Free Republic

FDI or Foreign Direct Investment in China hit a 30-year low last year.China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments stood at $33 billion last year, according to data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange released Sunday. That measure of new foreign investment into the country — which records monetary flows connected to foreign-owned entities in China — was 82% lower than the 2022 level and the lowest since 1993...The government’s efforts to get overseas companies to return after Covid are falling short, and more will be needed if Beijing is to succeed in its aims. The continuing...

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) are defying the combined urging of green lobbyists and government diktat with just a quarter making up new purchases for 2023, UK data reveals. The consumer rejection of EVs is a challenge to the electric car market and government goals to move towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

CBS reports “ Popular drugs used to suppress appetites such as Ozempic and Wegovy might be causing an economic impact at some large retailers who say that people are buying less food at the grocery store, impacting their bottom line.” Video at link

This type of motion is not new, it actually has a name. It is called the Hilina Slump. During the last strong quake in Hawaii, a magnitude 7.2 event on November 29th 1975, this slump slid toward the ocean by about 11 feet. Another temblor, the 7.9 magnitude Hawaii quake of 1868 caused the slump to move as well, resulting in a tsunami with a maximum wave height of about 60 feet. With all respect for the people who are being affected by the current eruption, the way Kilauea lava comes to the surface is rather tame. It crawls slowly...

We confidently assume that we have the world's most entrepreneurial nation, and the proof seems overwhelming. Google, Facebook and Twitter are but three (relatively) recent startups that have become corporate titans. Before them, there were others: Microsoft, Intel and FedEx. We seem to excel at nurturing new firms. Or do we? Previous studies have shown that, despite the success of firms like Facebook, the number of startups has dropped sharply, from about 13% of all firms in the late 1980s to about 8% in 2011. Now a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research reports that the expansion...

Investors and financial journalists scrambling to find an explanation for the recent plunge in global stock markets have plenty of suspects. Some look abroad for scapegoats: Greece or China. Others blame Janet Yellen: the Federal Reserve she chairs is at long last on the verge of raising interest rates, if only slightly. Personally, I blame the decline in share values on Donald Trump. On immigration, Trump has made a name for himself as the restrictionist candidate. Yet scholars describe increased immigration as an engine of economic growth. The last time America slammed the immigration door shut, in 1929, with the...

HOUSTON – Oil field services firm Schlumberger announced Thursday it plans to ax another 11,000 workers, kicking off what could be a second major wave of layoffs across the oil industry. The move will bring Schlumberger’s layoffs up to 20,000 employees, roughly 15 percent of its workforce, since it began paring back its payroll earlier this year to cope with low oil prices. The nine-month oil slump has cost the energy industry more than 120,000 jobs so far, according to oil field staffing firm Swift Worldwide Resources. Oil equipment companies have been forced to fine-tune their workforce as they promise...

Chevron Corp. said Tuesday it would sell off more assets and cut back on capital spending, as the integrated oil and gas giant looks to protect its finances from lower crude prices. Chevron said it would put about $15 billion of assets up for sale through 2017 — up from a previous $10 billion target — and cut capital spending incrementally to roughly $30 billion in 2017. In January, Chevron had said it would trim capital spending to $35 billion in 2015, down about $5 billion from its 2014 budget. Despite the cuts, the San Ramon, California-based company said it...

January 09, 2015 Alasdair_Macleod 2014 ended with two ominous developments: the strength of the US dollar and a collapse in key commodity prices. It is tempting to view both events as one, but the continuing fall in oil prices through December reveals they are sequential: first there was a greater preference for dollars compared with other currencies and this still persists, followed by a developing preference for all but the weakest currencies at the expense of raw materials and energy. These are two steps on a path that should logically lead to a global slump. Dollar strength was the first...

"We're starting to feel the infection now." -- Michael Feroli, a J.P. Morgan economist, talking to The Wall Street Journal about the first monthly decline in Institute for Supply Management’s measure of U.S. manufacturing output since July 2009, including the sharpest drop in new orders since the plunge that followed Sept. 11, 2001. The perversity of a continually crummy economy is that sometimes the best news for investors is bad news. That’s the case with the surprisingly steep drop in manufacturing output in June. The measure slipped into negative territory for the first time since the American economy technically escaped...

Greece Tests The Limit Of Sovereign Debt As It Grinds Towards SlumpGreece is disturbingly close to a debt compound spiral. It is the first developed country on either side of the Atlantic to push unfunded welfare largesse to the limits of market tolerance. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 5:58PM GMT 22 Nov 2009 Euro membership blocks every plausible way out of the crisis, other than EU beggary. This is what happens when a facile political elite signs up to a currency union for reasons of prestige or to snatch windfall gains without understanding the terms of its Faustian contract. When the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Tuesday urged bold action action to pull the economy out of a deepening slump, even if it means a surge in U.S. government debt. "We are better off moving aggressively today to solve our economic problems," he told the Senate. "The alternative could be a prolonged episode of economic stagnation that would not only contribute to further deterioration in the fiscal situation, but would also imply lower output, employment and incomes for an extended period," he said. President Barack Obama's recent budget proposal projects an explosion of the budget deficit to...

* Global stocks slide on economic data, ailing banks fear * Gold futures shoot above $1,000 in flight to safety * Government bond prices rise as risk aversion grows * Oil slumps as deteriorating economy dents demand (Adds close of European markets) By Herbert Lash NEW YORK, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Jitters about ailing banks and worsening economies slammed global markets on Friday as investors fled risky assets such as stocks for the relative safety of government debt and gold, which shot above $1,000 an ounce. The Dow Jones industrials and European shares slid to six-year lows, while the S&P...

The credit markets have been bouncing around wildly as of late, with one Wall Street firm after another – Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG – either merging with a more stable entity or being bailed out by taxpayers. This follows the massive government bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a veritable cesspool of corruption. How did this come to be? Ironically, from the very thing that is now being proposed to correct it – more government involvement and oversight. The main reason these entities are looking to Washington to be saved is because it was, for the...

For India's Tech Titans, Growth Is Waning By NIRAJ SHETH August 20, 2008; Page A1 NEW DELHI -- India's information-technology industry, the engine of the nation's economic resurgence, is losing steam. A decade ago, a host of Indian companies -- led by Infosys Technologies Ltd., Wipro Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. -- shot to global prominence by helping fix the "millennium bug" that threatened to crash many of the world's computers at the end of 1999. Often growing at 40% a year or more since, they quickly helped build a global tech-outsourcing industry that has changed how the world...

Massachusetts home prices had their biggest monthly drop in two decades in April, the Warren Group reported today.

Chrysler to shut down for fortnight as sales plunge Andrew Clark and Mark Milner The Guardian, Friday March 14 2008 The American carmaker Chrysler has told its 70,000 workers to take a two-week holiday in July, in a company-wide shutdown reflecting plunging sales of vans and lorries. Chrysler, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital, is smaller than rivals Ford and General Motors, and is being squeezed by soaring petrol prices. In an internal memo, Robert Nardelli , chief executive, asked staff to approach the idea "with an open mind and a team spirit". He wrote: "In...

...For all the wishful thinking in the housing industry, home prices can be remarkably stubborn. Just look at what happened in the '80s and '90s. The inflation-adjusted average price of an existing home peaked in 1979, didn't bottom out until 1984 and didn't return to the 1979 level until 1995. In other words, real home prices went nowhere for 16 years. Granted, inflation during that period was running at an average of 4.7%, versus 2.6% since 1995. But that doesn't mean real home prices will now fare better. Chief economist Lawrence Yun of the National Association of Realtors predicts that...

House prices in London dropped at their fastest pace in more than two years in October sparking fears that a serious housing slowdown will spread from the nation's capital in the year ahead. The Land Registry, the most comprehensive source of house price data, said today that house prices fell by 0.6 per cent in October in London. While price rises in most other regions of England and Wales helped the overall average increase by an anaemic 0.1 per cent, the sharp drop in London set warning bells ringing as the capital's property market usually plots a course for the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Demand for big-ticket manufactured goods plunged in August by the largest amount in seven months, with widespread weakness signaling a slowdown in the nation's industrial sector. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that orders for durable goods, everything from commercial jetliners to home appliances, fell by 4.9 percent in August, the biggest decline since a 6.1 percent fall in January. It was far larger than the 3.5 percent drop that economists had been expecting and resulted from across-the-board decreases in a number of categories. The concern is that the steep downturn in housing and turbulence in financial markets...