Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Feb 2, 2015 (I)

choi

Peter Coy, America the Relatively Beautiful. (in the section “Opening Remarks”)
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... f-world-to-grow-too

Quote:

“Michael Sabia, chief executive officer of the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec. He’s recently put his $173 billion pension fund’s money where his mouth is, buying a Manhattan skyscraper and participating in the purchase of Phoenix-based PetSmart. The Chinese have changed their tune a bit, too. Instead of restating the desire for what Beijing’s leadership calls ‘a new type of great power relationship,’ Premier Li Keqiang told an audience in Davos, ‘China has no intention to compete with other countries for supremacy.’”

"With tax revenue rising, the federal budget deficit has shrunk by two-thirds.

"Of the 10 most valuable companies in the world [judged by market capitalization], eight are based in the US. The shale oil revolution, which was born and remains centered in the US, has broken the back of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, halving the world price of crude since last summer. And the U.S. remains a cultural powerhouse. ‘You walk down the street in Davos, and they’re playing Unbroken [a 2014 film directed by Angelina Jolie] and Boyhood,’ notes Vaclav Smil, a Czech-born professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. China may be growing faster, but it lacks the magnetism of the US, he adds. ‘The US is still the indispensable country. Who wants a green card to go to China?”

“The secrets of America’s success to date are flexibility and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. [The foregoing is one of the two excerpts in the windows of print]

“When it [debt-fueled housing bubble] popped, the US suffered its deepest downturn since the 1930s. Creditors panicked, and lending froze. In the last quarter of 2008 the gross domestic product shrank at a breathtaking annual rate of 8.2 percent.

“America’s lesson for the rest of the world is that serious economic problems ‘never get resolved without a real and meaningful discontinuity’ in policy, according to Lawrence Summers, Obama’s first National Economic Council director. Crisis resolution fails, Summers said in Davos, ‘where it’s a grinding, consensual, one more step along the road. Here I’m talking about Europe.’”

“The US is merely winning the Least Ugly Contest, says Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. [The other excerpt in print: Calling the US the world’s strongest economy is akin to naming it the winner of the Least Ugly Contest]


Note:
(a) This is the  cover story of the Issue, whose cover depicted a bald eagle riding a motorcycle: “Roar Eagle Roar.”
(b)
(i) Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisse_de_d%C3%A9p%C3%B4t_et_placement_du_Qu%C3%A9bec
(CDPQ; founded in 1965; manages public pension plans in Quebec; The name translates to Quebec Deposit and Investment Fund, but it is referred to by its full French name or as "the Caisse" in English, as no official name exist in that language [English])
(ii) French English dictionary
* caisse (noun feminine; from Latin [noun feminine] capsa a box[; from Latin verb capiō capture, seize, take)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caisse
^ The English noun “case” (meaning a box) also shares the same Latin root (both capsa and capiō) but through a different part of France.
* Dépôt (noun masculine; from Latin noun dēpositum deposit): “1: warehouse, depot, depository; * * * 3: deposit (object being deposited)”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A9p%C3%B4t
* placement (noun masculine): “investment”
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/placement

(c) Boyhood (film)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyhood_(film)
(a 2014 American coming-of-age drama film)

(d) “the US excels at invention and reinvention. Some of it comes from basic science, and some comes from the machinery of development and commercialization of which Silicon Valley is the world’s exemplar. The bow-tie-wearing president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, told a story in Davos about a young Estonian inventor he invited to tea in the summer of 2011 who told him he was moving to the US in two weeks to make his fortune. His name is Hardi Meybaum, and he co-founded a computer-aided-design company called GrabCAD [in 2009 in Estonia: Wikipedia]. Last fall the now-Boston-based company was sold for $100 million. Said Ilves: ‘That never would have happened in Europe.’”
(i) Ingrid Lunden, 3D Printing Company Stratasys Is Buying GrabCAD for Around $100M, Beating Out Autodesk, Adobe. TechCrunch, Sept 16, 2014
techcrunch.com/2014/09/16/3d-printing-company-stratasys-is-buying-grabcad-for-around-100m/
(ii) Its principal product being 3-D printer, Stratasys
www.stratasys.com
is based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota (a suburb of state’s capital).