But why the panicked selling in China? It certainly wasn't because of anything Greenspan said. Most news reports are declaring that it was the result of rumors about potential policy initiatives that the Chinese leadership might soon enact to cool off an economy that is growing too fast. Whether Premier Wen Jiabao is about to announce interest rate hikes or a capital gains tax is impossible to say, but what we do know is that the leadership is very concerned with attempting to rein in China's reckless growth. And that's probably a good thing for everyone.
So when Shanghai sneezes, the world's markets catch the bird flu? True or not, the fact that this story is even being told is testament to how far and how fast China has come. It's instructive to think back 10 years, to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. China managed to keep itself relatively immune from the devastation that ransacked its neighbors, in part because of its iron grip on its own currency, and possibly because it was less well integrated into the global economy than the rest of the region. Ten years later, it's China that's shaking up the status quo, with a little help from the United States. From that vantage point, the fact that on Wednesday the Shanghai stock exchange, so far, is keeping its cool could well be the single most significant data point in all the market madness racing around the globe over the past 24 hours.
The reality is that in 1997 China had NO international stock market and did not yet own the ultimate capitalist safe haven; Hong Kong. So the Yaun was protected by the Chinese and their stock market, being internal, did not suffer the meltdown the rest of the world did.The 1987 market crash, which greeted Greenspan just two months into his term and drained the stock markets of nearly one-quarter of their value in a single day, was widely thought at the time to be a precursor of recession. But the Fed chairman, beginning to establish his reputation for working miracles, avoided the inevitable by guaranteeing to pump enough money into the economy to keep anyone from going broke for lack of cash.
The bull market effectively came to an end on September 3, 1929, immediately the shrewder operators returned from vacation and looked hard at the underlying figures. Later rises were merely hiccups in a steady downward trend. On Monday October 9, for the first time, the ticker tape could not keep pace with the news of falls and never caught up. Margin calls had begun to go out by telegram the Saturday before, and by the beginning of the week speculators began to realize they might lose their savings and even their homes. On Thursday, October 12, shares dropped vertically with no one buying, and speculators were sold out as they failed to respond to margin calls. Then came Black Tuesday, October 19, and the first selling of sound stocks to raise desperately needed liquidity.
So far all was explicable and might easily have been predicted. This particular stock market corrective was bound to be severe because of the unprecedented amount of speculation which Wall Street rules then permitted. In 1929 1,548,707 customers had accounts with America's 29 stock exchanges. In a population of 120 million, nearly 30 million families had an active association with the market, and a million investors could be called speculators. Moreover, of these nearly two-thirds, or 600,000, were trading on margin; that is, on funds they either did not possess or could not easily produce.
The danger of this growth in margin trading was compounded by the mushrooming of investment trusts which marked the last phase of the bull market. Traditionally, stocks were valued at about ten times earnings. With high margin trading, earnings on shares, only one or two percent, were far less than the eight to ten percent interest on loans used to buy them. This meant that any profits were in capital gains alone. Thus, Radio Corporation of America, which had never paid a dividend at all, went from 85 to 410 points in 1928. By 1929, some stocks were selling at 50 times earnings. A market boom based entirely on capital gains is merely a form of pyramid selling. By the end of 1928 the new investment trusts were coming onto the market at the rate of one a day, and virtually all were archetype inverted pyramids. They had "high leverage"—a new term in 1929—through their own supposedly shrewd investments, and secured phenomenal stock exchange growth on the basis of a very small plinth of real growth. United Founders Corporation, for instance, had been created by a bankruptcy with an investment of $500, and by 1929 its nominal resources, which determined its share price, were listed as $686,165,000. Another investment trust had a market value of over a billion dollars, but its chief asset was an electric company which in 1921 had been worth only $6 million. These crazy trusts, whose assets were almost entirely dubious paper, gave the boom an additional superstructure of pure speculation, and once the market broke, the "high leverage" worked in reverse.
Hence, awakening from the pipe dream was bound to be painful, and it is not surprising that by the end of the day on October 24, eleven men well-known on Wall Street had committed suicide. The immediate panic subsided on November 13, at which point the index had fallen from 452 to 224. That was indeed a severe correction but it has to be remembered that in December 1928 the index had been 245, only 21 points higher. Business and stock exchange downturns serve essential economic purposes. They have to be sharp, but they need not be long because they are self-adjusting. All they require on the part of the government, the business community, and the public is patience. The 1920 recession had adjusted itself within a year. There was no reason why the 1929 recession should have taken longer, for the American economy was fundamentally sound. If the recession had been allowed to adjust itself, as it would have done by the end of 1930 on any earlier analogy, confidence would have returned and the world slump need never have occurred.
Instead, the stock market became an engine of doom, carrying to destruction the entire nation and, in its wake, the world. By July 8, 1932, New York Times industrials had fallen from 224 at the end of the initial panic to 58. U.S. Steel, the world's biggest and most efficient steel-maker, which had been 262 points before the market broke in 1929, was now only 22. General Motors, already one of the best-run and most successful manufacturing groups in the world, had fallen from 73 to 8. These calamitous falls were gradually reflected in the real economy. Industrial production, which had been 114 in August 1929, was 54 by March 1933, a fall of more than half, while manufactured durables fell by 77 percent, nearly four-fifths. Business construction fell from $8.7 billion in 1929 to only $1.4 billion in 1933.
Unemployment rose over the same period from a mere 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent in 1933, and 26.7 percent the following year. At one point, 34 million men, women, and children were without any income at all, and this figure excluded farm families who were also desperately hit. City revenues collapsed, schools and universities shut or went bankrupt, and malnutrition leapt to 20 percent, something that had never happened before in United States history—even in the harsh early days of settlement.
This pattern was repeated all over the industrial world. It was the worst slump in history, and the most protracted. Indeed there was no natural recovery. France, for instance, did not get back to its 1929 level of industrial production until the mid-1950s. The world economy, insofar as it was saved at all, was saved by war, or its preparations. The first major economy to revitalize itself was Germany's, which with the advent of Hitler's Nazi regime in January, 1933, embarked on an immediate rearmament program. Within a year, Germany had full employment. None of the others fared so well. Britain began to rearm in 1937, and thereafter unemployment fell gradually, though it was still at historically high levels when war broke out on September 3, 1939. That was the date on which Wall Street, anticipating lucrative arms sales and eventually U.S. participation in the war, at last returned to 1929 prices.
Worker shortage a 'myth' - union
'Lots of skilled people in province'
Alberta's labour shortage is a myth, says the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.Tim Brower, IBEW Local 424 business manager, says non-union contractors are using the "myth" of a labour shortage to bring in temporary foreign workers who are taking away jobs from Albertans. "There is a shortage of unskilled people in this province. I won't deny that," he told reporters at the legislature yesterday. "Tim Hortons is looking for people. 7-Eleven is looking for people ... but when it comes to skilled people in this province, there is no shortage. I am the expert. I have them available."Brower said 1,000 electricians in his union are unemployed or working other jobs because they can't find work in their trade. "I have run into my members working at Home Depot handing out electrical components," he said. "Some of them are driving trucks.
Kushner is the president of the Merit Contractors Association and the person most responsible for getting a review of the Code rolling. Call them merit contractors, or open shops, it all means non-union (or at the very most, an "alternative" labour group such as the Christian Labour Association of Canada).
Alberta's non-union construction industry began 20 years ago, as the oil price slump of the early 1980s shut down jobs and pushed companies into bankruptcy. Driven by the earlier, decades-long boom and labour shortage, construction labour relations had become a perpetual upward spiral of wage increases. Faced with the crunch, companies had to cut costs or go under.
The end result was the famous "spin-off" company, a term industry people are reluctant to use to this day. After locking out their employees for 25 hours, the firm would hire them back in a subsidiary company, or through a labour broker, at lower wages. After the dust settled, the complexion of Alberta�s construction industry had changed forever.
Today, there are few union contractors working in the commercial/institutional sector, while the large industrial projects are built almost exclusively by organized labour. The Merit Contractors Association represents 670 companies in Alberta, employing over 20,000 persons who complete 32 million hours of construction work annually. The Association has been growing at a rate of 36% a year, for the past four years. During those four years, it�s been lobbying ceaselessly, in its own right and through its members, for changes to workplace legislation, making annual presentations at Standing Policy Committee and appearances at Conservative Party functions.
Celine Dion not Stephane Dion.
10:52: I'm not the biggest fan of movie scores, but I have to say, Ennio Morricone elevates the genre. Take notes, please, John Williams. Celine Dion opens her mouth, my cue to get up and stretch my legs.
You had to lean forward to hear her sing, and as the camera focused on her mouth I was given to think of a Kissing Gourami as she painfully formed each word with her lips as she sang. High notes ferget it. Deep contralto ferget it. It was white toast, nah make that Melba toast.
One look at the face of the former face of the franchise and you knew.
Impeccable sources suggest the dispute wasn't so much about money, but conditions - such as Ryan's insistence on a no-cut/no-trade clause.
And, in the end, trading Smyth was a "hockey" decision. The money was there, but GM Kevin Lowe and his boss Cal Nichols felt $5.5 to $5.8 million a year could be better used on up-and-coming talent than a five-year commitment to a player who'll get slower and less productive as he ages.
West Indian émigré, political organiser, Marxist theorist, historian, literary and cultural critic, novelist, playwright and short-story writer, teacher, cricketer, sports commentator. C.L.R. James’s life work covered a strikingly wide range of interests. All of these were tied together by James’s rigorous method and integrated political vision. In the obituary published in The New York Times on May 31, 1989, his third wife and former political collaborator, Selma James, wrote:
C.L.R. James was fundamentally a political person and his great contribution was to break away from the very narrow and white male concept of what Marxist politics was. He saw the world, literature, sports, politics and music as one totality, and saw political life as embodying all of those, which was very different from the politics he walked into in the middle of the 1930s, first in England and then in the United States.
