Tag: markets

Chinese Insourcing

But Liu is investing $10m in South Carolina, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China. Liu spent $500k for 30k m2 in Spartanburg — less than 25% what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan. US electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.

you won’t hear this from the dobbtards

Hunger Instability

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments. In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

we’ll see lots more of this sort with peak oil. time to scrap agricultural subsidies around the world. of course, governments will do the populist and wrong opposite.

Marriage and the Market

Trends in marital behavior reflect a common-sense response to the economic and social circumstances surrounding us. Just as we have deregulated the economy so that firms and businesses can deal with changing conditions, the long run trend in US family policy has been to deregulate the marriage market, and the book of rules governing who can get married or divorced where and when, has become much thinner. Yet much of the current political debate is precisely about re-regulating marriage. Our concern is that this re-regulation may actually be a force undermining the dynamic institution that is the modern US family.

from a union of production to a union of consumption