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不好意思，今天发的有点晚失误失误 。
【速度】
China Seeks to Assure Workers of Stability
【计时1】
HONG KONG - The Chinese government is seeking to reassure workers of their rights, a move activists say highlights Beijing's concern that possible labor unrest could cause disruptions to social stability.
China's latest economic figures indicate the country's robust economic growth continues to slow, with exports, industrial output and retail sales posting lower growth than last year.
The numbers also indicate that inflation and rising consumer prices have slowed - a key goal of leaders worried about the needs of hundreds of millions of middle and lower class workers.
Wealth disparity
But there is one economic indicator that continues to be a major concern for officials trying to maintain social stability: wealth disparity. The main economic indicator of the wealth gap - a measurement known as the gini coefficient - has not been released by authorities in more than a decade.
Premier Wen Jiabao recently visited bus drivers and sanitation workers in Beijing to reassure them of his commitment to worker rights. The visits did not occur by chance, says Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin.
"These two groups, over the last two or three years, have been at the forefront of labor activism in China. They’re the groups, apart from factory workers, who are most likely to go on strike. I’m sure it’s no coincidence [Wen] picked those two groups to give his support - saying these workers should be more respected and better valued in society," said Crothall.
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China's 220 million migrant laborers, known disparagingly as waidi ren or "outsiders," continue to work long hours in poor conditions.
In an effort to preserve worker harmony, the government has encouraged salary increases among the lowest paid in society. The National Bureau of Statistics reported last week that rural migrant workers saw average pay gains of 21 percent in 2011. In Shanghai, the minimum wage has risen 14 percent on the year. Similar rises are being implemented in the Pearl River Delta region, China’s industrial heartland.
More expectations
However, unlike their parents, blue-collar workers today desire more than just a monthly pay check, observes Alexandra Harney, author of The China Price - the True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage.
"Workers expectations have risen; for their lives, for their jobs," she said. "They are looking for experiences, but also to build careers. And one of the persistent fears I hear when I talk to workers in factories is that they find their jobs really boring; that they don’t really have many other options."
Workers have made other gains beyond improved wages, for instance they are increasingly comfortable asserting their legal rights under legislation, including the 2008 Labor Contract Law. Ken DeWoskin, director of the Deloitte China Research and Insight Center, believes those glaring disparities in the distribution of wealth add considerably to working class woes.
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【计时3】
"They see cars that cost more money than their families have ever earned in their entire lives," he said. "There’s a sense of potential but also of frustration if they’re earning minimum wage, to have so much luxury and so much wealth in their face all the time. I think there’s a crisis in China of conspicuous consumption."
The hukou system
That dissatisfaction is compounded by China’s long-standing hukou system, which prevents migrant workers accessing a full range of social services - including health and schooling for their children - outside their home provinces.
The working class also bears the brunt of still widespread official corruption. Last week, four people died when a government office in Yunnan province was bombed. The main suspect is reportedly a woman angered by local officials who requisitioned her land to sell to developers at a vast profit.
Despite some improvements in worker rights, data gathered by the China Labor Bulletin reveal a higher incidence of strikes in China these last two months than at any time since it began daily monitoring of worker unrest in 2010.
Lessons from Japan, South Korea
Professor Karel Williams of Manchester University Business School argues China needs to look to the economic models implemented by Japan and South Korea, not just to grow the skills and prosperity of its workforce, but to move the country to the next phase of its development.
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"We have a future where China’s competitive advantage is eroded by rising wages and rising exchange rates. It has to stop being a low-wage payer and build major corporates with R&D capabilities and the ability to produce branded goods," said Williams.
Historically, China has shown great elasticity in coping with disparities in wealth, says DeWoskin, and China’s laborers are not likely catalysts for the type of dissent sweeping the Middle East.
"In China, dramatic change generally happens because an alternate power center arises under an alternate leader. Then you have a competition between leaders. Much of what we are seeing politically today is less a result of an ideological struggle and a popular uprising than it is the working-out of great difficulties between various factions in the government," said DeWoskin.
China's once-a-decade transition of power occurs later this year during the Communist Party's 18th National Congress. In the months leading up to the leadership handover, officials are likely to be highly sensitive to labor unrest and its affect on the country's stability.
G8 Summit to Focus on Africa Food Security
STATE DEPARTMENT - As host of this week's summit of the world's Group of Eight leading industrial nations (G8), President Barack Obama has put African food security on the agenda.
Food security remains a recurring problem across Africa, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid each year. The Horn of Africa endured a severe drought last year that turned to famine in Somalia, and several countries in West Africa are now going through a food shortage that aid agencies have warned needs immediate international attention.
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【计时5】
With that in mind, the president has invited Benin's President Boni Yayi, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ghana's President John Atta Mills and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwere to the U.S. There, they will join with business leaders and civil society groups to discuss agricultural development and food security in Africa as part of this G8 summit.
"It is one of the things that this president and this administration regard as a major, major project to work with Africa on," said Johnnie Carson, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.
Nailing down business commitments
The leaders meet Friday at an event hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to launch what Carson says will be significant new business commitments for African agriculture. They also will discuss how best to address issues of hunger and poverty in a development environment affected by the global economic crisis.
Carson said the Obama administration's "Feed the Future" program is designed to create a green, agricultural revolution in Africa like those that ended widespread hunger in much of Latin America and Asia in the 1960's and 1970's.
"Africa has enormous promise and potential in the agricultural field. And there is absolutely no reason why Africa should be in a food deficit, why there should be insufficiency in the continent, and why it can not, in fact, be a major agro-producer not only for the continent, but also for export globally," said Carson.
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【自由阅读】
Money, ingenuity and opportunity
Working with the United Nations and the G8, Carson said Obama is determined to spotlight Africa's agricultural challenges and opportunities for private sector investors. African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka and African Union chairman Jean Ping will join those talks.
Relief groups including ActionAid, Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision are calling on G8 leaders to start by meeting their existing financial commitments to easing hunger in Africa.
Friday's new initiative is expected to target 50 million food-insecure people by boosting agricultural investments. In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 80 percent of food is still grown by small-scale farmers.
今天的越障有点晦涩，之前一些单词粘连我已经改好了，要是还有的话恕寡人眼拙。
【越障】
Investigating JPMorgan Chase
By SIMON JOHNSON
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.
JP Morgan Chase is too big to fail. As the largest bank holding company in the United States, with assets approaching $2.5 trillion as reported under standard American accounting principles, it is inconceivable that JPMorgan Chase would be allowed to collapse now or in the near future. The damage to the American economy and to the world would be too great.
The company’s recent trading losses therefore call for greater public scrutiny than would be the case for mos tprivate enterprise – and demand an independent investigation into exactly what happened. (Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets has already called for exactly this.)
The investigation begun by the F.B.I. is unlikely to be sufficiently public. Given the strong political connections between JPMorgan Chase and the Obama administration, it would also be better to have an investigation led by a completely independent counsel.
Hopefully, too-big-to-fail is not forever.The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is working on a mechanism that could conceivably allow that agency to handle the “failure” of a bank holding company while protecting the creditors of operating subsidiaries – limiting the potential contagion effect.
But this mechanism is not yet in place. It does not now apply to cross-border banking (remember that JPMorgan Chase’s losses are in London), and even the F.D.I.C.’s acting chairman, Martin J.Gruenberg, was careful in describing its likely efficacy in a speech last week.
(Disclosure: I’m on the F.D.I.C.’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee, and I’ve worked with the F.D.I.C. with some outreach activities intended to help the agency receive constructive feed back on resolution. I am not paid by the F.D.I.C.)
In effect, JPMorgan Chase operates with the implicit backing of the United States government – primarily in the form o factual and potential access to borrowing from the Federal Reserve, with the implication that the Treasury could also provide support.
Being effectively backed by the full faith and credit of the government is a great help; it lowers a bank’s financing costs because it reduces the risk to creditors. JPMorgan Chase and the other big banks in the American economy are effectively government-sponsored (and subsidized) enterprises.
There is no kind of market involved in determining the franchise value of mega-banks; this is a government subsidys cheme, pure and simple. People on the right of the political spectrum understand this, as do people on the left; see my blog post last week on the extent of cross-partisan agreement on this issue.
I would add to that list former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Republican. When I appeared on his radio show on Monday afternoon, we were in complete agreement on the need to break up or otherwise constrain the size of big banks.
There are many unanswered questions about the JPMorgan Chase losses and a great deal of informed guesswork about exactly what went wrong. By his own account, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, was unaware of what was happening on the relevant trading desk until Bloomberg News reporters brought it to his attention.
At that time, he dismissed any concerns as a “tempest in a teapot.” In the weeks after, this supposed “hedge” – or risk-reduction strategy – blew up badly.
The question is not why a trader made a mistake; this can happen anywhere. The issue is how this was handled and reported by JPMorgan Chase’s risk-management professionals and their systems –believed by many insiders to be the best in the business.
Here are five questions that an independent investigation should consider:
1. What exactly was the trade? Who approved and reviewed the trade?
2. To what extent were the mistakes encouraged or condoned by particular quantitative models — for example, those popularly known as value-at-risk? (For a critique, see Pablo Triana’s book,“The Number That Killed Us.”)
3. What did Mr. Dimon know and when did he know it? Was there disclosure to the board and to shareholders with appropriate timing? This is among the specific concerns raised by Mr. Kelleher.
4. Does the board have adequate depth of experience along the relevant dimensions of risk management?
5. What interactions did Mr. Dimon or any of his colleagues have with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before and while these losses were incurred? Mr. Dimon is on the board of that institution, where his role is described as advisory. But on what exactly did he advise them in recent months and years, particularly with regard to risk management and capital levels in systemically important banks?
On the one hand, we hear from bankers that supervisors are watching them closely – and even undermining their business. On the other hand, clearly someone was not paying attention. Why not?
This is not about conducting a witch hunt.It is about establishing the facts and understanding if anything about standard operating procedures and emergency protocols should be examined.
The right analogy is National Transportation Safety Board investigations – a suggestion that has been made by Andrew Lo, my colleague at M.I.T., and his co-authors. We learn a great deal when companies actually go bankrupt; e.g., about Enron (see the excellent book“The Smartest Guys in the Room,” by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind) and about Lehman (see the bankruptcy examiner’s report).
But we need to investigate near-misses as well.
This is awkward for the White House – look at any of Ben White’s recent articles on the links between Wall Street and the Obama administration. But the power of big banks on Wall Street makes this kindof investigation even more necessary – see the reporting of Matt Taibbi for some graphic details.
Congress may also want to get involved, at least to understand if Dodd-Frank has been at all helpful. The Volcker Rule is not yet in effect but, if it were, would this have made a difference?
Mr. Dimon contends not, and he has been a consistent and vociferous opponent of the rule from the very beginning. It would seem foolhardy to accept Mr. Dimon’s view on this matter at face value. I testified in favor of the Volcker Rule before the Senate Banking Committee inearly 2010; Barry Zubrow, then chief risk officer of JPMorgan Chase, testified and strongly opposed it.
Some people in the private sector and within the banking community will push back, asserting that this would further expand the scope of government vis-à-vis legitimate private business. This misses the point — that it is the people who run our largest banks who have undermined the viability of the private sector and who threaten its future.
Cam Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, has shown strong leadership on this point over the last week (you can follow him at @Cam_Fine on Twitter).
In the end, we may well come to the same conclusion as Elizabeth Warren – who has brilliantly seized the political moment and put her opponent for the Senate seat from Massachusetts, the Republican incumbent Scott Brown, on the defensive.
Ms. Warren is calling for the re-impositionof Glass-Steagall – separating commercial from investment banking. Mr. Fine is already pushing in the same direction. This position should be appealing across the political spectrum.
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发表于 2012-5-18 00:23:36
沙发一起坐~~~哈哈
楼主
好吧，这篇不算)