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Post #5 (October 16, 2016) Billion dollar Investments:

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Post #5 (October 16, 2016) Billion dollar Investments:

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Soft Bank in San Francisco is possibly teaming up with Saudi Arabia to become the largest investors in technology. Combined the two will invest up to $100 billion to different technology companies around the world. The amount of money going into this investment is astonishing, but re enforces the developing pattern that technology is one of the greatest advancements man has seen. The technology spill over that is going to occur is how Saudi Arabia will impact domestic firms in the technology industry. This is relevant in context to the traditional economic perspective of the linkage effect.

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The company has had success in investing in companies rather than buying them outright. Its signature investment was its early backing of the Alibaba Group, well before that company became a colossus of Chinese e-commerce and internet businesses.

In July, SoftBank agreed to buy ARM, the British chip designer whose products underpin goods as varied as iPhones and drones, for $32 billion. It has also been a prolific investor in budding technology companies, from the Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing to the bioengineering start-up Zymergen.

"With the establishment of the SoftBank Vision Fund, we will be able to step up investments in technology companies globally," Mr. Son said in a statement. "Over the next decade, the SoftBank Vision Fund will be the biggest investor in the technology sector."

Its partner, Saudi Arabia, has been taking bigger steps into the tech investing world as well. The kingdom poured $3.5 billion into Uber in June, becoming one of the Silicon Valley darling's biggest individual investors and gaining a seat on its board.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which is leading the investment in the SoftBank Vision Fund, has been looking to diversify its portfolio beyond oil assets. The kingdom's fund is expected to swell to more than $2 trillion after the country's state-owned oil producer, Aramco, goes public in the next several years.

"The Public Investment Fund is focused on achieving attractive long-term financial returns from its investments at home and abroad, as well as supporting the kingdom's Vision 2030 strategy to develop a diversified economy," Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince and chairman of the Public Investment Fund, said in a statement.

The SoftBank Vision Fund will be led by Rajeev Misra, SoftBank's head of strategic finance, and will be based in Britain. Two former investment bankers - Nizar al-Bassam, formerly of Deutsche Bank, and Dalinc Ariburnu, previously of Goldman Sachs - will also be involved.

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SoftBank and Saudi Arabia Partner to Form Giant Investment Fund

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The company has had success in investing in companies rather than buying them outright. Its signature investment was its early backing of the Alibaba Group, well before that company became a colossus of Chinese e-commerce and internet businesses. In July, SoftBank agreed to buy ARM, the British chip designer whose products underpin goods as varied as iPhones and drones, for $32 billion.

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As I read this article I broke down into tears. With the aid of the Nigerian Government, some girls from Chibok who were abducted by Boko Haram’s army were released from slavery. Many others were not so fortunate and have died or are forced to be a part of Haram’s military.

As American’s we take for granted our freedom. We see ourselves are developed as a nation, so it would seem that Africa needs a recipe for development; their barbaric tactics are just one example of how their country is underdeveloped. Largely this is due to lack of vital resources.

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Videos of the ceremony showed reunited families hopping up and down together in celebration, singing Christian songs of praise.

"I felt like it was the day that I born her into this world," said Ruth Markus, the mother of Saratu Markus, one of the freed girls. "I danced and danced and danced."

The girls are in the custody of the secret police, and they are receiving medical and psychological care, government officials said.

They were scheduled to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday.

Mr. Buhari, who took office a year ago, had pledged during his campaign to find the girls. Officials have said they expect more girls to be released soon.

As many as 276 girls were taken in April 2014 when members of Boko Haram stormed their boarding school during exam week.

About 50 escaped in the initial days after the abduction, but before last week only one had been found since: Amina Ali, who was discovered this year roaming in the forest with a baby.

Boko Haram fighters have captured and killed large groups of other schoolchildren, but the kidnapping of the students from Chibok caught the world's attention, fueled by a #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign.

On Sunday, people from Chibok who met with the girls said they looked gaunt.

"They've just become like skeletons," said Yana Galang, a mother of a still-missing girl and a community leader of the Chibok parents.

Some parents who met with the girls said they had reported that one of the schoolgirls in their group of about 100 died of a snakebite, one died in childbirth (their encampment included male hostages, too) and four died in a bombing.

The Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross helped broker negotiations to release the girls, and the Chibok residents who met with the girls Sunday offered more details about their release.

Militants had gathered the girls recently and told them that they were going home. A few days later, a Red Cross vehicle rumbled into the forest where the girls were held.

Representatives shook hands and talked with a militant and then left. A militant then read from a piece of paper the names of those who were to be freed.

Militants later drove the girls for a couple hours until their vehicle broke down. They pointed them in a direction and told them to start walking.

The girls walked for two days and arrived in a border town where they were able to contact Nigerian officials.

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international committee of the red cross

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21 Chibok Schoolgirls, Reuniting With Parents, Tell of Boko Haram Slavery

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Videos of the ceremony showed reunited families hopping up and down together in celebration, singing Christian songs of praise. "I felt like it was the day that I born her into this world," said Ruth Markus, the mother of Saratu Markus, one of the freed girls. "I danced and danced and danced."

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Post #3 (October 16, 2016) Hayekian ideas fighting poverty:

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Post #3 (October 16, 2016) Hayekian ideas fighting poverty:

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In a study done by Harvard Institute of Politics this article notes that 12.7% of households in America did not have enough food to eat last year. Poverty may be a reason why people do not trust in capitalism, and free markets are hard to believe in.

Income inequality makes this article relevant to class topics.  “Feeding America” provides examples of gross ineffectiveness of collecting scare resources. With a wage gap it is difficult to obtain things you need when 1) goods go to the higher bidder and 2) buyers have different amounts of wealth.

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Skepticism about capitalism and free markets is rising. A survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that a majority of 18-to-29-year-old Americans do not believe in modern capitalism at all.

The persistence of deep poverty in an affluent nation may be one reason for this. It's easy to doubt the wisdom of markets when 12.7 percent of American households lived without enough food last year.

Yet food banks, the organizations at the forefront of the fight against hunger, haven't given up on free markets at all - to the contrary, they are increasingly relying on them. How this unlikely marriage happened, and what it teaches us about markets, is an important story.

It is embedded in the research of Canice Prendergast, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who documented the innovations of Feeding America, a large nonprofit organization that collects and distributes hundreds of millions of tons of food to more than 200 food banks throughout the United States.

Until 2005, Feeding America distributed food and other goods in a straightforward way. New donations went to the food bank that had been waiting for new supplies the longest.

This seemed fair, but food frequently ended up in the wrong places. Professor Prendergast said the director of a food bank in Idaho would "roll his eyes when they'd keep offering him potatoes, even though he had warehouses full of them." And Susannah Morgan, director of the Oregon food bank, said that when she was working for a food bank in Alaska, she had frustrations like this one: "picking up the phone one day and being told I'd been given a truckload of peanut butter - in Louisiana." Moving peanut butter across the country was suddenly her responsibility.

These problems provided textbook examples of gross inefficiency in allocating scarce resources, with an eerie resemblance to the pervasive shortages and misdirected resources of central planning in the old Soviet Union.

Free markets are, of course, another way of distributing resources, but they may seem ill suited for food banks, where the goal is to get food to the neediest cases, not the richest.

In a free housing market, for example, big houses generally do not go to those who need them most but to those willing and able to pay the most. Poor families with children often must squeeze into tiny apartments, while rich single people may enjoy spacious homes.

But it turns out that when you analyze objections to free markets on these grounds, they contain two basic issues: First, goods go to the highest bidder; second, bidders possess different amounts of wealth. Disentangling these two factors is important. When markets produce outcomes that seem unfair, it is usually the second factor - the wealth disparity - that is to blame.

Place bidders on an equal footing and the superior efficiency of the market becomes evident. When two similarly well-off families vie for a large house, for example, the family that places the greater value on the property will outbid the other one.

This insight has been put into practice in many settings. In some universities, for example, students bid on courses using "points," not dollars. This bidding process can be fair and efficient when universities allocate the points equitably. It would be a very different matter if the richer students invariably received entry to the best classes.

A task force at Feeding America - which included Professor Prendergast, Ms. Morgan and others - adopted this approach. They embraced a bidding system using a virtual currency. Crucially, food banks with the greatest need received the most currency and so could place the highest bids, harnessing the benefits of a free market with fairness in the distribution of the underlying wealth.

The new system started in 2005 and quickly proved successful, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For example, donations seemed to fall into two categories. Food banks sought some items, like diapers, that "sold" at relatively high prices. Some food banks focused on bidding on these items, which had the effect of lowering the prices of staples, like produce. The neediest food banks were able to obtain these staples at bargain prices. This was the kind of positive-sum situation that ideal markets allow: Everyone was a winner.

In another unexpected turn of events, some food banks began to sell their excess stores. The Idaho food bank, with warehouses full of potatoes, sold some of them and bought other commodities with the proceeds. Soon, these transactions accounted for more than 12 million pounds of food redistributed among the food banks each year.

Most noticeably, everything ran more smoothly. Donations in the old system were laboriously offered to individual food banks in succession until a taker could be found. Donations were sometimes not accepted. Imagine how this made donors feel. Why give when what you offer is not wanted?

In the seven months after the new, more efficient system went into action, food donations increased by 50 million pounds, Professor Prendergast's data indicates. Cause and effect is difficult to demonstrate, but the greater efficiency in making use of donations may have led to more donations.

What's more, the food bank market didn't just allocate scarce resources; it also made it possible to use "knowledge not given to anyone in its totality," as Friedrich A. Hayek, the Nobel laureate, once wrote. In this case, each food bank director knew a part of the puzzle - what the local neighborhood needed, where food donations were available and so on. The more efficient internal market put together all of these pieces.

Markets report such dispersed information in the form of prices. Feeding America, for example, was surprised to see pasta at one point trading for 116 times the price of fresh vegetables. That was revealing data. In hindsight, it made sense: Vegetables spoil rapidly, which is why food companies donated them freely; pasta, with its longer shelf life, was a rarer commodity, as far as donations go. But none of this was obvious until the bidding market sprang up. Feeding America began to use this new information to decide which donations to seek most aggressively.

Though the market eventually flourished, getting it started was not easy. John Arnold, a director of a food bank in western Michigan who died in 2012, at first rejected the new approach: "I am a socialist," he said. "That's why I run a food bank. I don't believe in markets." But despite his initial objections, he became a champion of basic market reforms and continued to innovate, pioneering "free market" inventions like allowing food bank clients to choose their own food, instead of making everyone accept the same basket, as early as the mid-1990s.

Feeding America's experience demonstrates the power of markets when they are used as a tool for fulfilling people's needs fairly and equitably.

This is an important point: Many economics textbooks separate efficiency from equity, but perceptions of the two are intertwined. The efficiency of the Feeding America market was intimately tied to its equity.

Political discourse these days often assumes that free market principles must be associated with inequality. Some free market advocates not only extol market virtues but also caution against interfering with the wealth distributions that untrammeled markets frequently create, elevating the market from a tool to an ideology.

This is a mistake. We could all learn from Mr. Arnold. He understood that you can use the market as a tool without embracing an entire ideology.

Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU4 of the New York edition with the headline: How Food Banks Can Stop Sending Potatoes to Idaho. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Sending Potatoes to Idaho? How the Free Market Can Fight Poverty

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Skepticism about capitalism and free markets is rising. A survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that a majority of 18-to-29-year-old Americans do not believe in modern capitalism at all. The persistence of deep poverty in an affluent nation may be one reason for this.

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Post #2 (October 14, 2016) American Deficit:

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Post #2 (October 14, 2016) American Deficit:

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This article describes that after 6 years of a regression of the yearly budget deficit, this year it will come to a stop. This was largely because of tax breaks given to businesses and individuals. Obama wanted to incorporate tax cuts along with tax increases on the wealthy, congress refused.

This article is relevant because it provides data about our countries’ G.D.P. It compared this year’s deficit of $587 billion (3.2%) to previous years of $438 billion (5.2%). Described, are Obamas plans to fix this, as well as the ideas that the current precedential candidates have to repair it.

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WASHINGTON - The Obama administration confirmed on Friday that a six-year run of declining annual budget deficits had halted: The shortfall for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $587 billion, an increase over last year in dollars and as a percentage of the economy.

The uptick, which had been projected last winter by government analysts, largely reflected the revenue loss from expiring tax breaks for businesses and individuals that Congress extended in December. President Obama had proposed to pair the tax cuts with some tax increases on wealthy Americans, to avoid adding to the deficit, but Congress refused.

The $587 billion deficit for fiscal year 2016 is equivalent to 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product, the measure of the overall output of the economy. The previous year's deficit was $438 billion, or 2.5 percent of G.D.P. - a reduction of three-quarters from the level amid the recession at the end of the George W. Bush administration.

While the tax cuts were the immediate cause of the return to rising annual deficits, budget shortfalls long had been forecast to climb unsustainably after 2018 because of the costs of an aging population. The number of people 65 years or older is expected to increase nearly 40 percent in a decade, driving up spending for Medicare and Social Security.

Mr. Obama, in his budgets this year and in past years, unsuccessfully proposed significant tax increases for the wealthiest taxpayers and some corporations to offset spending initiatives and reduce deficits. In contrast, congressional Republicans proposed mainly to cut Medicare spending, in part by offering beneficiaries taxpayer-funded vouchers to purchase private insurance, and Medicaid, with reduced block grants to states. But legislation to that end never came to a vote.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, proposes some of the same tax increases as Mr. Obama has, and more. But the new revenue is intended to pay for her spending plans, including for education, not to reduce deficits.

Mrs. Clinton's Republican rival, Donald J. Trump, would cut taxes by trillions of dollars mostly for the wealthy and corporations even as he has vowed to sharply reduce the federal debt. His promises to reduce spending enough to cut the debt and pay for his tax cuts have been disputed even by conservative groups, because Mr. Trump has said Medicare and Social Security are off-limits for cuts.

The Obama administration's final reckoning on spending and taxes for 2016, which was jointly released by Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew and the budget director, Shaun Donovan, showed increases in spending for veterans benefit payments, the health programs Medicare and Medicaid, and for interest payments on the nation's debt.

Military spending increased little over all, and dropped for military operations and maintenance. Spending on nutrition for the poor, formerly known as food stamps, was down 4 percent.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Ending Trend, U.S. Deficit Increases to $587 Billion. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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U.S. Deficit Increases to $587 Billion, Ending Downward Trend

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WASHINGTON - The Obama administration confirmed on Friday that a six-year run of declining annual budget deficits had halted: The shortfall for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $587 billion, an increase over last year in dollars and as a percentage of the economy.

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Post #1 (October 14, 2016) Canada- Economic Bright Spots:

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Post #1 (October 14, 2016) Canada- Economic Bright Spots:

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Canada is being talked about in the news for negative and positive reasons. Canada's economy is described as "less than uplifting", their most famous smartphone technology (Blackberry) will no longer be made, and the Canadian dollar has "slumped." Positively, the possibility of approximately 1,500 new jobs could emerge.
The value of Canadian money has weakened in hopes of boosting factories, by making their products cheaper for consumers. Similar situations arose in "Commanding Heights." Outsourcing may be the reason an American global digital company will be moving their business to Canada.

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The other bright spot came from old-fashioned manufacturing. In its current contract negotiations with Detroit-based automakers, the big trade union Unifor has set preserving jobs in Canadian factories as its central objective, and is showing some results. After persuading General Motors to commit to two of its Canadian plants last month, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles agreed this week to refurbish the paint operations at an aging factory in suburban Toronto.

The two automakers, unlike Thomson Reuters, will be looking to various levels of government to provide some of the money to be invested in the plants. If the federal government signs on, the decision may be criticized in hard-hit western provinces, particularly Alberta, if no corresponding aid is offered to the energy industry.

The death of Jim Prentice, the former premier of Alberta, in the crash of a business jet in British Columbia was felt across Canada on Friday. Mr. Prentice held a variety of cabinet posts in the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2010. He stood out in what was an otherwise highly partisan government by acknowledging the concerns of people and groups who were opposed to its positions.

Coinage. Central banks are not about to abandon their currencies and turn everything over to Bitcoin. But they are exploring the technology that underlies the digital currency. Nathaniel Popper, a colleague of mine who literally wrote the book on Bitcoin, reported that the Bank of Canada teamed up with Canada's five largest banks and a consulting firm to run a major digital currency simulation over the summer.

Return to sender. Disputes in the world of philosophy, it seems, can get down and quite dirty. Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins of the University of British Columbia, whose studies have ranged from the knowledge of arithmetic to the nature of romantic love, is one of four philosophers who recently received feces in the mail. The identity of the sender is still unknown. But all four recipients, Jennifer Schuessler found, have been "loosely connected through a long-running, multisided argument with one of the field's most vocal figures."

Portrait. The current exhibition of German and Austrian art at the Neue Gallery in New York focuses on women in the work of Gustav Klimt. In his review for The New York Times, Ken Johnson mentioned an interesting Canadian connection to the artist. Mäda Primavesi was just 9 years old when she posed for one of Klimt's most famous paintings. After World War II, she moved to Canada, where she founded and ran a convalescent home for children in Montreal. Well before her death in 2000, Ms. Primavesi made news by selling a portrait painted by Klimt of her mother, which had widely been thought lost.

Succession. This week, one contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Tony Clement, quit the race; another, Erin O'Toole, officially joined it, and a third, Lisa Raitt, edged toward candidacy. Writing on iPolitics.ca, the conservative political commentator Tasha Kheiriddin suggested that immigration and identity politics could emerge as the major themes of the still-nascent campaign.

Here are some stories, not necessarily related to Canada, that I found interesting:

* While their numbers have declined, bicycle couriers are still around, and they hold an annual North American championship. "This is maybe the only cycling competition where a highlighter is performance equipment," one participant said.

* As we increasingly interact with computers by speaking to them, some people are asking whether they will always have to sound "like a helpful young Caucasian female."

* China's attempts at shaming and reforming badly behaved Chinese tourists are not proving to be much of a success.
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for more than a decade. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
Correction: October 14, 2016

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Canada Today: Economic Bright Spots, and Some Disquieting Mail

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The other bright spot came from old-fashioned manufacturing. In its current contract negotiations with Detroit-based automakers, the big trade union Unifor has set preserving jobs in Canadian factories as its central objective, and is showing some results.