Category: Economics

Categories
Activism Economics Environment Photography Politics & government

[491] Of Surviving Scrutiny protest

A protest was held at the Business School last Thursday in conjunction of Surviving Scrutiny: Corporations in the Age of Global Business. The representative from Coke was obviously uncomfortable with the presence of protesters during her talk.

The Michigan Daily on the other hand didn’t quite report what really happened. At the same time, their report seems to be inaccurate.

Anyway, more pixels!

I don’t know whether that is legal or not but it’s way too cool!

In front of Hale before the talk started.

Getting the 125 feet bottle-link into the auditorium. The person from Coke was distracted by it – when the moderator asked her a question, she asked the moderator to repeat to question.

In the auditorium.

A close-up of the banner in the previous photo.

p/s – switched backed to Blogger’s commenting system. The improvement brought by the Blogger team looks good but I can’t make it work at the moment.

pp/s – the commeting system is now working. And I didn’t even touch the code and it somehow worked.

Categories
Economics Environment Politics & government

[490] Of Michigan Student Assembly and the Coke resolution

I was at the Michigan Student Assembly Chambers yesterday, hearing the tabling of a resolution against Coke. Before the session started, probably hundreds of emails flew here and there, presenting idea, news and opinion on the resolution. Seriously, I do think the Killer Coke coalition needs a proper forum instead of a mailing list. It is a daunting task to read all of them with some time constraint in place, especially in a mailbox. However, the highlight of all these email storm was the one sent by the MSA president to the protesting coalition.

He wrote and later said in the meeting that he and others in the MSA board want to postpone the tabling of the motion for another seven days. Reason – they claim that they simply are not sufficiently educated on the issue, despite more than a week worth of effort from certain quarters to inform them of the situation.

Some try to resist the postponement. The Killer Coke coalition obviously wanted the resolution to be voted swiftly but the coalition unfortunately stood almost alone on that. After a few somewhat heated discussions, the MSA voted something like 30 ayes to 2 nays on not voting on the resolution in yesterday session. The representatives from the Coke Bottlers that were there are obviously pleased with the adjournment motion.

Immediately after that, a few people were allowed to speak, both from the coalition and from the Michigan Coke. A person from the coalition, a graduate student from the School of Natural Resource and the Environment as I was informed by a colleague, criticized the MSA board for giving an excuse of ignorance for adjourning the motion after she had read a declaration from workers in India.

A few others from the coalition spoke but most of them only echoed the SNRE graduate’s disappointment on MSA postponing the issue to another week. And so, here goes the lobbying again. And I expect, my huge mailbox to be battered some more.

Finally, this coming Thursday, which is tomorrow, somehow, representatives from Starbuck, Nike, Timberland and, drum roll please, Coca Cola are coming to the Michigan Business School for Surviving Scrutiny: Corporations in the Age of Global Business. Imagine the perfect timing of Coke sending in a high level manager to Michigan. Unfortunate for them – definately couldn’t be better for us – that the coalition is organizing a huge protest for them.

Boy, this is exciting. LOL!

p/s – also yesterday, I attended a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz.

He is the person with the tie.He basically talked about the same issues he has written in Globalization and Its Discontent, plus a bit of humor. The auditorium was full and I had to squeze in. More at the Michigan Daily.

pp/s – also, thanks to the Brazilian Maxwell, Ajax 1, Auxerre 0. van der Vaart’s pass was great.

ppp/s – Kyoto. =)

Categories
Economics Environment

[489] Of a day before Kyoto Day

It took almost a decade to ratify the pact that tries something to mitigate the biggest environmental issue of our time. Now, time is at hand. The real fight begins in less than a day.

While the treaty will come into force tomorrow, the facilities for emission trading have been set up. One of them is the Chicago Climate Exchange, the CCX. It is the world’s first greenhouse gases exchange. The existence of this exchange will allow companies to buy and sell quotas set forth by the Kyoto Protocol. The market looks thin to me for the moment but I’m sure as time goes by, it will thicken. In Europe, agreements between firms and countries on quota transfer have already been signed upon. I’m unable to provide a link or two on this as the news came out some weeks ago. Wikipedia, the Oracle of the Internet, however does provide some example.

While the implementation of the Protocol takes place, some already fail to prepare themselves for oncoming treaty. The European Union, possibly the green’s current best of friends, has sued a few of its members for such failure.

The target of the Protocol is anything but easy and that is why some have failed to comply despite ratification. The pact asserts that by the year 2012, the worldwide level of six greenhouse gases needs to be comparable to 1990 level. I simply believe it is almost impossible to reach that goal. The time frame is simply too short for such grand achievement – economy will grow somehow and so will the emission of the gases.

Yet, this constraint imposed by Kyoto may overcome that skepticism. It has been said that the mother of all inventions is necessity (I say laziness is the father of invention). With the expensive protocol in place, there will come a time to find a cheaper way to implement Kyoto. My take on the solution is technology; in particular, energy efficiency. A breakthrough such as the mass production of fuel cell is highly needed for the 1990 target to be possible.

And of course, future participation by China and India is important. The US and Australia on the other hand are possibly lost in their own reality. Concerning the US, a few states, notably of New England and the Pacific, have taken their own initiative to reduce carbon emission despite the diverging stance by the federal government.

Whatever it is, an ode to Kyoto and the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, the place where it all begun. Kyoto might be imperfect but it is bringing us into the right direction, however short that step really is.

Categories
Economics

[488] Of Malaysia rules the world

This Gamespot article says it all. We are even outperforming China! w00t!

Special thanks to Bigstig for the lead. LOL!

Categories
Economics

[487] Of selling the gold bullions

Reuters reports that US Treasury Secretary John Show has proposed to sell the US gold reserve so that the country may finance the debt relief it has given to poor blocks. According to the same article, the US is the world’s largest stock of gold bullions. I’d imagine the plan sounds extremely reasonable to the poor debtors since it may encourage future debt relief. There is however opposition coming from the US states that produce gold.

The reason for such opposition is simple. Any move to sell the gold reserve by the US will bring the price of gold down as quantity increases. Producers of gold obvious don’t like the idea of seeing the price of the commodity going down.

I’m in the position of supporting the sale. While the sale of bullions will negatively affect the producers of gold, I see benefit outweighing the cost. Few benefits that I can think of are, one, of course, lower liability for the poor nations; two, providing the US with liquid asset that may be used for higher return investment – the bullions probably merely sits in the bank doing nothing; three, environment.

The sale of the bullions will force the producers of gold to cut down its production if they want to preserve the price of the gold. With lower production, polluting material used in the mining of gold such as mercury and cyanide will be reduced.

Let’s see who will win this one. I bet the proposal will be shot down almost effortlessly.

p/s – the Fed wants to rework the way the Federal Open Market Committee announces any of its intention. The powerful independent central bank wants to drop the usage of the magic word “accommodating” and, the better known “measured”. The article suggests that the interest rate might increase at a greater rate in the near future.

Already, upon that announcement, the price of T-bills is heading down – reason for such fall is that any hike in interest rate makes other investments offer better return than bond. With lower return relatively to other investment option, demand for current bond fall and, with falling demand, comes falling price.

And that happens because the Fed wants to drop the word “accommodating” and “measured” while the real hike hasn’t been done or even announced yet.

Feel the power of Alan “Invisible Hand” Greenspan’s Fed.

The federal fund rate right now and past rates, thanks to Wikipedia:

GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia

The rise has been steep for the past few years and if the hunch is true, the rise will be steeper soon. But nobody will do a Volcker, that’s for sure. Inflation is still in check despite the arising fear a year ago.