Danish facility services company ISS is the world’s fourth-largest employer

Facility services companies clean up in China

Staff Reporter

2013-11-25

The Danish company, ISS A/S, is not very well known around the world, but the facility services provider has two very impressive qualities. The first is that the company is the world’s fourth-largest employer. Read more of this post

China’s Logistical Nightmare

China’s Logistical Nightmare

2013-11-21 17:21:43

Peter Fuhrman, Chairman and CEO China First Capital

China is modeling itself after the wrong part of the American economy. The money, the rhetoric and the policies are all focused on trying to replicate America’s lead in high-technology and innovation. Instead, China would be long-term much better off and its citizens enjoy immediate higher living standards if it copied something far more mundane from the US, its distribution and logistics. If China’s $9 trillion economy has an Achilles Heel, this is it. It simply costs too much to get things into consumers’ hands. Read more of this post

Burned Short Sellers Adjust as Stocks Keep Rising

Nov 24, 2013

Burned Short Sellers Adjust as Stocks Keep Rising

GREGORY ZUCKERMAN

The U.S. stock market is at all-time highs. Technology stocks have surged, from Twitterto LinkedIn to Facebook. Even individual investors who doubted the staying power of the rally are now pouring money into stocks. About the only people gnashing their teeth are short sellers, the investors who make a living betting that stocks will fall in price rather than rise. Short-selling hedge funds are down nearly 15% from the start of this year through October, according to hedge-fund tracker HFR. Read more of this post

The Wisdom of the Swiss; they reject a harmful pay equity scheme

The Wisdom of the Swiss

They reject a harmful pay equity scheme.

Updated Nov. 24, 2013 5:05 p.m. ET

Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a referendum on pay-equality Sunday. Nearly two-thirds of the votes went against a proposal to limit the ratio of the highest-paid to lowest-paid people in a company to 12:1. The sponsors of the initiative blamed their defeat on a campaign of “fear” by the business community. The truth is, as voters plainly saw, that it was the 12:1 campaigners who were relying on emotional appeals. Read more of this post

‘Abenomics’ Battles for Word-of-the-Year Title

November 25, 2013, 11:16 AM

‘Abenomics’ Battles for Word-of-the-Year Title

ELEANOR WARNOCK

Even if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-growth “Abenomics” strategy fails to turn the world’s third-largest economy around, it still has the chance to win one honor: 2013′s buzzword of the year. The premier’s last name with the suffix -nomics tacked on was one of 50 phrases nominated this week for the title by publishing house Jiyukokuminsha. The competition is stiff: Mr. Abe will have to beat out air pollutant “PM 2.5,” “big data” and Funabashi, Chiba prefecture’s androgynous pear-fairy mascot Funasshi in order to take home the top prize on Dec. 2. Read more of this post

The man who used to walk on water: How Barack Obama can get at least some of his credibility back

The man who used to walk on water: How Barack Obama can get at least some of his credibility back

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

AN AMERICAN president’s most important power is not the veto pen or the ability to launch missiles. It is the bully pulpit. When a president speaks, the world listens. That is why Barack Obama’s credibility matters. If people do not believe what he says, his power to shape events withers. And recent events have seriously shaken people’s belief in Mr Obama. At home, the chaos of his health reform has made it harder for him to get anything else done. Abroad, he is seen as weak and disengaged, to the frustration of America’s allies. Read more of this post

The Indian problem: Opposition to a global trade deal risks hurting the very countries India claims it is trying to protect

The Indian problem: Opposition to a global trade deal risks hurting the very countries India claims it is trying to protect

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

INDIA, home to a third of the world’s extremely poor people, takes pride in being a champion of the poor. But words are one thing, deeds another. Right now, India stands in the way of a deal that members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are hoping to do in less than two weeks’ time—and its stubborn opposition could deliver a serious blow to the poorest countries in the emerging world. Read more of this post

Local Chinese governments combat “corruption on wheels”

Local governments combat “corruption on wheels”

KUNMING, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) — Clear labeling of government cars so that the public can easily identify them and spot their misuse has become a trendy practice among China’s local authorities in response to the country’s anti-corruption drive. Chen Xiaoming, deputy director of Yongsheng County Publicity Department of Lijiang City in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, posted photos of an official car painted with “No private use of government vehicles” and a hotline telephone number for public complaints on Sina Weibo under verified user account “Biantunliying.” Read more of this post

Reform in China: Let quite a few flowers bloom; Two proposals buried in a party document could help change Chinese government

Reform in China: Let quite a few flowers bloom; Two proposals buried in a party document could help change Chinese government

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

THE jury is in. After months of speculation and an initial summary last week, the final 22,000-character overview of China’s “third plenum” was published on November 15th. In the economic sphere the document turned out to be bolder than the initial summary suggested. The new party boss, Xi Jinping, wants to push through changes that have stalled over the past decade. As the document itself says: “We should let labour, knowledge, technology, management and capital unleash their dynamism, let all sources of wealth spread and let all people enjoy more fruits of development fairly.” Quite. Read more of this post

You break it, you own it: America should give global banking rules—and Europe’s dilatory regulators—one last chance

You break it, you own it: America should give global banking rules—and Europe’s dilatory regulators—one last chance

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

SOME wounds go on hurting for years after they were inflicted. For bank regulators, the trauma of the collapse little more than five years ago of Lehman Brothers is as raw as if it had just happened. Lehman had spanned the world, and was run as a single entity largely overseen in America. Its disintegration caused rancour almost everywhere. Britain complained that it had been allowed to snatch $5 billion in cash from its London operation just days before the bankruptcy. Germany fumed that the Bundesbank had been saddled with defaults on about €8 billion-worth ($11 billion) of loans the central bank had made to Lehman’s German subsidiary. Read more of this post

Asian shipyards: The deeper the better; Korean and Singaporean yards have adapted well to China’s challenge

Asian shipyards: The deeper the better; Korean and Singaporean yards have adapted well to China’s challenge

Nov 23rd 2013 | BUSAN |From the print edition

PLENTY of behemoths are being welded into shape in South Korea’s shipyards at the moment. Clustered around the southern city of Busan, the big three yards—Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, and Hyundai Heavy Industries—are churning out the world’s biggest container ships, 400 metres long; an oil barge whose length, at about 460 metres, or 1,462 feet, is almost half the height of Scafell Pike, England’s tallest mountain; and some of the largest oil rigs yet built. Read more of this post

A Growing Chill Between South Korea and Japan Creates Problems for the U.S.

November 23, 2013

A Growing Chill Between South Korea and Japan Creates Problems for the U.S.

By MARTIN FACKLER and CHOE SANG-HUN

TOKYO — In the courtly world of diplomacy, the meeting between Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea was something of a shock. Mr. Hagel was in the region to try to revitalize America’s faltering “pivot” to Asia and had one especially pressing request for Ms. Park: to try to get along better with Japan. The steely Ms. Park instead delivered a lecture about Japan’s “total absence of sincerity” over the suffering that imperial Japan caused Korea in the last century and finished with a request of her own: that Washington force Tokyo to behave. Read more of this post

An Open Letter to the FOMC: Recognizing the Valuation Bubble In Equities

November 25, 2013

An Open Letter to the FOMC: Recognizing the Valuation Bubble In Equities 
John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
To the members of the FOMC,

You’ve emphasized the tremendous burden placed on the Fed in recent years, and your dedication to collectively doing right by the country. It’s important to start with that recognition, because as concerned as I’ve been about the impact and economic assumptions behind the Fed’s actions, I don’t question your motives or integrity. What follows is simply information that may be helpful in realistically assessing the outcomes and risks of the present policy course, and perhaps to help prevent a bad situation from becoming worse. Read more of this post

Why are there so many tunnels under London?

Why are there so many tunnels under London?

Nov 24th 2013, 23:50 by E.H.

NO ONE knows quite how many tunnels have been burrowed under London. Some of the city’s many underground channels have been subject to the Official Secrets Act: the Kingsway tunnels were once used by a research arm of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service. Others are so old they have fallen into disuse and been forgotten. Nonetheless, anyone walking through central London can reckon that the busy streets around them are mirrored in criss-crossing tunnels below. The world’s first subterranean railway, the London Underground, opened in the city 150 years ago. Last month the first tunnel for Crossrail, an ambitious £15 billion ($24 billion) new railway project running across London, was completed. It lies 40 metres below th Read more of this post

Private military contractors: Beyond Blackwater; An industry reinvents itself after the demise of its most controversial firm

Private military contractors: Beyond Blackwater; An industry reinvents itself after the demise of its most controversial firm

Nov 23rd 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition

“WE WERE selling $1m a year in merchandise with the company logo on it,” says Erik Prince with a mixture of nostalgia and defiance. Blackwater, the company in question, rose to worldwide prominence as an outsourced branch of the American army during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. It had plenty of admirers for the way it had pioneered a new branch of the defence industry, earning a total of around $2 billion from Uncle Sam for providing armed personnel to the Pentagon, the State Department and, secretly, the CIA. But the firm was overwhelmed by its more numerous critics, who said it was an undisciplined, unaccountable bunch of mercenaries. Read more of this post

Delaware’s corporate courts: A new judicial boss; Change is afoot in America’s leading forum for resolving business disputes

Delaware’s corporate courts: A new judicial boss; Change is afoot in America’s leading forum for resolving business disputes

Nov 23rd 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition

IT MAY be one of America’s smallest states but in corporate law Delaware punches well above its weight. Its Court of Chancery, which hears business cases, recently stymied Carl Icahn’s attempt to disrupt a buy-out of Dell. Next month Cooper Tire will try to get another of the court’s rulings overturned by the state’s Supreme Court, so as to hold an Indian rival to the letter of a $2.3 billion merger agreement. Read more of this post

Airbus’s big bet: Commercially, the A380 super-jumbo will struggle to reach cruising altitude

Airbus’s big bet: Commercially, the A380 super-jumbo will struggle to reach cruising altitude

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

THE new venue for Dubai’s international air show, which opened on November 17th, is yet another testament to the ambitions of the tiny Gulf state. Al Maktoum airport, when fully operational in 2027, will handle 160m passengers a year on five runways. And it will operate in tandem with Dubai’s older airport, which is closer to its centre and currently welcomes 60m travellers a year. The punt on continued growth in demand is also reflected in the big orders for new planes that the region’s airlines announced at this week’s show. Read more of this post

How other infrastructure projects can learn from London’s new railway

How other infrastructure projects can learn from London’s new railway

Nov 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

FOR the past 18 months Phyllis, a 1,000-tonne boring machine, has been whirring underground through London. Navigating its way past Victorian sewers and London’s labyrinthine Tube system, in October the bore (named after the woman who created London’s A-Z map by The Economist’s deputy editor in a competition) arrived at Farringdon station in north-east London, having tunnelled 13 miles through the city. The new tunnel marks the first stage of the ambitious Crossrail project, a £15 billion ($24 billion) new railway line. Read more of this post