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US president Biden's 2024 Budget places great emphasis on aid to workers and families in the US and shores up the Medicare hospital-insurance trust fund. He will do this by raising taxes on the wages, investment gains and self-employment income of people making more than $400,000 a year. Additional savings come from increasing the drugs on which Medicare can negotiate prices from 20 to 50 drugs.  Childcare- families making less than $200,000 a year will get subsidized child health care, the lowest income families paying nothing. Housing- Building and preserving 2 million housing units. Series of tax credits to make buying homes more affordable. College education- Reducing the cost of going to education with $12 billion allocated for this. Offering tution free community college. Family and Medical Leave- Federal paid family and medical leave program. Retirees- a $2000 cap on out of pocket cost of prescription drugs for retirees. Reduced taxes for under $400,000 income households- This would be done without increasing the deficits to extend the tax reduction from the 2017 tax cuts to households making less than $400,000 a year.     ...

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There are about 181,000 homeless in California one third of the total in the US. This $6.4 billion bond issuance for borrowing funds was approved by just over 50% of the vote. It will go to create more affordable housing so badly needed in California's out of control housing prices. People tended to think nothing works and out of apathy did not vote. But the scale of the problem required effort at the state level or federal level with funding in the tens of billions of dollars for affordable housing. This is the first time that this has happened even though Silicon Valley and capital markets have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in dubious companies and projects that have contributed little to the standard of living and ease of living of the American people, including essential infrastructure and health, education services. The dilapidated and crumbling infrastructure, of subways, streets and bridges in New York City is another aspect of the same problem of serious, serious lack of affordable housing in California. It also creates the kind of class divisions in society that FDR-Truman-Kennedy sought to remove since the 1930's. ...

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The paradox during the opioid crisis of American companies conducting business and trade in and with China on a magnitude never seen before in history disassociated from their own neighborhoods in the US is nowhere more evident than in this crisis. A similar paradox between the government in China disassociated from American communities and local stores that import its products and keep workers employed in China in the case of China. And the paradox of the American government allowing any action whatsoever of this type that affects communities in the US and continuing business and trade as normal exists today. It has the impact of eroding public confidence in the relationship between two countries even as it damages the fragile situation of communities in the US hit by lack of investment in infrastructure, in manufacturing, health, and following the pandemic in incomes. It shows the danger of business and trade operating in a vacuum or compartmentalized not aware of everything that is happening in societies and communities that surround it. In any case it is the communities and the land that always exist even as businesses trade patterns change, or take different forms, and some disappear. ...

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In another sign of how the capital allocation system is failing America and how capital markets are malfunctioning, this report in WSJ shows how capital of $346 billion in 2021, much of it needed for vital investments in renovating crumbling US infrastructure, in chips and science, in education, is being wasted. Vital needs are being ignored in America in education when only one thirds of eight graders are passing NAEP test reading comprehension in the US. No one talks about it yet it is a fact that cannot be ignored. Yet underinvestment in education, health, infrastructure and public services happens as wasteful investment takes place as hundreds of billions of capital is diverted into ventures that have little meaning. Shown here is a robotic pizza maker that is going out of business. The Internal Rate of Return for venture firms was negative 7% in the third quarter of 2022. As president Biden said in The State of the Union this year "free markets without competition is not capitalism it is extortion." There is no competition in the planned misallocation of this type that fails common sense,  American families and children,  as well as financial rates of return. ...

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Mental health can play a part in the life of athletes, and in sports competition. Injuries are part of this, death in the family is part of this. Mikaela Shiffrin's hopes were dashed at the Beijing Olympics in Alpine skiing.Her father Jeff Shiffrin had accompanied her through every Olympics in her skiing career and was always at the finishing line. After his death before the Olympics in Beijing, Mikaela Shiffrin was told by a German fan that she subconsciously avoided getting to the finishing line because she would not be seeing her father there.  Dina Asher-Smith is a British sprinter whose hopes at the Tokyo Olympics were dashed because of a hamstring injury. Yet she bounced back and says she had time afterwards to grapple with her emotions- "Before Tokyo I did'nt have time to grapple with my emotions, you can't be crying  your way through rehab," she said. She competes now with a different frame of mind- "you can't run fast with baggage- you gotta throw it out" she says in an interview with The Guardian's Sean Ingle. ...

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These simulations show the  importance of flattening the curve for coronavirus especially the steep jump in the curve when it grows exponentially as people mingle in crowded environments, on trains and subways, and in public gatherings of more than 10 people. This is shown here in four different simulations in the Washington Post. Social distancing and quarantine worked in China, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea. Though the attempted quarantine simulation here does not cover the situations in China, Taiwan and Singapore where quarantine has worked and was the only way to tackle the coronavirus in time to do least damage. Additional simulations would show the way it was limited in Singapore through contact tracing and mandated staying at home for all who have come in contact with affected persons. And in South Korea a simulation could show how this worked through containment by testing and limiting spread, or China by an effective quarantine or lockdown of a city or province.  The basic idea is to limit contact and separate so that intermingling is restricted to as few places as possible for a limited period during which health authorites can achieve a controlled situation through systemwide organized efforts.  ...

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Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker gets an order in with a number of Chinese manufacturers for supply of over a million N95 masks. The hard hit east coast states of the U.S. face a critical shortage of N95 masks for health care workers in hospitals. The problem is getting them shipped from Shenzen, China to to Boston's Logan airport. Someone suggested using the Patriots football team's Boeing 767 jet. Robert Kraft, Patriot's owner agreed and the passenger plane was converted to carry cargo. The Chinese consulate in New York stays open over the weekend to process the flight crew's visas. Approval for landing without the crew being asked to quarantine for 14 days was another hurdle. Chinese authorites agreed to permit the landing for about 3 hours to pick up cargo only, with the flight crew staying on the plane. Chinese internet company Tencent sent some of its employees to help prepare the shipment and send it to Shenzen airport. The Boeing 767 makes a stop in Alaska before flying to Shenzen and completes the flight back to Logan airport in Boston. Governor Baker and the Patriot's Mr. Kraft send 300,000 of the masks to New York. ...

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The Nation as a whole falls behind other nations, and becomes weaker as a result of children being asked to absorb learning on empty stomachs or inadequate nutrition. This is one of the major advances of modern civilization and which differentiated Europe and the US from Asian countries. It is now reversed as Europe and the US are cutting back while India and other Asian countries are backing free School lunches. India has gone one step ahead to destroy centuries of malnutrition for children and families backed a plan that provides free and subsidized grain, vegetables to every household of 1.2 billion people. The starvation and malnutrition are seen in India as a stigma that Europeans and Americans had about India an how they looked down upon India for sanitation and malnutrition. These are twin enemies in India and China for a reason both because of health of children and seen as a ticket to oppression by foreigners who ruled parts of India and China for centuries. One of the most remarkable achievements in school lunches that changed the face of Madras State (Tamilnadu) is the free lunch program for children in teh 1950's and 1960's under Tamil chief minister Kamaraj. ...

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Dulles with closeness to Churchill assumed a benevolent perception of the British Empire in Asia even with the enormous suffering and lack of development in China and India from the policies of the British. Such perceptions continued under Kissinger/Nixon, and Reagan/Rumsfeld. John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State during the Cold War. He stated his ideas in Foreign Affairs in 1957 that were colored heavily by the China conflict (1949) Korean conflict (1950)  the Vietnam conflict (1954), the Hungarian Revolution (1956), and the struggle with the Soviet Union. Many of his ideas continued through the 1960's to the 1980's determining US policy in Vietnam, towards China and India, and in Rumsfeld's policies in the Middle East that involved the US in local and religious wars.  Dulles sought to respond to the aspirations of colonized nations in Asia - China, India, Vietnam- but lacked an understanding of the hundreds of years of colonial rule and suppression of freedom, increasing poverty by lack of investment in education, health and industry, faced by these countries in dealings with the British Empire.    ...

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Steps the Modi government in India is taking in the 2020 Budget to tackle slowing growth include relaxing the fiscal deficit target from 3% to 3.5% of GDO, selling public sector companies to generate more funds, so that additional investment can be done in infrastructure, rural development, education and health care. Growth of the economy is expected to drop to 5% for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2020.  A weak banking sector with sharp decline in credit, and decline in the auto sales by 20%, have worsened the decline in growth.  Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman, the Finance Minister, said that this budget is designed to "boost Indian incomes, and enhance their purchasing power." The Indian slowdown comes in the middle of a global slowdown, with China's growth expected to be 4.9% in the first quarter of 2020. Growth was further weakened after the effects of the coronavirus lockdown on parts of China, disruption of supply chains, partial closure of businesses. ...

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The UK government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, says coronavirus testing has not been scaled quickly enough. Public health experts warn that Downing Street is in the position to face "an unforgiving reckoning." The UK has done 5400 tests per million population, the U.S. 8894 tests per million, and Germany 15,700 per million, according to data from Worldometer website. UK got off to a slow start.  Experts at Imperial College, London, say a major problem is the lack of contact trace, test, isolate. Contact tracing having fallen behind. The government is relying too much they say on an app from Google and Apple to do the tracing because for this kind of work humans are needed, "boots on the ground" are needed. South Korea and Taiwan have successfully used people to do the contact tracing by using access to cellphone carrier data that was made possible from protocols established in earlier MERS crisis. ...

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As the virus toll mounts Japan's prime minister Abe announces a nationwide emergency on April 15. He delayed action to avoid effects on the economy of a lockdown. Japan is shifting to taking stronger action after seeing infections double every 8 days to reach 9000. Abe says person to person contact has to go down by 80%. The measures are not a lockdown as in the UK and are voluntary. Total deaths are 136 in Japan. A Kyodo News poll shows about 80% of the public thinks the moves comes too late. 

Schools are shut and companies have closed operations. Flights were restricted and visitors to Japan dropped 93% in March. These voluntary actions as well as a cultural advantage in people used to wearing face masks, is likely to help Japan through this health crisis. The emergency will cover a holiday period, and is through May 6. The government will give every household $1000 as a way to offset income lost.

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Some countries such as France are increasing kilometres of bike lanes in Paris and suburbs. Traffic has dropped in Paris and other cities to a point where people living in cities are looking for ways to preserve some of the good things from the public health crisis such as the quieter streets, less or no pollution, less traffic congestion. Some cities are closing areas on their rever fronts so that people have more room to walk and exercize. Cities doing this are Oakland, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia in the U.S., and Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver in Canada. Cycling and walking is becoming popular.  In Berlin motor vehicle lanes are being replaced with bicycle lanes in many streets. In Bogota 35 kms. of auto traffic laneshave been converted using cones into bicycle lanes. In March the mayor of Mexico City suggested 130 kms of temporary bicycle lanes. This report in the Guardian says London is one of the cities that have not acted quickly to make these changes for larger bike use. ...

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In Britain 6500 nursing homes are seen as "not fit for purpose" of elderly care. They are now seen as possibly closing without an investment of $15 billion pounds to make them fit for use. This also shows the neglect of elderly care in countries such as the UK, and the U.S. A clear distortion of priorities when so much money is being wasted in misallocation on the fringes of tech and elsewhere, without money for basic infrastructure and basic services. It also shows a mistaken set of priorities that have taken over in recent decades,a lack of decent respect for people as they get older in life. Countries such as Brazil neglected basic sanitation in the country worsening health and epidemics while building large soccer stadiums in the north and financing the Olympics. U.S. Britain, E.U. neglected elderly care and infrastructure, in the tech led booms of the past two decades, and pushed money into the wrong places through a distorted set of priorities. ...

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Requests, consensus, and social pressure played a bigger role than just strict rules and penalties in controlling the virus in Japan. By contrast in Germany states imposed strict rules and fines, some consensus, a better equipped hospital system, added contact tracing, to limit the spread. More than 100 industries in Japan have drawn up new guidelines for reopening to minimize risks. Prime minister Abe said recently " Now we are going to venture into a new arena. Therefore we need to create a new lifestyle from now on. We need to change our way of thinking." The new social consensus on the best way to behave outdoors and at work is the way Japan is tackling reopening.  The effort is focused on avoiding high risk situations the 3 C's crowded, closed spaces, and close contact, close conversations. Japan started with a fumbled response but gradually the right spirit and social distancing caught on. The universal health care system helped Japan detect cases early, even in the remote rural areas. ...

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Prime minister Morrison becomes the first leader to meet prime minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan after Mr. Shinzo Abe resigned for health reasons. Mr. Suga was Chief Cabinet Secretary under Abe for 8 years. The 2 countries have agreed to strengthen defense relations by removing legal and administrative barriers for their militaries entering each others country. This improves joint military training and quick support in a crisis. Earlier in November Japan and Australia joined India and U.S. in joint naval exercizes after the 4 foreign ministers met in Tokyo. Small islands in the East China Sea controlled by Japan have seen more frequent patrols by Chinese Coast Guard. China claims these islands. Genron NPO shows almost 90% of Japanese people now have a negative view of China. Australia has acted on concerns of domestic interference by China. India has faced expansion along its Himalayan border with China by units of the Chinese armed forces. India has also developed closer ties with Australia to build its maritime presence in the Indian Ocean region. ...

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Elections in December in Britain are rare, with this election in 2019 in Britain being the first in one hundred years. It also poses big risks. There is the flu season, the National Health Service being stretched to provide services, the weather, and voter turnout.  It poses risks for Tories and Labour, and Boris Johnson's bid for Leave seats held by Labour is a bold one that could turn out either way. Labour plans to run on a positive program of change and not just the Brexit issue. Johnson will campaign without being able to have Brexit behind him. The close association with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cummings brash style could also play a part in the election creating another level of uncertainty. Mr. Hammond, a leading Tory rebel says he is not sure if he wants to see the Tories win, adding another level of uncertainty. The SNP in Scotland hope to take Tory seats in this election and the Lib Democrats are campaigning on canceling Brexit altogether to get Tory Remain seats. ...

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This analysis of coal use using graphs shows a clear move away from coal in the world, except for two growth markets China and India which account for 60% of the increase in coal use since 2008. India has gone black in its shift to increasing use of coal. China has begun the shift away from coal to address the smog over large urban areas, poor air quality and health impact of coal use. Because China used five times the coal used by India in 2017, the overall impact in China and India is showing a shift away from coal to hydropower, other renewables including solar energy. It is likely that India will make the shift following China's example in the future. 

The trend is clear when one looks at the incremental terawatt hour and where it comes from. The shift is clear to renewables, hydropower, and non fossil uses in the rest of the World and China which account for most of the coal use in the world.

 

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India has done well with low cost, scalable, low tech solutions in the past. This is also being done now to tackle the coronavirus. This is being used to support what may be the largest lockdown in history. Everyone is expected to remain at home. Only shops selling essential items such as food and pharmaceuticals are allowed to remain open. All but essential offices are closed, with workers told to stay home. Indelible ink that takes two weeks to wash away was widely available following the election. It is being widely used with high numbers of infections having the back of their hand stamped "Home Quarantined." After India announced a nationwide lockdown all wireless carriers were asked by the government to  insert a taped coronavirus health advisory that comes on after callers dial and before the call connects.Th recorded message talks about how to protect against the coronavirus. Prime time news shows are interrupted three times a day for back to back news conferences from the prime minister, and local officials.   ...

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Feldstein is back after his proposal that the government step in with low cost loans to families thatwould help homeowners reduce what they owed the bank by 20%, for those homeowners who are close to negative equity but not there yet. This is needed to prevent the next big wave of defaults on loans, from homeowners who see that walking away from their loans is a rational solution once they reach the point of negative equity. Feldstein hammers away at some critical points that point out that reducing rates risks more than it accomplishes. Food prices globally do not benefit from lower rates, as governments may have to raise interest rates to cool inflation in their economies. Rising food prices threatens the livelihoods of poor and working classes in the global economy, especially in developing countries of Asia and Africa. It also does little to stimulate the economy in the USA and actually helps increase inflation for commodities like oil and food products. So why is the Fed lowering rates even though the costs are more significant than the benefits. Lowering rates would be counterintuiive in this situation as Feldstein points out. Bernanke's response would be that its a temporary crisis response, lower interest rates helps financial firms restructure their debt and helps them restore health to their balance sheets in the fragile financial markets, where the financial architecture itself is being questioned. And the immediate crisis was in the financial markets, whereas some other solutions could be found for the damage this caused to the overall world economy in terms of inflation. Feldstein quotes estimates of inlation at 4% in the last 12 months and of 4.8% this year. The inflation rate in China is estimated much higher at about 8.5% and has become the focus of government efforts including relaxing the exchange rate, as the rise in prices especially of food affects the large working poor in China. Another aspect of lower interest rates is that lower rates surely would do little when there is such a large inventory of unsold homes. Significant also is the fact that lowering rates for fed funds by 3% from this time last year, has done little to lower mortgage interest rates which have come down only by 0.5%. So it does not give much relief to homeowners either. So is lowering rates a medicine that comes with a lot of side effects that you adminster only because the patient is in a critical condition, as the financial and credit markets appeared to Bernanke and Paulson that weekend only a few weeks ago? Probably so,which takes one back to Feldstein's main point. That main point is that the only way to get to solutions that strike at the core of this crisis is to help homeowners avoid default on their home mortgage loans, by reducing the loan amount by something like 20%, through government loans which can later be recouped to some extent. It cautions the Fed to use the medicine of lower rates sparingly, and urges the market participants and the public that insists that there be no "bailouts" to come to their senses, and accept that their will be tolerable losses for all if there are not to be intolerable losses for all....

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CEO Shigetaka Komori of Fujifilm Holdings Corp. describes how Fuji responded to the technological changes that made photographic film obsolete. Kodak recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Fuji made the transition to other products to cope with the change. Komori became president in 2000. He says one of the responses was to reduce costs. In 2005 and 2006 Fujifilm reduced costs by $2.5 billion mostly in photographic film. Fuji's management asked the question what technologies the company possessed and how they could be applied in new business areas. This led to new businesses in making the films used for making LCD panels used on PC's, televisions and other devices. These materials generate 10% of sales. The other areas are in medical equipment, drugs and cosmetics. Fujifilm acquired health care companies Toyama Chemical for $1.4 billion in 2008 and agreed to buy SonoSite for $995 in Jan. 2012. Health care now makes up 12% of sales.

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Abbott Labs acquisition of Piramal Healthcare for $3.7 billion gives it 7% of the Indian market. Acccording to IMS Health emerging markets drug sales for 17 countries went up from $42 billion in 2000 to 126 billion in 2009. Anlysts expect 70% of global growth to come from these areas in next 5 years.

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The CEO of the New York Times and the former director general of the BBC, takes a look at the public discourse in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and in the Brexit campaign, and finds some troubling changes. The use of words that can eaily be picked up by Twitter and social media to attack opponents, the complete disregard for facts, and outright attempts to denigrate and destroy using rhetorical tactics, and a section of the public that has turned away from the facts or is disinterested in facts, is deeply troubling for Mark Thompson. When the public discourse fails, then the politics as a whole starts to collapse, says Thompson. We are children of the enlightenment, says Thompson, and were taught to look underneath statements to discern the truth. This is a crisis in public discourse. Worse it is one in which truth telling by people who say they are outsiders and tell it like it is, is not about telling the truth. Which is what makes it so dangerous. Thompson cites the statement by Michael Gove that "people in this country have had enough of experts," as another dangerous sign. He says it is time that experts make themselves understandable and talk in a way the public can understand. The media needs to explain issues in clear ways, and professional policymakers language of discourse needs to be conveyed in better ways that the public can grasp, in which the Brexit Remain campaign failed, says Thompson. Its important to acknowledge the problem, as the health of our democracies depends on finding solutions to what has happened in 2015-2016 to change the public discourse and let it deteriorate to unimaginable levels.  ...

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The asset bubble may be due to the huge infusion of liquidity in the economy. This inflates the value of financial wealth in stocks relative to real wealth in goods and services and businesses that produce them. Industrial production is down but stock prices are up. This leads to distortions that can show up elsewhere such as in the currency markets with depreciating dollar or in the stimulus being withdrawn too early.