Mr Obama goes to visit his creditors

Ouch!  Those headline writers in the UK and elsewhere can be brutal .... The title of this post is the editorial in Financial Times.
This editorial is one of the many that point out that we--the world--is in for trouble if the US dollar continues to be the world's currency, if the US continues with its what-me-worry approach, and if China continues to peg its currency to the dollar.

generalised concern about currencies; an as yet incomplete reversal of the strengthening of the dollar during the crisis; and a determination by the Chinese authorities to avoid appreciation against the dollar since the serious crisis began.

What is more intriguing to me is something Dan Drezner wrote about some time ago, where he noted:

It's the rest of the world -- articularly Europe and the Pacific Rim -- that are getting royally screwed by China's policy.  These countries are seeing their currencies appreciating against both the dollar and the renminbi, which means their products are less competitive in the U.S. market compared to domestic production and Chinese exports.

The more time goes by, the more I am convinced that my rather nutty conclusion--it seemed like that then--might not be as nutty after all:

Sometimes I wonder whether China's interest in the US dollar, and keeping its yuan tied to the dollar, is to essentially bankrupt the rest of the world and the US so that it can ultimately prevail as the global power.

Remembrance of things past--the White House

In 1994, we could go up close and personal and hang on to the fence and take photos.  I am not sure what Bill Clinton was up to in the Oval Office when I clicked this photo .... muahahahaha

I have not been to DC since 9/11; will be there next year for the AAG annual meeting.  I bet the city will look very different from how I remember it from 15 years ago.
Why the hell did bin Laden have to screw up things for practically the overwhelming majority on this planet :-(
Oh well, "there is no there there" ..... I wish it were otherwise ....

Why are we in Afghanistan? seriously ....

The photos and read the text under each of them (ht).... Withdrawing the troops is seven-years overdue ... at least 
The text under the photo that is to the left here:
Soldiers from the U.S. Army First Battalion, 26th Infantry take defensive positions at firebase Restrepo after receiving fire from Taliban positions in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan's Kunar Province on May 11, 2009. Spc. Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas, far left was wearing "I love NY" boxer shorts after rushing from his sleeping quarters to join his fellow platoon members.

Hey Lou Dobbs, I will not miss you--I never watched your program :-)

A long time ago--when Bernard Shaw was the news anchor at CNN--I remember watching that news channel a lot.  For two main reasons: one, the internets was only a series of tubes (!) at that time, and the friendly web hadn't come into place.  So, there was no way a junkie like me could get updated otherwise.  Second, CNN was mostly only a news channel.
Then things changed--thanks to Faux News.
Soon, CNN also became a sensation-seeking shoutfest channel, with half the screen devoted to rolling ticker updates.
While I was smart enough to program my TV to skip the Faux News channel, I would pause every once in a while at CNN.  But, Lou Dobbs?  Nah!

As always, The Onion has the best news update on Dobbs' departure.  The entire report is hysterical--the way it weaves in stereotypes after stereotypes that Dobbs' might have used in his rants, er, program.  An excerpt:

Acting on anonymous tips from within the Hispanic-American community, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials on Wednesday deported Luis Miguel Salvador Aguila Dominguez, who for the last 48 years had been living illegally in the United States under the name Lou Dobbs. ...
In addition to holding multiple jobs without ever obtaining a guest-worker permit or H-1B visa, "Dobbs" is reported to have collected welfare every month for nearly five decades. He appeared in good health when apprehended, having used Medicaid to obtain numerous health care services over the years, but immigration officials fear he still may have exposed the American population to the many infectious diseases illegal immigrants tend to carry, including both malaria and leprosy.

USA! USA! USA!!! .....

The Economist:

according to new Gallup polling data gathered over the last three years, 16% of adults—or some 700m people—in over 130 countries say they would like to start a new life abroad. The most popular destinations specified are wealthy Western countries, though Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also attractive. If everyone got their wish, America's population would swell by 165m while Canada, Britain and France would each gain 45m new migrants.

Outsourcing from Bangalore .... to rural India

With more than a billion people, India is more a continent than a country.  So, we can and should expect wage differentials within its own borders, which means that outsourcing can happen even from costlier urban areas to inexpensive rural areas.
At the same time, as I have blogged often, here, a college degree is way too hyped, and is quite an unnecessary credential for many of these jobs. 
So, combine these two and this NY Times report is no surprise at all!  Excerpt:

Now some businesses have begun looking to rural India for an untapped pool of eager and motivated office workers. Rural Shores has hired about 100 young people, most of them high school graduates who have completed some college, all of them from rural areas around this small town. The company has three centers now, but it aims to open 500 centers across India in the next five years.
Most of the center’s employees are the first members of their families to have office jobs. They speak halting English at best, but have enough skill with the language to do basic data entry, read forms and even write simple e-mail messages.
With much lower rent and wages than in similar centers in cities, the company says it can do the same jobs as many outsourcing companies for half the price. A Bangalore office worker with skills similar to those of workers here commands about 7,000 rupees a month, or $150, Mr. Srinivasan said. In small towns and villages, a minimum-wage salary of about $60 a month is considered excellent.
Here in Bagepalli, the Rural Shores office hums through two shifts a day. One set of workers answers customer service e-mail messages for an Indian loyalty card company. Another processes claims for an insurance company. In one room, workers capture data from scanned timecards filled out by truck drivers in the United States. They record nights spent in Abilene, Tex., deliveries in Kansas City and breakdowns in Salt Lake City, all of which the workers decipher and enter into a database.

A whole new world, every few days :-)

Party like it is 1999 :-(

If only it were at least 1999, with respect to the S&P index

The Best F**king News Team Ever reports on the Berlin Wall

The ending, with Jon Oliver, is simply fantastic :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Legends of the Wall
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Healthcare reform: subterfuge, and the triumph of hope over experience

The House narrowly passes a healthcare reform bill.  Next stop the Senate.
But .....
First, from this NY Times piece that reports on Maine's healthcacre efforts:

Maine is the Charlie Brown of health care. The state’s legislators have tried for decades to fix its system, but their efforts have always fallen short: health insurance premiums are still among the least affordable in the nation, health care spending per person is among the highest and hospital emergency rooms are among the most crowded. Indeed, many overhauls to the system have done little more than squeeze a balloon — solving one problem while worsening another.

But like the Peanuts character, the state keeps trying. Indeed, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Maine’s senior United States senator and so far one of only two Republicans in Congress to vote for an overhaul, spent two years in the late 1970s as chairwoman of the State Legislature’s joint Health and Human Services Committee pushing small reform efforts. “That’s where I garnered an enormous deference to the issue of health care and its complexities,” Ms. Snowe said in an interview.

Maine’s history is a cautionary tale for national health reform. The state could never figure out how to slow the spiraling increase in medical costs, hobbling its efforts to offer more people insurance coverage.

 And, then from John Cassidy's essay in the New Yorker:

So what does it all add up to? The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.

That takes me back to where I began. Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars.

Ahem!

Abortion and healthcare reform

Now it is big news (samples: click here and here)
Not news to me.  I blogged about this back in September.  Ha! I led that post with:

It has puzzled me that those opposed to health care reform have gone the insane route of using labels like socialism....when they could have scored a lot more points a lot easier by simply zooming into abortion.  Of course, I am not the first guy to have thought about this.  But, I still cannot understand why abortion did not become a populist issue in health care reform.

The Dalai Lama: next stop White House? :-)

In an opinion column a few weeks ago, I wrote about two trips that the Dalai Lama had on his calendar: the visit to the White House to meet with President Obama, which was nixed by the President, and the visit to to Tawang.  I wondered whether the Tawang visit will happen, given how China was clearly unhappy that the "splittist" was heading to a "disputed territory" ....

For once, a good update: the visit happened. 

Now, let us see what Obama will do :-)

Israel/Palestine: quote of the day

“When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”

 Thomas Friedman in the NY Times