Economist, Apr 20, 2013

choi

My comment: There is no need to read (1) to (3).

(1) Northern Iraq  | Peace, Harmony and Oil; Despite assertions to the contrary, Iraq's Kurds are inching toward outright independence
("The relative order, security and wealth enjoyed by the 5m residents of Iraq's three Kurdish provinces are the envy of the remaining 25m who live in the battered bulk of Iraq, and of others too. Since 2011 some 130,000 Syrian refugees, nearly all of them ethnic Kurds, have been welcomed in as brothers"/ then there is petroleum, too)


(2) Charlemagne | The Flying Taxman; Bank secrecy is dying in Europe--thanks mainly to America
(European governments, strapped for cash, push for transparency)

Quote: "The most important force for change is the least visible: America's readiness to wield blunt financial power beyond its borders. Under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, financial institutions must reveal details of American clients abroad or face a 30% withholding tax on any income earned in America. EU members are negotiating [with US?] to provide the information, reducing the administrative burden and allowing a reciprocal deal for America to pass information about European citizens."

Note: Charlemagne is the title of a Economist column.

choi

(3) Crime rates  | Down These Not-So-Mean Streets; Better policing is only one reason why, despite the persistent economic slump and high youth unemployment, crime continues to fall [since at least 1995].


(4) Electronic trading  | Dutch Fleet; The home of the world's first stock exchange is now a high-frequency heartland.
http://www.economist.com/news/fi ... ncy-heartland-dutch

first two paragraphs:

"ANY good history of financial markets will have a section on Amsterdam. The Dutch city was the home of the world’s first stock exchange, kicked off in 1602 by the issuance of shares in the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC). Equity derivatives followed: forward contracts on VOC shares were being traded by 1607. By the 1630s the secondary market had taken off, helped along by Christoffel and Jan Raphoen, brothers who bought and sold VOC shares on demand and can claim to have been the world’s first market-makers.

"Amsterdam has since become less pivotal to finance. But in the controversial field of high-frequency trading (HFT) it is still at the cutting edge. HFT is a catch-all term for ultra-fast electronic trading in which participants hold positions for short periods. It is a technique used by everyone from big banks to hedge funds. But the specialists are private firms punting their own capital to take advantage of tiny price anomalies, to hop on short-run trends and, in the case of some of Amsterdam’s biggest HFT operators, to make markets.

Note:
(a) The article mentions "Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC)."
(i) Dutch East India Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
(Dutch: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, "United East India Company"; 1602 to profit from the Malukan spice trade - 1798 when it went bankrupt; often considered to have been the first multinational corporation in the world [2] and it was the first company to issue stock; The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century)
(ii) Dutch-English dictionary:

* verenigde/ verenigd )adj): "united"
* oost (adj): "east"
* Indisch (adj): "Indian"  (The Dutch spelling for India is same: India)
(b) Stock exchange
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_exchange
(section 1 History)

(c) World's first known futures market is
(i) Dōjima Rice Exchange  堂島米市場
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Djima_Rice_Exchange
(1697-1939 [when the war approached]; seen as the forerunners to a modern banking system)

* kaisho 会所  【かいしょ】 (n): "meeting place; club" 
* All kanji characters in posting are Chinese pronunciation 音読.
(ii) rice broker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_brokers
(Daimyo income at this time was in the form of koku of rice, an amount equal to the amount of rice a man eats in a year)

* daimyo 大名 (n): "Japanese feudal lord"
* koku 石 【こく】 (n): "measure of volume (approx 180.39 liters, 6.37 cubic ft)"
(iii) Osaka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka
(Osaka used to be referred to as the 'nation's kitchen' 天下の台所 in feudal Edo 江戸 [old name for Tokyo] period because it was the centre of trading for rice, creating the first modern futures exchange market in the world)

* tenka 天下 【てんか】 (n): "(1) the whole world; (2) the whole country"
* daidokoro 台所 【だいどころ】 (n): "kitchen"

choi

(5) Special report: Car

Two out five articles in the special report are noteworthy, for dealing with China in depth.

(a) China | Voting With Their Wallets; Chinese car buyers overwhelmingly prefer foreign brands.
http://www.economist.com/news/sp ... oting-their-wallets

Quote:

"For their study, Bernstein’s analysts bought two fairly well-regarded Chinese cars—a sedan from Geely and a Great Wall SUV—and took them to Europe for road-testing and a “teardown”, with specialist engineers examining their build quality. Even though the Chinese firms seemed to have made some progress in areas such as bodywork, overall the cars were badly put together and not pleasant to drive.

The Chinese makers "are skimping on basic research, which means they will become increasingly reliant on foreign carmakers or foreign component makers. Two Chinese companies that bought foreign firms with useful technology—SAIC, which absorbed the remnants of Britain’s Rover Group, and Geely, which bought Volvo of Sweden—do not seem to have much to show for their purchases yet.

Note: Qoros Auto Co, Ltd  观致汽车

choi

Special report: Car

(b) Propulsion systems  | The Great Powertrain Race; Carmakers are hedging their bets on powering cars.
http://www.economist.com/news/sp ... eat-powertrain-race

Quote:

(i) "Many of the most sophisticated parts needed for different kinds of advanced powertrains are not made by carmakers but by a select band of high-tech suppliers, including Bosch and Continental of Germany and Denso and Panasonic of Japan. Such suppliers will enjoy growing pricing power, says Philip Watkins of Citigroup, even as suppliers of low-tech parts will continue to be squeezed by the carmakers. In China, foreign parts-makers do not have to share their profits with their local joint-venture partners in the way foreign carmakers do, and Chinese parts-makers do not yet seem capable of matching the best Western and Japanese technology, so high-tech suppliers appear to have a bright future.

(ii) "Perhaps oddly, the Chinese do not seem to be investing heavily to catch up. The Bernstein study found that even the biggest local firms were skimping on research and development. The world’s three biggest makers—Toyota, GM and VW—each have R&D budgets of $8 billion-10 billion a year, whereas the big Chinese firms Bernstein studied are at best spending a few hundred million dollars each.

"Since both China and India are churning out vast quantities of engineering graduates, the world’s largest carmakers had been expected to shift much of their R&D there. But this has not happened, says Mr Mosquet of BCG: the most innovative carmakers seem to be those that keep most fundamental research at home, as Toyota, VW and Hyundai are doing, farming out only fairly peripheral work to labs in emerging markets. Bernstein’s study notes that, despite all those home-grown engineers, the Chinese carmakers are spending small fortunes hiring European ones. The domestic sort, says the study, mostly seem unable to do the kind of reverse engineering that allowed Japanese and Korean carmakers to catch up with the West. And the best ones are snapped up by the foreign carmakers in China, which can offer much higher pay.

"So all this new technology is giving the strongest of the rich world’s carmakers a breathing-space from new competition. But it will not come cheap, and they will need to pass the expense on to their customers.