Archive for February, 2010
Yahoo Is Getting Very Efficient — At Dying
From TechCrunchEfficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly.
It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and the “ready, fire, aim” game plan of Facebook and the other young guns is eating their lunch. Even the massive Google is still trying to shake things up with new and controversial products.
Yahoo’s strategy seems more like “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…”
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See Also:
- Yahoo Just Put Out Two Videos To Convince Employees It’s Still In The Search Game
- SEC STALKER: Yahoo’s Founders Are Unloading 5 Million Shares
- Yahoo To Shutter "Yahoo! Tech"*
The Best iPhone Apps Of The Week
In this week’s conservative, undersexed app roundup: Guitarists, assisted! Camera and video apps, replaced! Final Fantasy yearning, sated! Science, wielded like a sword! Birds, projectilized! Beautiful puzzles, conquered! And more…
Check out the week’s best iPhone apps >
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See Also:
- 15 Outrageous Sex Apps That Made It Into The iPhone App Store
- The 10 Best iPhone Apps Of The Week
- This Week’s Best iPhone Apps
Wen Jiabao Sets His Own Expectations Bar Way Too High As He Promises To Kill Bubbles While Supporting Asset Prices
One wonders if the Chinese government is setting its citizens expectations dangerously high right now.
According to Xinhua, Wen Jiabao staged a chat with Chinese ‘netizens’ whereby he promised to keep inflation under control and prevent a housing bubble.
Thing is, we’re pretty sure that the government is expected to support housing values and stock markets at the same time. While keeping the yuan pegged at a competitive rate vs. the dollar of course.
Obviously China has gotten away with setting pretty high economic expectations for quite some time already, but it seems as if almost every economic variable is now expected to be under the deliberate control of the government.
This is great for public relations while the economy is humming along, but one as to wonder if these government economic guarantees will one day come back to bite, hard. Maybe they should learn the importance of ‘under-promising, over-delivering’ rather than over-promising and then simply hoping for the best.
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See Also:
- India Aims To Double Exports By 2014, Which Means Obama’s Export Dreams Are Toast
- Why Fears Of A Chinese Bubble Are Totally Ridiculous
- China Test Driving A Yuan Hike With Select Industries
How The White House Just Used The “Gate Crashers” Incident To Open The Door To More Corporate Influence
Remember the “gate crasher” incident from last year, when the Salahi’s managed to finagle their way into a White House party?
It seems like ages ago, and the media has long moved on, but in the last couple of days the real fallout occurred.
Desirée Rogers, the White House Social Secretary at the center of the fiasco, resigned on Friday.
Immediately her replacement, Juliana Smoot, was named.
Who is Smoot?
Ben Smith at POLITICO notes that she’s basically a career fundraiser, who’s now in the perfect position, as Smith puts it to “unite money and access.”
She has the long rolodex from her days of raising cash, and now she holds the invites to swanky White House parties.
The more things change…
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See Also:
- The Salahis Want To Join Elite Reality TV Circles
- If Congress Comes Calling, Alleged White House Party Crashers Will Plead The 5th
- White House Posts Photo Of Party Crashers To Its Flickr Page
Asian Economies Are Actually Becoming A Smaller Part Of The World
The latest Economist provides some interesting macro perspective for the global economy.
Despite talk of Asia de-throning the West economically over time, the trend has actually moved in reverse recently… when measured using current market exchange rates:
The Economist via Free Exchange:
Yet a closer look at the figures suggests that the shift in economic power from West to East can be exaggerated. Thanks partly to falling currencies, Asia’s total share of world GDP (in nominal terms at market exchange rates) has actually slipped, from 29% in 1995 to 27% last year (see chart 1). In 2009 Asia’s total GDP exceeded America’s but was still slightly smaller than western Europe’s (although it could overtake the latter this year). To put it another way, the output of the rich West is still almost twice as big as that of the East.
As for the popular belief that Asian producers are grabbing an ever-larger slice of exports, the region’s 31% share of world exports last year was not much higher than in 1995 (28%) and remains smaller than western Europe’s. Indeed, the shift towards Asia appears to have slowed, not quickened. Its share of world output and exports surged during the 1980s and early 1990s. Although China’s share has grown since then, this has been largely offset by the decline in Japan, whose share of output and exports has halved.
Just don’t forget the two important ‘buts’ here. One is that Asian economies are a lot larger if measured based on purchasing power parity, which is basically whereby one adjusts currency values so that a basket of similar products in each country would have the same global price. The other is that Japan’s decline has been a huge drag on Asia’s aggregate data. Ex-Japan, Asia would look a lot better than the above statements suggest.
Continue reading at The Economist >
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See Also:
- The Illusion Of Japanese GDP Growth
- India Aims To Double Exports By 2014, Which Means Obama’s Export Dreams Are Toast
- It Surely Matters… Euro Getting Murdered By Bernanke’s Hike As Asian Markets Rout