even more difficult Manifa field in the Persian Gulf come onstream? Its not certain. meantime oil reached 119 dollars a barrel. But analysts will be sure to watch this one and the new fields in Brazilian offshore waters to bring prices down just as conservation kicks in and global demand slips a bit from the super heated growth of the last few years especially from Asia. ...

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Russia is embarking on a huge wave of infrastructure spending and construction of roads, airports and railways. Russia is planning to raise about $1 trillion over the next 10 years to for infrastructure investment with 80% of it coming from private sources. Russia is planning to construct 39000 miles of new roads and 5300 miles of railways by 2015. The first major project is the Western high speed diameter near St Petersburg n eight lane 28 mile expressway that will link St Petersburg with expressways to Helsinki and Moscow by 2015. By early next year the local government will select one of 4 international groups, Bechtel, Bouygues of France, Deutsche Bank and a fourth group. The winning consortium would work under an arrangement that it will operate the expressway for 30 years charging tolls starting at about $1.60 per car. For foreign investors the expressways as toll highways can generate reliable returns that are better than the equity markets considering the risks in equity markets, and this is how the toll highways would be financed. There is some risk involved though for the investors because toll highways is a new concept for drivers in Russia, and construction costs may go up significantly if an investment boom takes shape (cement prices doubled in the past year and are the highest in Europe) which would cut into returns. But the investment community is looking at it as an opportunity considering the number of American and European investors showing interest. Also with Russia's high growth rates well into the future just as in China and India, a growing middle class and growing automobile numbers, this should be a decent bet for investors. ...