by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 21, 2016 | News
China’s real jobless rate may be considerably higher than the official 5 percent.
Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University, estimates, in the words of Bloomberg News, that the rate “may be 10 percent in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts and required unpaid leave.”
Bloomberg adds: “Many state-owned firms battling overcapacity favor putting workers in a holding pattern to avoid mass layoffs that risk fueling social unrest. While that helps airbrush the appearance of duress, it also slows the shift of workers to services jobs, where labor demand remains more solid in China’s shifting economy.”
“Other projections indicate the employment situation is even worse. An indicator of unemployment and underemployment produced by London-based research firm Fathom Consulting has more than tripled since 2012 to 13.2 percent.
“The official jobless rate isn’t much help for economists: it’s been virtually unchanged at about 4.1 percent since 2010 even as the economy slowed. The gauge only counts those who register for unemployment benefits in their home towns, which doesn’t take into account 277 million migrant workers. Total employment is 775 million, National Bureau of Statistics data show.”
To read the Bloomberg article, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 21, 2016 | Initiative
There are indications that hackers working for the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin may also be targeting Democratic congressional candidates, especially in Florida, as well as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
To read a Reuters article on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 21, 2016 | News
The leaders of Germany, France and Italy — the Eurozone’s three largest countries — are meeting on a small southern Italian island for talks on how the European Union should proceed following Britain’s vote to leave.
Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande are on Ventotene, off Naples, for a second round of trilateral talks before an informal E.U. summit in Slovakia next month that will map out some post-Brexit scenarios.
T0 read The Guardian’s article on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 18, 2016 | Initiative
Twitter has suspended 235,000 terrorist-related accounts over the last six months, a doubling of its suspension rate.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “Twitter, which relies mostly on users to flag content before it takes action, said in a blog post it has recently invested in bigger teams reviewing reports 24 hours a day, and better spam-detection tools and language capabilities.
“One third of the suspended accounts were identified thanks to the spam tools, Twitter said.
“There is no one ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the internet,” Twitter said in its blog post.
“The efforts come after Twitter came under fire for allowing terrorist-related content to proliferate on its site,” the WSJ reported.
To read The Wall Street Journal story, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Aug 18, 2016 | News
An increasing number of young people in Europe are neither working, nor in school nor being trained. This bodes ill for the socio-economic future of the Continent.
Bloomberg reports that “The problem isn’t only that they are currently without a job. They ‘face a permanent disadvantage on the labor market,’according to Guntram Wolff, director of the Brussels-based policy group Bruegel. ‘They will never be as productive as people who have a normal start.”’
To read the Bloomberg story, please hit this link.
