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Covaxin vaccine from Bharat Biotech in India is found to be 81% effective at protecting people from coronavirus in clinical trials. India's first Made in India vaccine for coronavirus will play a major role in India's effort to produce enough vaccine to vaccinate 1.2 billion people. With enough vaccine supplies coming from many Indian pharmaceutical makers who will now have access to Bharat Biotech's science and vaccine making technologies. The Indian government has stepped in to coordinate this effort. Covaxin and Covishield will play a major role when new vaccine supplies come into the field in July to December 2021. The target is to vaccinate 1.2 billion people by December 2021. This is an important moment for Indian science in the field of medicine.

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This report in WSJ says industry and Boeing officials now increasingly believe that workers at Boeing factory reinstalled a plug in 737 Max 9 jet but failed to put back the bolts. The door plug blew off 16000 feet over Oregon leading to an emergency landing. Boeing is affected by lack of good quality practices and worker training for quality standards for several years. The question remains why this sort of defect is not detected in the final inspection detail checklist, with a second final inspection and third for overall quality. And why the plane is not checked again for obvious defects by the airline when it receives the new plane.The cost of this is minimal compared to the cost of compensating airlines for losses in some way and loss of customer loyalty.

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The picture on the cost of living action is mixed. In this report some Easterners in Pennsylvania and New York are shown taking loans to pay for groceries at high prices. In Michigan trips to the supermarkets show a modest increase of 1% in prices and prices coming down. Overall the faster the situation the better it is for working people and a top priority for president Joe Biden. Biden has approached it on a macro and micro level with a range of actions to bring cost of living down for people, from action on student debt for 5 million people, from health care cost cuts setting a ceiling on what health care cost would be, to cutting costs in areas such as housing, groceries and gas through concerted action across the economy.

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Women were one of the hardest hit groups during the pandemic. Not only were they forced to leave work but also had to shoulder more childcare responsibilities. About 30% of women who changed jobs during the pandemic got new jobs that paid 30% higher with salary and bonus, according to the Conference Board. In 2022 women are coming back to the workplace with better wage gains to makeup for the momentum lost during the worst part of the pandemic period.

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A sharp decrease in China's contacts with the outside world as a result of its zero tolerance covid policies during the pandemic, is the topic of this report in The Hindu. This has happened with Chinese people to people contact with Europe, US, and India which is sharply down from before the pandemic. This is also happening as supply chains are being rebuilt in a new direction of being shorter and culturally closer for Europe and the US.

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Chile's new Constitution draft document of 499 pages scales back mining, decentralises power and grants social rights. Rewriting the Constitution was one of the demands of protests that lasted for months leading to the election of president Boric. After decades under a constitution written by Gen. Pinochet that favored mining companies and industry Chileans protested the way pensions were organized and the way Chile was run that neglected the working class and middle class families.

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Yannis Palaiologos of Katherimini newspaper in Greece gives a failing grade to Pasok and the New Democratic party in Greece for letting Greece get into the debt crisis and not taking the action needed in tax collection to protect the interests of the upper classes. Palaiologos says the burden of servicing the huge debt has fallen disproportionately on the lower and working classes, which is the reason for the rapid rise of Syriza in Greece and its decisive win of the popular vote.

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In Britain, in India and in the EU, the race is between the vaccination drive and the infection case growth, as each country and region takes steps to accelerate and organize production, distribution and administering of the vaccine to all parts of the population.

The latest late stage trial for Astra Zeneca vaccine in US, Chile and Peru, offers new hope. It is shown in that trial that it is 100% effective in prevention of hospitalization and deaths, and 79% effective in prevention of symptomatic illness from the coronavirus. It is also seen as safe by experts as it goes for FDA regulatory approval in the US. It is provided at cost, and storage is in ordinary refrigerators for long periods, with production in India of large quantities of the vaccine, making it a vaccine that could reach large parts of the world's population.

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Cable news in structural decline says this report in NYT. It is particularly severe at CNN News. Viewers are declining rapidly dropping 27% in the second quarter for a year ago, and down to 639,000 people in prime time. This trails MSNBC where viewers have declined by 23%. Fox News viewer numbers show a 1% increase.

Viewers looking for discriminating and in depth news have other alternatives including online editions of major newspapers around the world.

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The battle of Dien Bien Phu has another significance as looking back it was not the cold war conflict with the soviets but a struggle for freedom and independence from French colonial rule. The conflict cast a shadow over the Kennedy administration, and after John Kennedy lost his life in Dallas, led to a loss of Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier, ideas that were lost for 4 decades of mediocre or inexperienced leaders from Nixon to Clinton, Bush and Obama and Trump that embroiled America in distant wars and wasted resources needed at home for infrastructure and needs of the people. FR24 looks back at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu 1954, that gave Vietnam freedom from colonial rule and independence. The French ended their rule and Vietnam was divided into 2 states. The US was drawn into the struggle by support and advisers to the new government in the South. Just 6 months after Dien Bien Phu the French were faced with another conflict with the Algerian war of independence that went on till 1962. In the South Vietnam situation it happened in the backdrop of the struggle of the US with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic founded by Mao in 1949, called the Cold War. In 1956 Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian revolution. It is in this context that president Kennedy was pulled into the conflict of North and South Vietnam. Would Kennedy in a second term have handled it differently than Lyndon Johnson who with the Tonkin resolution had America drawn into the conflict left behind by the colonial French power. It is possible Kennedy would have handled it by consulting Congress and the people and looked for solutions outside Cold War conflict. The result and the end of Kennedy's term led to the vision of the New Frontier and Kennedy's imaginative leadership being forgotten with a series of mediocre presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump for three decades leaving America into expanded wars in Cambodia, Star Wars competition wit the Soviets, Iraq, Afghanistan and wasted America's resources, neglecting its infrastructure and needs of its people in health and education. ...

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The constructive contribution made by the G-20 meetings of leaders towards building agreement on economic and other policies for peace and progress in the global economy. The meetings were especially useful for coordinating policy and addressing issues arising in the global economy after the 2008 financial crisis. Here Li Baodong, China's vice minister for international organizations and conferences, international economic affairs, describes the path ahead: IMF reforms implementation, better coordination of macroeconomic policies, pursuing the anti-protectionist and free trade policies with further support to the WTO and ministerial MC9 meeting in Bali in Dec. 2013, and infrastructure financing proposals for developing countries on the agenda at the St Petersburg, Russia, G-2- meeting in Sept. 2013. Baodong says the mechanism called the Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth as part of the G-20 meetings is a major achievement. Each G-20 economy submits it macroeconomic policy plan for a Mutual Assessment Process under this arrangement. The progress from the Bretton Woods financial architecture to the new arrangement- from the G-6 to the G-20 to include developing countries from India to Mexico and Brazil- is another major achievement, not fully recognized by the public, says Baodong. Interestingly Baodong makes particular mention to global rebalancing, rather than pushing what he calls the impossible task of increasing demand to get growth. This is a realization coming to China's economic policymakers under the new Jinping-Keqiang administration after the overly aggressive effort to stimulate demand in the 2009-2011 Stimulus, and the ensuing financial problems in the banking and credit system. It is indicative of the policy shift and its implementation underway in China in 2013-2015....

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Mr. Giuseppe Conte, Italy's prime minister in the governing coalition of Five Star and Northern League parties was ignored by party leaders. He now finds himself leader of the Five Star Movement with which his views were aligned without being a member. In a new coalition of the establishment Democratic party and the Five Star party of Beppe Grillo after the earlier coalition collapsed Mr. Conte finds a new role as a leader.  Once an obscure lawyer who was looking for a job teaching job at Rome University even when he was prime minister Mr. Conte became popular with his speech in parliament strongly critical of Mr. Salvini.

This also gives Italy the chance to improve relations with the European Union.

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A study by the Pew Research center shows minorities are the ones hardest hit in the millions of foreclosures taking place in the US. Counties with black or Latino majorites and the New York region are hit severely. What appeared to be a boon five years ago as black home ownership rose sharply after decades of discriminatory lending and zoning practices, has now turned into a curse with families losing homes to foreclosure, neighborhoods seeing increasing crime and declining house values, and renters being evicted. Lenders like Mozilo's Countrywide and other similiar lenders simply used the idea of home ownership as a flag to get political support for a wild west in lending practices, which allowed predatory lending to take place in the deregulatory atmosphere of the time. See the link to the impact on minorities. Nowhere has it been shown more pointedly that prudence and character in leaders in all areas is the essential conditon for progress, making free enterprise a necessary condition but subject to this essential condition, than in the way the housing and foreclosure crisis is hitting the American and the world economy in so many ways. This is evident in neighborhoods like this one on 145th st. in Jamaica, Queens, whaere black households making more than $68,000 a year are five times as likely to hold high interest subprime mortgages as whites of similiar incomes. Defaults occur three times as often in minority census tracts as mostly white ones. And 85% of the worst hit neighborhoods have majority of black and Latino homeowners. Which may also explain why there is not agroundswell of support for serious government foreclosure prevention measures like bankruptcy legislation and other legislation such as that suggested by Martin Feldstein and others for homeowners nearly or already under water, when faced with fierce lobbying by the banks and financial institutions. Consumer advocates say years ago many banks drew red lines around black neighborhoods and refused to lend, then as deregulation became the rage five years ago, these banks under unscruplous leaders targeted these neighborhoods for subprime lending. A dozen banks and lending companioes that made big profits from subprime loans accounted for half the loans given to the New York region'sblack middle -income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, a case of reverse redlining that the N.A.A.C.P. says in its lawsuit against these lenders. Housing and Urban Development Sec. Shaun Donovan, in aspeech to New York University said that 33% of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, went to borrowers with credit scoresthat should have qualitifed them for conventional prevailing-rate loans. For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, says the NYT, a difference of three percentage points - a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans- tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30 year loan. ...

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This is an high exceptional report in the NYT by Rosenthal, Fitzsimmons and Laforgia on the crumbling infrastructure in the U.S., taking the New York subway system as one of the most glaring examples of this failure of public administration since World War II. The woes of the system amount to a kind of defunding of the subway system for update, maintenance and technological improvement to meet the doubled ridership since 1950. Read this to understand why this is happening throughout the U.S. for clues to the possible causes, and what needs to be done. As this is now in the hands of ordinary citizens who suffer daily from the inefficiencies, delays, and rundown conditions on the subways compared to other subway systems in Europe, Japan and China. One report in the media in Nov. 2017 says Japan's Shinkansen railways apologized to customers for a train leaving 24 seconds early. Small details get accounted for in other countries, whereas they are ignored here in one of the largest cities in the world. A former New York transit system president from the 1970's calls it "heartbreaking" making him mad when he thinks about what is happening in the way New York subways are run. Financial deals have saddled the New York subway system with added $5 billion in interest on debt in return for  short term cash infusion. The result is that about 17% of the budget goes to paying interest on debt. In 1997 this was about 6%. So that needed maintenance and capital projects suffer. The New York subway system has only a 65% on time record,  the worst of any subway system in the world. And technology dates back to the 1930's with a signals system from that period,  says this New York Times report. Maintenance needs have suffered under the Cuomo administration says this report.  The system has suffered an enormous stagnation, leaving it in a shape that has not changed for decades. There are fewer miles of track than in 1950 after the war, while the ridership of 5.7 million today has doubled. The budget for maintenance has barely budged from 25 years ago. This report says the politicians who ran the city and the state of New York bear much of the responsibility for the crumbling infrastructure of the subways in New York.   ...

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The former commander of the NATO US forces in Europe 2014-2018, Gen. Ben Hodges, says the war could end in 2023 with air support to Ukraine. Hodges tells DW.com's Ines Pohl, that the only red line for Washington's support in Ukraine is "boots on the ground." Hodges says Ukraine must retake Crimea to maintain the international rules based order and the UN Charter.

About the Russian offensive in Feb 2023 Hodges says Russia was attempting to "surge" a new offensive but it does not have the capability to launch a "major' one. "They don't have the armored forces, the ability to break through," and that it will not change the "overall operational environment in Ukraine." This is the first serious assessment of the new phase in the war on an overall basis looking at the larger picture of Russian and Ukraine plus outside support capabilities. 

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PM Modi describes situation of Indian Rail from Himalayas to Ceylon after 1947. The budget is now six times that in 2014. Action was taken to include Rail India under government of India's budget so that the government could directly invest in modernization of Indian Rail as top priority. Parts of northeast were not included in Indian Rail. Today the entire country is integrated in a modern network for the 21st century with Vande Bharat high speed trains. It opens possibilities of setting up these rail networks in other parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe with new technology trains at a fraction of the cost. This was the vision of John F. Kennedy in his New Frontier of the vast potential of India when he told the US Senate on March 25, 1958- "India today represents as great a hope, as commanding a challenge as Western Europe did in 1947- and our people are still, I am confident equal to the effort."   ...

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This report in the WSj looks at the Silicon valley approach of pursuing rapid torrential growth at any cost. It shows the victims as investors looking for outsize returns to the point of turning their attention from the facts showing the products as highly hyped improperly as tech for WeWork or having health risks in alternative smoking products in the case of Juul Labs Inc. Both company CEO's were asked to resign. This discussion is on the the limited number of new ideas as the tech really creative stuff  peters out and the tens of billions of dollars pursuing a few ideas even if they as in the case of WeWork basically a real estate company subleasing space were not really tech. The neglect of top priorities in infrastructure, in priorities for health, education and other pressing needs are a result of the misallocation of capital by capital markets structures of funds, banks and investors. Juul started at Stanford University and quickly raised $14 billion. Soon three million high schoolers in the U.S. were using the vaping product as e-cigarettes causing alarmed parents to bring up the issue and the Food and Drug Administration to look into it. As the tech boom results in fewer new ideas practices fail to change in the allocation of capital and wasted capital, resulting in gross neglect of priorities for infrastructure, health and education, wide gaps in income.   ...

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Three CEO's have come and gone at Boeing in a couple of years. CEO backgrounds in finance did not work, backgrounds in engineering also failed. Boeing is searching for a new CEO and this time what is sought for is a worker centric mentality from the heart and inborn that identifies with what workers go through on the manufacturing factory floor. A picture emerges about the cost of missing quality culture at Boeing, and the cost of a culture of pushing planes as fast off the manufacturing floor as possible. The Guardian reports that Boeing said it would use $4-$4.5 billion due to crisis costs after a Jan 5 accident of a nearly new Max 735 aircraft and other accidents. This includes costs related to regulatory scrutiny and costs related to lower aircraft production and lower deliveries and is almost the entire gross profit of Boeing in 2019 pre pandemic year. What this shows that quality culture is basic to manufacturing and it starts with respect for dignity of workers shown through training, education, wages and benefits and a worker centric culture replacing a culture of managers addressing purely financial aspects of the business. Instead of saying lets take care of the financial aspects of the business, saying lets take care of the process of manufacturing  so that a good process centred on workers on their own motivation taking responsibility on the factory floor that will produce good financial results for the company as a whole.   ...

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The Republican House health care bill AHCA  keeps some some of the more popular parts of the Affordable Care Act such as not taking pre-existing conditions to deny insurance, keeping children covered on parents insurance till age 26, and increase contributions to Health Savings accounts. It is different in that the expansion of Medicaid at 138% of poverty rate threshold is rolled back. Age is used for tax credits instead of income, hitting those approaching Medicare age harder. The maximum charged to older people is now set at  5 times compared to 3 times what young have to pay. In general the Republican bill is seen as targeting the elderly to keep premiums down. The elderly on low incomes are hit hardest. Fox News O'Reilly Show showed the host questioning House Republicans, citing the CBO estimates that elderly on low incomes may have to pay as much as $14,000 a year for insurance making it basically unaffordable, and 52 million Americans would be affected adversely. Large companies are no longer required to offer mandatory health insurance under the new bill. Conservatives from Freedom Caucus wanted to see the essential areas of benefits covered by the law limited to fewer than the ten areas in the Affordable Care Act. The ACHA Republican bill leaves to states to determine what are required essential benefits. At one point maternity benefits were to be dropped but this was changed to let states decide. As a result the bill is 33 votes short of the number needed for passing the house in March 2017.   Neither the Democrats Affordable Care Act or the Republican House bill of Speaker Ryan do much to tackle the real problem- the absolute amount and increases for health care dollars for treating each disease in the U.S. compared to European and other countries. As a result health care has become more of a partisan struggle between the two parties than a real effort by all to overcome the problems that have to be tackled. Republicans want to see premiums drop and keep the burden on the deficit down- but with the level of U.S. health care costs disproportionately high compared to Europe and the rest of the world the arithmetic is tough and ends up leaving out vulnerable groups such as the elderly on low incomes, thus making the whole proposition prone to fail. For the same reason the Democrats failed to keep premiums down with a wider safety net leading to calls for repeal of their version.   ...

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Greece's national statistics agency Elstat shows data indicating a rapidly deteriorating Greek economy. The unemployment rate went up to 20.9% in November, up from 18.2 % the prior month, with the total number of unemployed at 1.029 million. Industrial output declined by 11.3% in December 2011 compared to the prior year. The unemployment rate is 48% for young people ages 15-24 for November 2011 compared to 35.6% in the prior year. For women the unemployment rate was 25.4% in November, compared to 17% the prior year. In the region of Attica, which includes Athens, the unemployment rate was 21.1% in November compared to 19.2% in October, and 13.9% the prior year. This creates new concern whether austerity measures will work and whether the Greek people can go through a decade of austerity programs, with debt still at 120% of GDP in 2020 under the program designed by the EU and the IMF, or whether there are other solutions that offer more hope of recovery.

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While automakers are trying to stall legislation on higher fuel economy in Congress they are already planning large investments in engine systems that will raise fuel economy. Nardelli states Chrysler's three goals as boosting quality, improving fuel economy, and overseas presence. A $3 billion investment in engine systems is planned by Chrysler with the goal of improving fuel economy. Note that similiar investments are planned by the German companies and some of the new products are to be shown at the upcoming Frankfurt auto show. There the pressures for reducing auto emissions are building up with a strong environmental consciousness in Europe. Phil Murtaugh who headed GM's China operations before becoming Executive VP at Shanghai Automotive Industry recently will join Chrysler's team as head of Asian operations. He will stay in China and report to Michael Manley Executive VP of International Sales. Chrysler plans to export Chery cars made by Chery Automobile Company in China under its Dodge brand. Note that LaSorda and Press will both share the titles of President and vice chairman and split duties which will be a new arrangement being trued out by Cerberus....

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The Chief Correspondent of BBC News points out the dangers facing May and the British economy as the deadline of March approaches for invoking Article 50 to leave the EU and start negotiations. The possibilities of a "disorderly break" cannot be discounted, he says. There are many hurdles. The negotiations could get bogged down on the issue of settling outstanding obligations for which Britain owes 50-60 billion euros. Consumers will feel the effects of higher prices on their budgets as prices creep up. Already tech goods prices are reflecting the drop in value of the British pound. There is little solace to be found in the 6 months of steady economy following the Brexit vote as inflation has not hit consumers hard so far. Chancellor Merkel of Germany has said that there will be "no cherry picking" allowed in the negotiations. And the French right and former Gaullists have never concealed their views about Britain being on again and off again on the idea of Europe. The City of London, British business, and large parts of the Conservative Party do not favor Brexit, even the civil servants expected to implement it are skeptical, creating an additional layer of complexity and uncertainty and difficulty.Under a "disorderly break" Britain would revert back to the tariffs set under World Trade Organization arrangements. ...

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How Petraeus won support in Congress and with public opinion, while at the same time changing the nature of the effort in Iraq. His struggles with General Fallon even though he reported directly to President Bush, who wished to disengage too quickly to make adifference in the failing effort to bring security. The first effort was to bring security with the surge in troops, then to build the Iraqi forces. To keep public opinion informed about tangible achievements of modest goals such as security for ordinary Iraqis, and fewer American casualties, rather than some beacon of democracy goal for the Middle East. A detailed account by the Washington Post of how this played out in the words of key players like Petraeus, Fallon, Ambassador Crocker and others, and what it may tell one about the lessons for another very different effort in a rural mountainous backward country like Afghanistan. One that emerges is to set modest goals like security, try new approaches but with a clear eye on the field, put in younger leaders who can bing flexibility and imagination and intellect, but disengage on favorable terms that achieves these modest objectives....

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Steven Rattner, was areporter for the New York Times covering the Chrysler rescue in 1970. He is now a key person on President Obama's task force for the auto industry, looking at the rescue of GM and Chrysler 39 years later. After working as a reporter for the NYT, he worked at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, eventually starting his own privae equity firm Quadrangle. He is an important fundraiser for the Democratic party, and for Presidents Clinton and Obama. In his current position as counsellor at the Treasury, the Obama administration can use Rattner's expertise as an investment expert and his finacial savy for issues beyond the auto industry. The President decided against a car czar as he wanted to be involved in understanding and making decisions for the auto industry, which may be wise considering the importance of these decisions, and considering that this would take advantage of a number of talented people on the task force with different expertise. Rattner ses the relevance of his expertise in investing, as the decisions for GM and Chrysler can be seen as investment decisions for the government, and under what circumstances and conditions can the government make a good investment in these companies. ...

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Fed's Bernanke sees cuts and higher taxes by state and local governments combining with higher oil prices slowing the U.S. economy. He told the Citizen's Budget commisson in New York, that in the long run the most important issue in fiscal matters will be whether the composition of the federal budget serves the public interest. And in saying this he emphasized the benefits of early childhood education, preschool programs and lifelong acquisition of skills. He advised states to take anticyclical steps to avoid the impact of boom and bust spending. One way to do this is to build rainy day funds that are then used for capital investment when times are bad.