Michel Ouellette JMD

Archive for the ‘Économie/ Economy’ Category

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Protest rallies held in Brazil’s major cities

In Austerity, Économie/ Economy, Société / Society on June 18, 2013 at 1:53 pm

Brazil Confed Cup Protests

More than 100,000 people took over the streets

BRAZIL – Demonstrations against rising costs of public transport and 2014 World Cup reflect anger over government policies.

Yesterday, Jun3 17th, over 100,000 young protesters have massed across Brazil to demonstrate against the rising costs of both public transport and the 2014 World Cup to be held in the country. Protesters gathered in at least seven cities on Monday in what they hoped would be their biggest demonstrations yet against the increase in transit rates.

The protest movement is mainly made up of the middle class and is critical of the government’s decision to increase transit rates by 10 cents, to $1.60. Police in Sao Paulo estimated that 30,000 people rallied in the city’s biggest demonstration yet. Up to 20,000 people marched in Rio de Janeiro and another 6,000 took part in protests in the capital Brasilia.

Brazilians have long accepted malfeasance as a cost of doing business, whether in business or receiving public services. The government loses more than $47bn each year to undeclared tax revenue, vanished public money and other widespread corruption, according to the Federation of Industries of Sao Paulo business group. But in the last decade, about 40 million Brazilians have moved into the middle class and they have begun to demand more from government.

While almost one-fifth of the population lives in poverty, many Brazilians are angry that billions of dollars in public funds are being spent to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics while few improvements are made elsewhere.

JMD

 jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com

Read more:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/06/201361721510894542.html

 

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Au Brésil, une manifestation monstre contre l’augmentation du coût de la vie

In Austérité, Économie/ Economy, Justice Sociale, Société / Society on June 18, 2013 at 12:56 pm

Brazil 130617-protest-hmed-10p.photoblog600

BRASILIA – Des milliers de jeunes se massent aux portes du Parlement après des heures de manifestation.

Au moment où le Brésil connaît un ralentissement économique, des dizaines de milliers de Brésiliens descendent dans la rue pour protester contre l’augmentation du coût de la vie et la facture astronomique de la prochaine Coupe du Monde. La principale manifestation s’est tenue lundi à Rio de Janeiro où 100 000 personnes se sont rassemblées, alors que 65 000 se rassemblaient à Sao Paulo, la capitale économique du pays.

JMD

 jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com

 

Pour en savoir plus:

http://bigbrowser.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/06/18/changebrazil-suivre-les-manifestations-au-bresil-en-ligne/

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Will China be the next superpower of the world?

In Économie/ Economy, Prédictions / Predictions on November 8, 2012 at 4:52 pm

Will China be the next superpower of the world?

Yes they will!

Hong Kong – Thousands of senior Chinese officials are gathering in Beijing for a week of lengthy speeches and meetings. At the end of this once in a decade process, The Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, a new set of top Chinese leaders will be revealed to the world. China’s prospective leaders, rise to the top by showing how loyal they are to the incumbent. What they will do when they rise to the top, that they will not show or tell.

While rumors continue to circulate about possible democratic reforms in the wake of the recent huge political scandal involving the former senior party official Bo Xilai, and widespread corruption among officials throughout the country, some say they expect measures to reshape China’s huge economy. Others predict the army may have a stronger influence over territorial disputes with neighbors like Japan.

What we do know is that in the recent years China’s economy has continued to grow, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty and that China is now the world’s second-biggest economy and closing fast on the United States.

Do the next leaders of the Chinese nation have plans to be the first superpower of the world?

They will not tell but that is exactly where they are heading.

JMD

jmdlive@live.ca

On this topic: http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/08/world/asia/china-leadership-change/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

How much money is enough not to be homeless?

In Anger, Économie/ Economy, Poverty Around The World, Société / Society on November 5, 2012 at 11:50 pm

My name is not Misha Barton but I can’t pay my rent anymore

Everywhere in the world, middle-class families continued to suffer in the aftermath of the Great Recession and even today, with a full-time job, many still cannot afford to pay their rent.  All over the world, income inequality is now widening. While the poor are not getting any poorer, – this could not be possible – the rich are getting richer and those in the middle classes are the ones pinched really hard. Numbers of them are now on the verge of poverty or joining the ranks of the already poor.

A lot of this increase in inequality is driven by changes initiated at the very top of the alimentary chain. The small fish is too small to be eaten by the big fish and the medium size fish, while too small to defend himself, is still too big to hide. This is what is called the squeeze in the middle position, the position where the lower-middle class is always whacked.If your government doesn’t hit you, don’t worry, your employer will.

Some groups are even hit harder than others. Those ages 35 to 44 and 55 to 64 are now suffering a severe drop in income and many of them now have to find either a second job or come out retirement working full-time only to pay the rent.

JMD

jmdlive@live.ca

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USA Election 2012: What about the poor?

In Économie/ Economy, Poverty Around The World, Société / Society on November 5, 2012 at 7:19 pm

To strengthen or to overhaul the American nation’s safety net?

President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney have vastly different views on how to help the 46.2 million Americans in poverty and the more than 30 million people who are near poor.

Between 2008 and 2011, In the United States, the number of people in poverty jumped 16%, the Medicaid rolls jumped 23.5% while food stamp enrollment soared 46%.

Just who is elected president matters a great deal for the poor.

JMD

jmdlive@live.ca

Reference:  http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/05/news/economy/obama-romney-poor/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

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The 2007economic crisis aftershock

In Économie/ Economy, Société / Society on February 9, 2012 at 2:11 pm

The Next Global Financial Meltdown is on its way

With the consequences of the last global economic crisis showing little sign of ending, Greece beginning to default on its debt, stock markets remaining volatile, food and energy prices continuing to rise and the real estate bubble about to burst in China, threatening to plunge the world into further chaos, the Next Global Financial Meltdown is on its way.

In 2007, in a once-in-a-century type of event, the world experiences the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. First came the dotcom bubble, then the housing bubble that resulted in a global planetary financial meltdown. For the next eight years, the world economic situation is just going to get even worse: much worse.

The American Federal Reserve financial market manipulation and the incredible irresponsibility and bad judgment of the United State government and European Union combined will make banana republic inflation levels inevitable. In the next few years, we will see up to 50% unemployment rates worldwide, up to 90% stock market crash, and up to 100% annual global inflation rates. Get ready to sell everything, and pile into gold and inflation-linked securities. Get ready to cash out your life insurance policies and dump your stocks.

For the next three years, unemployment rates will be increasing drastically throughout the world and remain high up to the year2019, with extremely weak consumer spending and governments everywhere faced with lower tax revenues. Meantime, oil and food prices will continue to rise while gold and silver will reached unprecedented highs.

As a result of the Wild West Casino mentality which has characterised investment banking over the last two decades, combined with a lack of regulation. The subprime financial market was a time bomb waiting to go off and it did.

The economic crisis which began in 2007 is now showing little sign of ending if any and, for years to come, the United State will continue to spiral out of control. During the years 2015 to 2019, while China will be facing the fallout of a massive real estate bubble, the United States of America will see its credit rating further downgraded and in an unprecedented move, the dollar will be losing its status as the world’s reserve currency.

With the United State paralysed by a political deadlock over the basket of currencies in the process of replacing the dollar, the contagion affecting the euro zone, initially confined to Greece, will eventually spread throughout the continent, leading to the collapse of numerous banks, corporations and financial institutions. Bailout after bailout initiated by the European Union and industrialized countries will fail to provide an adequate long term solution to the new Global economic downturn.

The world being now mired in a full-blown depression, with no sign of a light at the end of the tunnel, with protests in many countries, a global movement for change is now emerging that will climax in the years 2015 to 2018. For the years to come, get ready to see and experience extremely volatile market conditions and frightening changes in our modern society at large. Society as we know it know is about to change.

While the gutting of our social programs is now creating a dangerously polarised society, 2019 will be mark by widespread riots and protests throughout the world.

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Remembering the Japanese “Lost Decade”

In Économie/ Economy on February 8, 2012 at 6:38 pm

“The Lost Decade” - Japan is our future: we'll be lucky if we handle it as well as they have.

Some thirty years ago, we used to talk about Japan in much the same tone as we now do of China. Japan was seen as an unstoppable economic growth machine. For most of us, it was only a matter of time before Japan overtook the United States as the world’s largest economy. Ten years later, the Japanese economic miracle ground to an ignominious halt. Japan was becoming a forgotten country and the country has struggled to show significant growth ever since.

The Japanese asset price bubble [baburu keiki] was an economic bubble in Japan that took place from 1986 to 1991, in which real estate and stock prices were greatly inflated. The bubble’s collapse lasted for more than a decade with stock prices initially bottoming in 2003 and descending even further in 2008.

Back in the 80s, the easily obtainable credit helped create and engorge the real estate bubble. As late as 1997, banks were still making loans that had a low probability of being repaid. By then, Loan Officers and Investment staff had a hard time finding anything to invest in that would return any kind of profit. They would even resort to depositing their block of investment cash, as ordinary deposits, in a competing bank. Correcting the credit problem became even more difficult as the government began to subsidize failing banks and businesses, creating many so-called “zombie businesses”.

In 1989, in Tokyo’s Ginza district, choice properties prices were fetching well over $215,000 US dollars per square meter, this is well over $93,000 per square foot. Suddenly, by 2004, prime “A” property in Tokyo’s financial districts had slumped to less than 1 percent of its peak value, and Tokyo’s residential homes were less than a tenth of their peak. Only in 2007 had property prices begun to rise; however, they began to fall in late 2008 due to the last American financial crisis and its consequences worldwide.

Over the years, in what is now referred as the Japanese “The Lost Decade”, with the combined collapse of the Tokyo stock and real estate markets, tens of trillions of dollars worth were wiped out.

In an attempt to find anything positive in any type of catastrophic events, it is becoming fashionable to argue that they might just prove to be the shock that the world or a country needs to purge itself of the political inertia and economic paralysis into which it has fallen. Well, possibly, but the truth is that, regardless of the disaster’s potential to galvanise change, the world’s future, like Japan’s future before, may already be largely pre-ordained. There is a point where economies simply outgrow their capacity to grow. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Japanese [baburu keiki], it is that Japan, in time merely returns to where it was.

Today, Japan is now in the front line when it comes to the three biggest challenges which, to varying degrees, afflict all of the major advanced modern economies: excessive public debt, the demographic costs of an ageing population, and increasingly acute energy insecurity. What is more, the banking crisis that years ago killed off the Japanese growth story has been replicated across all Western economies, many of which are now threatened with much the same deflationary, low-growth future and this is not altogether looking very good.

As we look back, for all the loss of national self-esteem, the reality is that Japan has coped with the aftermath of its banking crash reasonably well. Output has stagnated, but in per capita terms it remains one of the highest income countries in the world. Furthermore, it has managed to maintain a degree of social cohesion that higher growth economies struggle to replicate. As for today’s economic events, their consequences will be much more widely felt then they were in Japan. Coming on top of a resurgent oil price, they constantly threaten to derail an already all-too-fragile recovery across modern advanced economies.

For years to come, worldwide monetary policies will, remain accommodative at the most for longer than otherwise.

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Toward a new Worldwide Economic Crisis

In Économie/ Economy on February 7, 2012 at 8:09 pm

- The worsening economic crisis in Greece: Only a prelude to global social disruption and economic times to come

For years, the successive governments of Greece like many others governments of the world today, have been spending money they didn’t have. As a result, the country ran up a massive deficit, reaching an estimated 13.6% by 2010.

To deal with it, Greece started to misreport its official financial statistics and actually paid hundreds of millions of dollars to banks such as Goldman Sachs to have them initiate baseless financial transactions that would hide Greece’s true level of spending and debt. All of this made Greece extremely vulnerable to a financial crisis such as the major recession that struck the world in 2007.

By 2009, Greece was collapsing under its crushing debts, by then estimated to be over $410 billion, thus growing 20% larger than the entire country economy.

The banks Greece had borrowed from were only making the problem worse: To hide the fact that Greece could soon go bankrupt, they started to charge Greece higher rates of interests when the country tried to borrow more money.

As a result, by 2010, revealing the true levels of spending and deficit that had accumulated over the years, Greece was forced to ask for outside assistance and was downgraded to the lowest credit rating in the euro zone.

With investors now viewing the country as a financial black hole, it made it difficult for the Greek government to receive outside help. Accordingly, the European Union allowed Greece to borrow from other European countries as well as the International Monetary Fund, in what became the largest bailout package in recent history. In return, Greece was forced to drastically cut back its spending.

Government corruption, large increases in taxes, and cuts to public social programs resulted in widespread civil unrest during the year 2011.

In March 2012, Greece will begin to default forcing a further restructuring in which the government will only able to pay back around half of what is owed. This will result in the country essentially being removed from the euro zone and Europe as a whole will be economically battered, along with every other countries which are now trading with Greece. The value of the euro will fall stressing the economies of the European Union with Spain, Italy and Portugal suffering the most.

Final result: the ongoing decline in value of the European currency will negatively affect stock markets around the world for years to come.

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Comment le monde économique basculera d’ici 2050

In Économie/ Economy on January 27, 2012 at 12:20 pm

La Chine: Une puissance mondiale en devenir

L’économie mondiale est en train de connaître un véritable séisme.

Un profond bouleversement de notre économie globale devrait prendre place d’ici 2050, à savoir, Chine et Inde en tête, une irrésistible montée en puissance des grands pays émergents. D’ici 2020, les sept principaux pays émergents, soit la Chine, la Russie, l’Inde, le Brésil, le Mexique, l’Indonésie et la Turquie, dépasseront ensemble le groupe des économies du G10. En 2050, 19 des 30 plus grandes économies mondiales seront émergentes.

À la source des mutations à venir ces quarante prochaines années: une démographie bouillonnante, une meilleure éducation et une démocratisation des principaux pays émergents.

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Is Modern Capitalism outdated?

In Économie/ Economy on January 26, 2012 at 12:36 pm

Modern Capitalism is falling apart.

Is 20th century capitalism failing 21st century society?

With the world still shaking from the global economic earthquake, and suffering daily aftershocks, it is not surprising to find more and more people asking themselves whether capitalism is dead. Today we are back to the inequality of 1929 and the Great Depression. High unemployment and the failure of wages to keep pace with living costs are resulting in widespread unrest against elites. For many and especially young people, the business community has lost its moral compass.

There is no doubt in my mind that capitalism is outdated and that today, talent, not capital, should be the main driver of economies. So far there seems to be a worldwide view that capitalism may be the worst form of economy and saying that the system needs fixing is only the starting point. Some believe that a new model based around a triangle of government, companies and society is the way forward. Some others believe that there has to be a more inclusive form of capitalism. The real problem is still that far too many narrow-minded executives that don’t want to make the necessary fundamental changes that are necessary to make capitalism work.

While the shift in economic power to the East is undeniable, no-one should think these emerging markets are great paragons of new model capitalism, spreading wealth and benefits. It’s all lip service unless major action is implemented. There may well be a rising middle class in the Eastern economies, but poverty, disease and a lack of social welfare still abound there, that is without saying anything about corruption, and lack of corporate transparency.

Can someone out there please tell me what the new model of global economy should be, how it might look like and most importantly, how we can prevent it to become a re-fashioned version of our actual, outdated and corrupted economic models?

I guess not!