Category: Economics

Proletariat Loses Money Investing in Ponzi Scheme Supported by Chinese Communists

(p. B1) HONG KONG — At every turn in his improbably rapid rise, Ding Ning, 34, went to great efforts to convey the image of strong government backing for his Internet financing business.
There was his company’s lavish annual meeting and banquet last year in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where China’s legislature meets and where top government leaders host official functions. Adding a splash of celebrity to the event were Zhou Tao, a nationally famous actress and host on the government’s main television broadcaster, and several mid-ranking officials, bureaucrats and lawmakers.
There were the positive profiles in state-controlled media, as well as the company’s advertising on official TV. There was the section of his company’s website devoted to building Communist Party spirit.
But it all came crashing down in dramatic fashion for Mr. Ding this week, when the police alleged that his financing business, Ezubao, was a $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme and announced 21 arrests, including of Mr. Ding. The company was shut down.
, , ,
(p. B7) In interviews, former staff and investors described the signals of strong state support as one of the keys to Ezubao’s rapid rise.
“Many people joined Ezubao because they saw the support from the government and from some government officials,” said Feng Zhe, 36, a Beijing resident who worked as a salesman at the company from June of last year until December.
Mr. Feng said a number of his friends and family members invested in Ezubao’s products and suffered losses. “Many people bought their products because the government has lent the company credibility,” he added.

For the full story, see:
NEIL GOUGH. “Feeling Twice Victimized.” The New York Times (Sat., Feb. 6, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 5, 2016, and has the title “Ponzi Scheme in China Gained Credibility From State Media.”)

“Recyclers Around the Country Face Losses”

(p. B1) . . . recycling is a commodities business. The paper, metal, plastic and glass that recyclers collect, sort and sell competes against so-called virgin materials. And right now, many commodities are cheap.
Abundant oil is the latest headache for recyclers. New plastics are made from the byproducts of oil and gas production. So as plentiful fossil fuels saturate global markets, it has become cheaper for the makers of water bottles, yogurt containers and takeout boxes to simply buy new plastics. This, in turn, is dragging down the price of recycled materials, straining every part of the recycling industry.
In Montgomery, Ala., Infinitus Energy opened a $35 million recycling center in 2014. By last October, it was hemorrhaging (p. B5) money and shut down. Montgomery’s recyclables are now going to a landfill, and a once booming local business, United Plastic Recycling, filed for bankruptcy last year.
. . .
. . . as recyclers around the country face losses, they are passing their costs along to cities and counties. Increasingly, local governments are receiving nothing at all for their recyclables, or even having to pay companies to accept them.
Last year, the city government in Washington, D.C., paid Waste Management $1.37 million to accept the recyclables it collected from residents.

For the full story, see:
DAVID GELLES. “Losing a Profit Motive: A Skid in Oil Prices Pulls the Recycling Industry Down With It.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 13, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 12, 2016, and has the title “Skid in Oil Prices Pulls the Recycling Industry Down With It.”)

New Middle-Skill Jobs Combine Technical and Social Skills

DemingGraphOnMathSocialSkillJobs2015-10-18.jpgSource of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below, based on Deming paper cited further below.

(p. 4) For all the jobs that machines can now do — whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food — they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.

Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.
The findings help explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: the slowdown in the growth even of high-skill jobs. The jobs hit hardest seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.
“As I’m speaking with you, I need to think about what’s going on in your head — ‘Is she bored? Am I giving her too much information?’ — and I have to adjust my behavior all the time,” said David Deming, associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study. “That’s a really hard thing to program, so it’s growing as a share of jobs.”
. . .
“If it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
Mr. Deming’s conclusions are supported by previous research, including that of Mr. Autor. Mr. Autor has written that traditional middle-skill jobs, like clerical or factory work, have been hollowed out by technology. The new middle-skill jobs combine technical and interpersonal expertise, like physical therapy or general contracting.
James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

For the full commentary, see:
Claire Cain Miller. “The Upshot; The Best Jobs Require Social Skills.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 16, 2015, and has the title “The Upshot; Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work.”)

The Deming paper referred to above, is:
Deming, David J. “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 21473, Aug. 2015.

The Autor paper referred to above, is:
Autor, David. “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., NBER Working Paper # 20485, Sept. 2014.

The Heckman paper referred to above, is:
Heckman, James J., Jora Stixrud, and Sergio Urzua. “The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior.” Journal of Labor Economics 24, no. 3 (July 2006): 411-82.

Technology Extends Capabilities of Older Japanese

(p. A1) TOKYO–At an office-building construction site in the center of Japan’s capital, 67-year-old Kenichi Saito effortlessly stacks 44-pound boards with the ease of a man half his age.
His secret: a bendable exoskeleton hugging his waist and thighs, with sensors attached to his skin. The sensors detect when Mr. Saito’s muscles start to move and direct the machine to support his motion, cutting his load’s effective weight by 18 pounds.
“I can carry as much as I did 10 years ago,” says the hard-hatted Mr. Saito.
Mr. Saito is part of an experiment by Obayashi Corp. , the construction giant handling the building project, to confront one of the biggest problems facing the company and the country: a chronic labor shortage resulting from a rapidly aging population. The exoskeleton has allowed Mr. Saito to extend his working life–and Obayashi to keep building.
. . .
(p. A14) The Fujisawa Aikoen nursing home about an hour outside Tokyo started leasing the “hybrid assistive limb,” or HAL, exoskeletons from maker Cyberdyne Inc. in June.
In Hokkaido, 60-year-old potato-pickers use rubber “smart suits” making it easier to bend over. Baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda airport employ similar assistance.
In cases where older people simply can’t do the job or aren’t available, Japanese manufacturers are turning to robots, which help them keep costs down and continue growing.
Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Japan’s largest bank, employs a small robot speaking 19 languages to greet customers, while a Nagasaki hotel staffed mainly by robots opened in July. Komatsu Ltd. is developing self-driving vehicles for construction sites, while industrial robot maker Fanuc Corp. is designing machines that repair each other.
Toyota Motor Corp. is testing in homes its “human support robot,” a videophone/remote-controlled android that allows family and friends to perform tasks for distant elderly people as if they were in the same home. In one demonstration, a young man uses a tablet to look around a bed-bound older man’s room, then directs the robot to open the curtains and bring the older man a drink.
SoftBank Group Corp. earlier this year drew global attention when it put on sale in Japan an automaton called Pepper, which it called the world’s first robot capable of understanding emotions. One of the earliest uses for the 4-foot-tall white humanoid is as a nursing helper.
In a Kanagawa Prefecture test, Pepper entertained a room of 30 80- to 90-year-olds for 40 minutes. He led them in light exercises and tested their ability to recognize colors and letters. Women patted his head like a grandchild.
Showing a video of Pepper with a dementia patient on another occasion, Shunji Iyama, one of the developers, says the robot may sometimes work better than people. “That man keeps repeating himself over and over again,” Mr. Iyama said. “If Pepper were human, he’d get fed up, but he just repeats the same reaction and doesn’t get tired.”

For the full story, see:
Jacob M. Schlesinger and Alexander Martin. “Graying Japan Tries to Embrace the Golden Years.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Nov. 30, 2015): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 29, 2015, and has the title “Graying Japan Tries to Embrace the Golden Years.”)

To Get the High-Hanging Fruit, Grow Shorter Trees

Dr. Gennaro Fazio, a plant breeder and geneticist with the USDA’s Agricultural Resource Service tells us . . . :

“In taller apple trees, the fruit that is high up, exposed to the sun, ripens the fastest. Low-hanging fruit doesn’t get much sun, and it’s not as ripe — not so delectable, you could say — as the higher fruit. You want to pick the low-hanging fruit last, so it has more time to develop.”

But according to Fazio none of this ultimately matters: the idiom “low-hanging fruit” has been rendered totally and utterly irrelevant by the changing nature of apple tree genetics.
When “low-hanging fruit” became a metaphor in the late 1960s, the majority of apple trees in the U.S. were 25- to 30-foot tall goliaths–and the only fruits within reach were those that lingered on lower branches. Today, however, the majority of apple trees are what arborists refer to as “dwarfs.”
. . .
Once hesitant that the smaller trees wouldn’t produce as much fruit, apple growers realized dwarf trees were actually far more profitable. “Farmers get a higher yield per acre,” says Heather Faubert, of the Rhode Island Fruit Growers Association. “With the taller trees, you could only plant about 20 trees per acre; now, you can get as many as 2,000 in the same space.”
The result of these smaller trees is that the lowest-hanging fruits are actually no longer the easiest to pick. In fact, picking them requires repeatedly bending over to knee-level, a maneuver that can prove incredibly straining on the lower back.
“The ergonomics of picking apples have completely changed,” says Fazio. “It really no longer makes sense to go for the low-hanging fruit. The phrase is irrelevant.”

For the full story, see:
Priceonomics.com, “Should You Literally Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit?,” Feb. 5, 2016, URL: http://priceonomics.com/should-you-literally-pick-the-low-hanging-fruit/.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The web page was excerpted in:
“Notable & Quotable: ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Feb. 10, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Feb. 9, 2016.)

Spread of Dynamic Pricing Increases Economic Surplus

The theory of consumer and producer surplus implies that total economic surplus will be greater when pricing changes as supply and demand shift. Dynamic pricing increases the extent to which that is possible, and so should increase the total economic surplus (which is the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus.) Dynamic pricing should also reduce the time consumers waste waiting for the product or service, when pricing is below the market clearing level (like when there are more people seeking a taxi, than there are taxis at the location).

(p. B1) Adult passes to the Indianapolis Zoo used to cost $16.95. Now they set customers back $8 or $30–or almost anywhere in between.
The zoo prices tickets like airfares, changing prices daily based on advance sales and expected demand. It discounts cold weekdays in February and boosts prices after school groups book dozens of tickets. Since introducing such dynamic pricing last year, the zoo’s admission revenue has grown 12%.
. . .
Backed by vast amounts of data and powerful software, more businesses are varying prices by the day, the hour, or even the minute. Online sellers have used such tactics for years, but frequent price (p. B4) changes are increasingly common in the physical world, amplifying the effects of supply and demand on everything from parking spots to golf-course greens fees.
. . .
Previously, a taxi at rush hour went to “the person who happened to be on the right street corner,” said Ian McHenry, the president of Beyond Pricing, which helps homeowners price their rented guest rooms like big hotels. Now, rides go to people willing to pay more, and fewer people “hit the jackpot and get that underpriced reservation or baseball ticket or open cab.”
. . .
“This is not a passing fad,” said Peter Fader, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s customer-analytics initiative. Amazon is making dynamic pricing the norm, he said, “and then it’s going to become imperative for the brick-and-mortar players to figure out how to do this.”
The trend is good for business, helping companies charge more for in-demand items and offload surplus goods. Caberfae Peaks ski resort in Cadillac, Mich., said its revenue per customer has surged 17.6% since it began dynamically pricing its advance-sale tickets five years ago.
Variable pricing can also influence behavior. Uber and Lyft raise prices during peak times in part to lure more drivers onto the road.
Highway operators use dynamic pricing to regulate traffic. Over the past two years, Ferrovial SA unit Cintra has opened several toll roads in the Dallas area that can change prices every five minutes to keep speeds above 50 miles an hour. The toll for one 7-mile stretch, for instance, fluctuated between 90 cents and $4.50 in a recent week.
The Indianapolis Zoo said it adopted dynamic pricing in part to limit crowds after opening a new orangutan center last year. The strategy worked: two-thirds of guests visited on weekdays this summer, compared with 57% in 2013.
And Gogo Inc. shifts the price of its in-flight Internet between $8 and $40 based on a flight’s route, day and time to limit the number of users and keep speeds high.
Andrew Sullivan, a products manager at a California manufacturer, recently paid $34 for the Wi-Fi. “It’s a drag as a consumer,” he said. “You’re not getting any additional value when you’re paying twice as much for the same commodity.”
Consumers typically resist dynamic pricing when it is introduced, but then quickly acclimate, Mr. Fader said. Five years ago, Major League Baseball teams caught flak when they began changing ticket prices based on factors such as date, opponent, weather forecasts and seats remaining.
“Now pretty much every one of them is doing it routinely, and doing it with a remarkable lack of backlash,” Mr. Fader said. “The first time, it’s ‘That ain’t right.’ The second time, it’s all right.”

For the full story, see:
JACK NICAS. “The Price You Pay Depends on Time and Day.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Dec. 14, 2015): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Now Prices Can Change From Minute to Minute.” The three contiguous paragraphs quoted near the end above (on the orangutan center, on Gogo, and on Wi-Fi) appeared in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)

Uber Attracts Older Drivers for the Freedom, Flexibility, Adventure and Money

(p. B1) When Carol Sue Johnson, 73, wheels her silver Mazda S.U.V. out of her driveway in suburban Minneapolis, she doesn’t know how much money she will make driving for the ride-hailing service Uber, but she’s sure she will have an adventure.
Her passengers run the gamut, she said, from three visiting Chinese business executives who were surprised to see a female driver, to teenagers needing a ride to hockey practices or games.
When one group of teenagers “started to get too rowdy,” said Ms. Johnson, who goes by Sue, “one of them told the others to stop because ‘Grandma’s in the car.'”
. . .
(p. B4) For most senior drivers, the biggest advantage is the extra income. Many of those who continue working after 65 do so because they would be too poor otherwise, according to a new report from the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute that found the current retirement system inadequate.
But driving for a ride-booking service, some retirees said, also can offer more than money.
“I love the freedom, the flexibility — and the cash coming in every week,” said Maureen Mahon, 59, who first saw an Uber advertisement on the side of a bus in Manhattan. Ms. Mahon, who lives in Brick Township, N.J., said she had been laid off twice in recent years from Wall Street, and has been driving intermittently since mid-2014.
“I meet businessmen, college kids on their way out for the night, folks going to parties, pretty much the whole range,” she said. “You can drive as much or as little as you like. If the weather’s bad or you have a doctor’s appointment, you just don’t turn on the app.”
Another attraction, compared to driving a taxi, is safety, since customers are screened and no cash is exchanged. So, too, is the opportunity for drivers to shape the job on their own terms.
Driving for Uber “is like a game,” said Stephen B. McPhail, 66, a former charter bus driver who lives in Covington, Wash., south of Seattle. “I like to map out how I spend my time to make the most money.”
An early riser, he gets up at 4:30 a.m. to land several airport rides. Typically, he said, “I work five hours to make between $100 and $150 a day, and I can be done as early as 10 a.m.”

For the full story, see:
ELIZABETH OLSON. “Retiring; Retired, and Now Hitting the Road for Uber and Lyft.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 23, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 22, 2016, and has the title “Retiring; Older Drivers Hit the Road for Uber and Lyft.”)

Bernanke’s “Astonishing” Admission that He Tried, and Failed, to Save Lehman

(p. B1) It is astonishing to hear a former Federal Reserve chairman acknowledge that he may have misled the public as part of an agreement with another senior government official about one of the most crucial moments in recent financial history — and that he now questions whether he should have “been more forthcoming.” But that is what Ben S. Bernanke says in his new memoir, “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath.”
That crucial moment? The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Mr. Bernanke, in perhaps the most candid explanation of Lehman’s 2008 collapse, writes that he and Henry M. Paulson, then the treasury secretary, purposely obfuscated when asked about Lehman’s demise early on, allowing a narrative to develop that the government had purposely let the firm fail.
“In congressional testimony immediately after Lehman’s collapse, Paulson and I were deliberately quite vague when discussing whether we could have saved Lehman,” Mr. Bernanke writes. “But we had agreed in advance to be vague because we were intensely concerned that acknowledging our inability to save Lehman would hurt market confidence and increase pressure on other vulnerable firms.”
. . .
(p. B4) He writes that it was simply impossible to save Lehman, pointing to the nearly $200 billion of losses that Lehman’s creditors have since suffered. No one has come forward on the record, nor has any contemporaneous document been produced in the past seven years that said the government had found a way to save the company and specifically chose not to do so for political reasons, a point Mr. Bernanke alludes to in his book. “I do not want the notion that Lehman’s failure could have been avoided, and that its failure was consequently a policy choice, to become the received wisdom, for the simple reason that it is not true,” he writes. “We did everything we could think of to avoid it.”

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “In Bernanke’s Memoir, a Candid Look at Lehman.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 6, 2015): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 5, 2015, and has the title “In Ben Bernanke’s Memoir, a Candid Look at Lehman Brothers’ Collapse.”)

The Bernanke memoir is:
Bernanke, Ben S. The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015.

Economists Blame Weather for Missed Forecast

(p. C8) Dozens of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had correctly predicted a drop, but one that was far less severe – negative 0.2% compared with the actual 0.6% month-over-month decline.
But they weren’t bothered by the discrepancy, blaming it on the weather. While that sounds like executives on a conference call throwing up excuses for a “miss” following quarterly earnings, the weather really did play a role. November was unusually mild and utility output was 7.6% lower than a year earlier. Manufacturing, by contrast, rose nearly 1%.
The surprising thing is that this wasn’t anticipated. Since few of the economists surveyed live in balmy places like Florida, they somehow failed to notice that they didn’t have to put on a heavy coat or sweater last month when heading into their offices to crank out forecasts.

For the full story, see:
SPENCER JAKAB. “OVERHEARD.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Dec 17, 2015): C8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec 16, 2015, and has the title “OVERHEARD; Economists Need to Get Out More.” The print version does not list an author. The wording of the two versions differs. The version quoted above is the online version.)

China “on a Treadmill to Hell”

(p. B1) DAVOS, Switzerland — At the World Economic Forum here, chief executives and investors are blaming China for a slump in global markets.
Fears about the country’s downshift, as its official growth slowed to a quarter-century low, have dominated high-level discussions, both during public debates and in smaller, private meetings.
The financier George Soros said at a dinner on Wednesday night [January 20, 2016] that a “hard landing is practically unavoidable,” adding that China is the root of the current financial crisis.
. . .
(p. B6) Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard economist who has long warned of a potential financial crisis in China, remained skeptical [that the Chinese government will reform its policies]. “There is a big propaganda push to say everything is good, everything is fine.”
Earlier in the week he told attendees at the forum that China’s large accumulation of government debt would one day be a shock to a financial system that “amplifies shocks.”
Others with bearish views on China have kept their claws out. Jim S. Chanos, who once said China was “on a treadmill to hell,” said he remained deeply concerned. His hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, estimated that China’s nominal gross domestic growth in 2015 was 5 percent compared with 15 percent just five years earlier.
“China’s debt problems still lie ahead of it,” Mr. Chanos said on Thursday, referring to concerns about the extent to which China’s seeming economic growth is actually fueled by borrowing.
As for Mr. Soros, he told an audience at the Panorama Restaurant in the Seehof Hotel in Davos this year that the Chinese had waited too long to properly address the transition of its growth model. Asked by a Bloomberg reporter if there was a risk of repeating 2008, Mr. Soros said the market was in a similar time of financial crisis.
“But the source of the disequilibrium is different,” Mr. Soros said, adding that in 2008, the main cause was the United States subprime crisis. “Now,” he said, “the root cause is basically China.”

For the full story, see:
ALEXANDRA STEVENSON. “Fears About China’s Economy Fester at Davos.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 23, 2016): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date and phrase, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 22, 2016.)

“Minds Feel More Crimped, Fear More Pervasive, Possibility More Limited”

Maybe to lead happy or satisfying lives, we need more adventure, or more projects (hard and important ones) to commit ourselves to?

(p. 19) Freedom is still out there. We all have our idea of it, the deferred dream. Your psyche builds layers of protection around your most vulnerable traits, which may be closely linked to that precious essence in which freedom resides. Freedom is inseparable from risk.

. . .
I don’t know if the world is freer than a half-century ago. On paper, it is. The totalitarian Soviet Imperium is gone. The generals who bossed Latin America are gone, generally. Asia has unshackled itself and claims this century as its own. Media has opened out, gone social.
Yet minds feel more crimped, fear more pervasive, possibility more limited, adventure more choreographed, politics more stale, economics more skewed, pressure more crushing, escape more elusive.
. . .
Which brings me to Finnegan’s wonderful book, a kind of hymn to freedom and passion. Freedom is inside you. It’s the thing that cannot be denied. For Finnegan, that’s surfing and writing. “How could you know your limits unless you tested them?” he asks — a question as true before the ferocious energy of the wave as before the infinite possibilities of the written form.

For the full commentary, see:
Cohen, Roger. “Ways to Be Free.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 23, 2016): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 21, 2016.)

The Finnegan book praised in the passage quoted above, is:
Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.