Soon after Trump recaptured the White House, Chinese leader Xi Jinping asked aides to urgently analyze the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry, concerned that, as Trump prepares for a showdown with Beijing, China could get isolated like Moscow during that era--wsj
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More jobs were lost in the Rust Belt in the northeastern United States between 1950 and 1980 … than in the decades that followed.
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A Government Accountability Office report last spring estimated the “federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.
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The United States has run an annual trade deficit every single year since 1976.
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Since 1999, trade as a share of GDP has risen from 31 per cent to 55 per cent in the eurozone, whereas in China it rose from 34 per cent to 37 per cent and in the US from 23 per cent to just 25 per cent. This openness was an asset in a globalising world. But now it has become a vulnerability.
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Energy firm Wood Mackenzie has estimated that the IRA’s energy subsidies could hit $3 trillion through 2050, and his own forthcoming estimates push the number even higher—to as much as $4.7 trillion over the same timeframe.
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Estimate for 2023 (2024 data aren’t available yet) are the Bureau of Land Management lost $734.6 million, the Forest Service lost $9.77 billion, and the National Park Service lost $2.82 billion.
In 2015 the Department of Commerce estimated that all federal lands were worth $1.8 trillion. Applying a simple long-term government bond yield of about 5%, a $1.8 trillion asset should yield $90 billion a year, not lose more than $13 billion.
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Germany has lost almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs since the start of the Covid pandemic as companies and politicians sound the alarm that Europe’s industrial heartland is suffering an irreversible decline…
The contraction of Germany’s industry is evident in the fall of market value in the sector. Together, Dax constituents Volkswagen, Thyssenkrupp and BASF have lost €50bn, or 34 per cent, in market capitalisation over the past five years. From 2010 to 2014, carmakers on the Dax index were more valuable on average than their peers in any other sector, but valuations have slipped as demand has started to falter. VW’s deliveries to customers last year slumped by nearly a fifth compared with the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
In other industrials, steelmaker Thyssenkrupp has announced plans to reduce its production capacity by up to a quarter and cut 40 per cent of jobs. BASF is looking to cut costs at its Ludwigshafen headquarters, the world’s largest chemical site, by €2bn a year
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GAO earlier estimated that 11% to 15% of unemployment benefits during the pandemic were fraudulent, totalling between $100 billion and $135 billion.
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Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
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