Has Chinese Currency Manipulation Succeeded in Breaking Japanese Manufacturers?

Tonight’s Financial Times has a eye-popping story, that the survival of Sharp, one of Japan’s top consumer products manufacturers, is in doubt:

Sharp has admitted there is “material doubt” about its ability to stay in business as it warned of a second year of record losses, deepening the gloom surrounding Japan’s once dominant consumer electronics industry…

The warning came a day after Panasonic stunned investors by projecting a second consecutive $10bn loss. Panasonic’s share price dropped a further 19 per cent on Thursday.

Sharp and Panasonic, along with Sony, are the most consumer-focused of Japan’s large technology companies. All three have suffered as prices for flatscreen televisions and other household items plunged globally.

Why We Need New Rights to Privacy

Because of technological advances, we must spell out what used to be taken for granted.

By Evan Selinger  |  Posted Friday, Nov. 2, 2012, at 12:17 PM ET

Thanks to the real state website Zillow, it's now super easy to profit from your neighbor’s suffering. With a few easy clicks, you can find out “if a homeowner has defaulted on the mortgage and by how much, whether a house has been taken back by the lender, and what a house might sell for in foreclosure,” as the Los Angeles Times recently reported. After using the service, you can stop by the Johnsons’ to make them a low-ball offer, perhaps sweetening the exploitation with a plate of cookies.

Maybe that’s not fair. Zillow doesn’t let people opt-out, but the company omits borrowers’ names, has a process for correcting mistakes, and uploads only legal information that was previously—albeit inconveniently—available.
 

Paul Krugman: Unraveling the "Future Generations" Debt Debate

The economist Brad DeLong recently took on Professor Nick Rowe, of Carlton University, over the bizarrely confused issue of intergenerational debt; in a moment I'll try to offer a new way of explaining why the conventional presentation is all wrong.

"In Nick Rowe's world the next generation's taxpayers are taxed to pay off the debt — and so they are losers," Mr. DeLong wrote in a blog post on Oct. 12. "And in Nick Rowe's world the next generation's debt-holders are not gainers."

Paul Krugman: The Blackmail Caucus

If President Obama is re-elected, health care coverage will expand dramatically, taxes on the wealthy will go up and Wall Street will face tougher regulation. If Mitt Romney wins instead, health coverage will shrink substantially, taxes on the wealthy will fall to levels not seen in 80 years and financial regulation will be rolled back.

Given the starkness of this difference, you might have expected to see people from both sides of the political divide urging voters to cast their ballots based on the issues. Lately, however, I’ve seen a growing number of Romney supporters making a quite different argument. Vote for Mr. Romney, they say, because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy. 

Desperate Effort by Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle to Silence Discussion about Income Inequality

A tangible sign that the issue of income inequality is taking hold in the American psyche: Tyler Cowen has made a patently ridiculous effort to try to change the topic, and Megan McArdle is dutifully amplifying it (aside: par for the course, McArdle has a remarkably uninformed discussion of thyroid treatment at the top of her short piece. I won’t waste reader time with a discussion, but suffice it to say I have personal experience with the exact symptom pattern she describes, and she’s misrepresenting both the diagnostic approach and endocrinologists’ responses).
Cowen’s contribution falls into the category of agnotology, which is “culturally induced ignorance,” or to put it in crasser terms, consciously seeking to make people stupider. His argument:

I get uneasy when I read sentences such as “inequality caused X.” “Inequality” didn’t cause anything. Inequality is a statistical residue of some other actual processes. It is better to say what caused X (say “the rage and poverty of inner city residents”) and, if relevant, connect this to inequality as well. Except that the cyclically adjusted deficit is an even more problematic causal concept than “inequality” because it relies on measurement of a modal, namely potential output.

This is actually not trivial to unpack.

Biofuel breakthrough: Quick cook method turns algae into oil

ANN ARBOR—It looks like Mother Nature was wasting her time with a multimillion-year process to produce crude oil. Michigan Engineering researchers can "pressure-cook" algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 percent of the green slime into biocrude.

"We're trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms," said Phil Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau professor and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan.

The findings will be presented Nov. 1 at the 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh.

Paul Krugman: Things That Aren't Bubbles

Noah Smith, who is a better human being than I am, wades through an anti-Krugman rant to find an interesting nugget: the claim that money is a bubble. It isn’t, of course; but my explanation of why it isn’t is a bit different from his, and has wider implications.

I’d start by asking, what do we mean when we talk about bubbles? Basically, I’d argue, we mean that people are basing their decisions on beliefs about the future that are based on recent experience but can’t be fulfilled. E.g., people buy houses because they expect home prices to keep rising at a pace that would eventually leave nobody able to buy a first home.

A Case Study of Republicans vs. Democrats on FEMA

—By Kevin Drum  | Tue Oct. 30, 2012 2:35 PM PDT

Mitt Romney apparently still thinks that downsizing and privatizing the functions of FEMA is a good idea. After all, everyone knows that federal bureaucracies are cesspools of incompetence.

Except....it turns out that they're only cesspools of incompetence during certain eras. See if you can spot the trend here:

George H.W. Bush: Appoints Wallace Stickney, head of New Hampshire's Department of Transportation, as head of FEMA. Stickney is a hapless choice and the agency is rapidly driven into the ditch: "Because FEMA had 10 times the proportion of political appointees of most other government agencies, the poorly chosen Bush appointees had a profound effect on the performance of the agency."

Bill Clinton: Appoints James Lee Witt, former head of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services, as head of FEMA. The agency is reborn as a professional operation: "As amazing as it sounds, Witt was the first FEMA head who came to the position with direct experience in emergency management....On Witt's recommendation, Clinton filled most of the FEMA jobs reserved for political appointees with persons who had previous experience in natural disasters and intergovernmental relations."

Keeping the Rich Comfy: Your Job Future?

By Sam Pizzigati

October 28, 2012 - 8:49pm ET 

We've lost our manufacturing economy in the United States. Now we're losing our service economy. We're rapidly becoming, some observers fear, a 'servant economy.'

Fire fighter, basketball player, lion tamer, teacher, nurse: Ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, and you'll get all sorts of answers. But you’ll never hear this one. You’ll never hear youngsters say they want to devote their careers to serving rich people.

Today’s youth might want to reconsider. They’re facing an American economy where serving rich people increasingly seems to offer the best future with real opportunity. Or, as the economist Jeff Faux puts it, we’re well on the way to becoming a full-fledged “servant economy.”

Inequality: Living in the Second Gilded Age

A third of a century ago, all of us economists confidently predicted that America would remain and even become more of a middle-class society. The high income and wealth inequality of the 1870-1929 Gilded Age, we would have said, was a peculiar result of the first age of industrialization. Transformations in technology, public investments in education, a progressive tax system, a safety net, and the continued decline in discrimination on the basis of race and sex had made late-20th century America a much more equal place than early 20th century America, and would make early 21st century America even more equal — even more of a middle-class society — still.

We were wrong.

Paul Krugman: Medicaid on the Ballot

There’s a lot we don’t know about what Mitt Romney would do if he won. He refuses to say which tax loopholes he would close to make up for $5 trillion in tax cuts; his economic “plan” is an empty shell.

But one thing is clear: If he wins, Medicaid — which now covers more than 50 million Americans, and which President Obama would expand further as part of his health reform — will face savage cuts. Estimates suggest that a Romney victory would deny health insurance to about 45 million people who would have coverage if he lost, with two-thirds of that difference due to the assault on Medicaid.

How Patriarchal, Christian Backlash Politics Have Only Become More Vicious

By Arthur Goldwag

October 28, 2012  |  When I tell Republicans — and even some moderate Democrats — that I wrote a book about right-wing hatred, their response, often as not, is skeptical and disapproving. Politics is a rough game, they say. Romney might have his 47 percent, but just listen to all those class war tropes about the 1 percent you hear from the left. Sure, the far right has an unfortunate legacy of racism, sexism and homophobia, but Obama has a whole deck of race and gender cards that he plays. And anyway, the nuts are ultimately unimportant — national elections are decided in the middle.

All of that might be true, but the kind of hatred that I’m talking about goes way beyond ordinary politics and deep into the realm of abnormal psychology. In its full-blown manifestations, it is akin to what an ophidiophobe feels at the sight of a snake: visceral and existential; categorical and absolute. It turns on the gut certainty that your adversaries aren’t looking just to raise your taxes but to destroy your whole way of life: that they are not only wrongheaded, but preternaturally evil. Comparatively few people experience these feelings on a conscious level, but they lie latent in many more of us than we might suspect.
 

Documents Found in Meth House Bare Inner Workings of Dark Money Group

by Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline, Oct. 29, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

The boxes landed in the office of Montana investigators in March 2011.

Found in a meth house in Colorado, they were somewhat of a mystery, holding files on 23 conservative candidates in state races in Montana. They were filled with candidate surveys and mailers that said they were paid for by campaigns, and fliers and bank records from outside spending groups. One folder was labeled "Montana $ Bomb."

The documents pointed to one outside group pulling the candidates' strings: a social welfare nonprofit called Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP.

The Supreme Court and the Death of Progress

Sunday, 28 October 2012 13:06 
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | News Analysis 

Ten years from now we will all look back at this upcoming election and we'll realize that it was here that the Progressive wave of reform that surged forward at the turn of the 20th Century - and made life better for billions of people in this nation over the last 100 years - finally broke and receded backward into the abyss.

We'll realize it was here when the original corporatists like the DuPonts and the Morgans, and today's corporatists like the Kochs, finally won their ruthless, century-old struggle against progressivism, against equal economic opportunity for all, and against equal civil rights for all.

Revealed: How Ronald Reagan, J. Egdar Hoover, and the FBI Plotted to Crush 1960s Dissidents

By Steve Wasserman

October 17, 2012  |  Berkeley in the years that I came of age was heady with the scent of night jasmine and tear gas. It whipsawed, sometimes violently, between clichés, from the Age of Aquarius to the Age of Apocalypse and back. I well recall the evening in February 1969 when hundreds of us, exhausted from a day of battling cops seeking to break the Third World Liberation Strike at the University of California’s campus, trooped down to the Berkeley Community Theatre, where we hoped to find relief in the much-ballyhooed provocations of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre.

Much to our surprise, the production of Paradise Now was a bust. What was an outrage to bourgeois sensibilities elsewhere—nearly nude members of the troupe intoning mantras of prohibition against smoking pot and sexing it up in public—was greeted by the solemn radicals and spirited anarchists of Berkeley as feeble and largely empty gestures. “Super Joel,” one of the town’s more colorful and ubiquitous characters, stood up and loudly denounced Beck and Malina for their faux-radicalism, then lit a joint and began to disrobe. Others quickly followed. Hundreds surrounded the couple, angrily demanding that their tickets be refunded. Dozens of debates erupted all around—over the nature of drama and the character of revolution. The show did not go on. The audience stormed the stage. Finally, at midnight, the fire marshals arrived and kicked us out. Beck and Malina had inadvertently achieved what had previously eluded them: goading the audience into taking collective action, seizing the moment, arguing over whether to remain passive spectators or become actors in a drama of their own making. It was unforgettable. I also remember the denouement: no sooner had the Living Theatre departed than, the next day, a furious Governor Reagan arrived and threatened to deploy the National Guard, in addition to the hundreds of police from throughout Northern California that filled the streets.