10 U.S. Cities With Housing Markets Struggling To Stay Afloat

          Image of an abandoned house


For three years, the real estate market has been going in one direction—primarily down. Some areas, however, have begun to recover.

Recent S&P/Case-Shiller data show that among the top 20 housing markets in the U.S., 18 had very modest improvements in sales prices during May. Others, like Washington and Boston, have began to at least stabilize from a year ago.

Few markets, however, can match Washington and Boston. Robert Shiller has been stating that home prices could fall another 10% in the next year. Inventories in some major metropolitan areas would take years of sales to get back to 2005 levels. Then, the normal inventory of homes for sale was replaced on average every six months and it was unusual for a house to be on the market for a year.

Foreclosure rates remain high and only the robo-signing scandal has slowed the process.

Read more: http://247wallst.com/2011/08/03/americas-ten-sickest-housing-markets/3/#ixzz1TzK4SdJ9

Read more: http://247wallst.com/2011/08/03/americas-ten-sickest-housing-markets/3/#ixzz1TzJsXxZp

The Amitabh Bachchan defence won’t save 2G, CWG scamsters:

The Amitabh Bachchan defence won’t save 2G, CWG scamsters:

R Jagannathan Aug 3, 2011

In a critical scene in the super-hit 1970s film Deewaar, when confronted by his police officer brother (played by Shashi Kapoor) about his illegal activities, Amitabh Bachchan challenges him thus: “Sure, I’ll confess to my crimes and sign a confession. But first get those people to sign who did such-and-such to our father and mother…”. You get the drift.

The Amitabh Bachchan defence won’t save 2G, CWG scamsters

R Jagannathan Aug 3, 2011
#2G scam #Amitabh Bachchan #CAG #CWG #Deewaar #LokAyukta #Manmohan Singh

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In a critical scene in the super-hit 1970s film Deewaar, when confronted by his police officer brother (played by Shashi Kapoor) about his illegal activities, Amitabh Bachchan challenges him thus: “Sure, I’ll confess to my crimes and sign a confession. But first get those people to sign who did such-and-such to our father and mother…”. You get the drift.

This is the classic defence of the criminal when caught in the act. He plays up his sense of being wronged, of being unfairly targeted when other, bigger criminals, are still at large. Needless to say, however well it may play at the box-office, in legal terms, this is no argument at all.

When you are accused of a crime, you defend yourself against it. The law will not cut you any slack just because someone else out there also committed the same crime or did worse.

India’s growing tribe of jailed politicians and businessmen, and also politicians who are trying to deflect blame from their current masters, have been consistently using the Amitabh Bachchan line of defence – whether it is in the 2G scam, the Commonwealth Games (CWG) scandal or the illegal mining capers, or anything.

India’s growing tribe of jailed politicians and businessmen, have been using the Amitabh Bachchan line of defence – whether it is in the 2G scam, (CWG) scandal or the illegal mining capers. Screen grab from the movie Deewaar

Their arguments are variants of two themes: “Why me? Look at the other crooks first”; or “He (usually a minister or bureaucrat) knew I was doing this, so he’s guilty too.” The third and final tactic is to question the authority of the accuser – whether it is the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the courts or a Lokayukta or a political rival.

More at
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..and .... let's hope the author is right !! and the scamsters are NOT saved !!

Robots don’t complain or die : Schumpeter

Business and management

Schumpeter

Foxconn

Robots don’t complain or die

Aug 2nd 2011, 16:19 by T.E. | HONG KONG

OTHER than the People’s Liberation Army, Foxconn may well be China’s largest individual employer, and certainly its most important. The secretive electronics manufacturer, whose prestigious clients include Apple, has a workforce of more than 1m, including over 500,000 in one vast factory in Shenzhen.

Over the past decade Foxconn’s success has epitomised China’s ability to take elegant designs from high-wage countries and turn them out cheaply in huge quantities. Initially applauded for its ability to create vast numbers of jobs, the company’s success has recently come to be seen in a harsher light. Last year there was a spate of employees at the Shenzhen plant committing suicide; in the latest such case, a 21-year-old worker threw himself off a building in late July. In May an explosion at a new factory in Chengdu killed three more employees and, it is believed, caused delays in production of Apple’s iPads.

To pacify its increasingly restive workers, Foxconn has repeatedly bumped up their wages, improved facilities, provided counselling and swathed its factories with nets to catch anyone leaping from a window. All this has resulted in higher costs, and signs that the company’s hitherto hugely successful business model has run its course. At a closed retreat in late July, Terry Gou, the chief executive of the company (which is also known as Hon Hai) unveiled a plan to replace a huge amount of human labour with robots by 2013.

In its public statement on the move, Foxconn talked about moving the more than 1m workers “higher up the value chain beyond basic manufacturing work” and of its “desire to move workers from more routine tasks to more value-added positions in manufacturing such as research and development, innovation and other areas that are equally important to the success of our operations.” But automation on the scale it is talking about would surely mean some of those human workers losing their jobs.

To a large extent, China’s recent economic development has been about reversing the rich-world trend towards automation—that is, using labour to replace capital in the manufacturing chain. Wages are now rising rapidly as a result of the demand for skilled labour (and because of big increases in the legal minimum wage), so one would expect this to make firms adjust their mix of labour and capital.

Many other, smaller, Chinese manufacturers have begun making similar moves, swapping increasingly costly labour with a bit more capital equipment. Foxconn is proposing to do it all (pardon the inevitable pun) in one great leap forward. But it may find this quite a challenge: its expertise has been in quietly running well-regimented armies of people making goods for highly visible companies. It is not known to have any particular skills in creating highly automated production lines; and moving in this direction will put it in direct competition with companies that do.

Still, it may have been an easy decision for Mr Gou. His highly image-conscious customers are bound to have been worried by the spate of horror stories about workers at Foxconn. If he did not change his production methods, the customers might feel obliged to look for another supplier.

Manufacturing experts and economists have been debating for some while now whether China’s rising labour costs and skill shortages might spell an end to the cheap “China price”, leading global consumer-goods companies to shift elsewhere in Asia for their low-cost production—or even bring it back to their home countries. Certainly, some of the West’s strongest (and most highly automated) manufacturers, including Germany's Mittelstand firms, have proved surprisingly resilient to the pressure from cheap Chinese labour.

Others are sceptical: they say that Chinese firms are proving so adept at producing in ever greater quantities with fewer hands that they are set to remain fearsome competitors. Either way, the Chinese authorities will presumably be monitoring all of this very closely, and worrying about the prospect of the country’s industrial progress leading, as it did in the West, to large numbers of relatively well educated and articulate factory workers being thrown on to the streets.

Source

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/08/foxconn?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/robotsdontcomplainordie

China Rating Agency Downgrades US Debt

Published: Tuesday, 2 Aug 2011 | 10:28 PM ET

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By: Deepanshu Bagchee
Supervising Digital Editor, CNBC Asia

China's Dagong Global Credit Rating has cut its credit rating on U.S. sovereign debt to A from A+, Chen Jialin, general manager of the international department at the firm confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The agency has also put the U.S. on negative outlook, China's main news agency Xinhua reported earlier. The decision came despite the U.S. raising the debt ceiling and averting a default, and even as both Fitch and Moody's re-affirmed the U.S.'s Triple-A rating.

According to Xinhua, Dagong's decision was based on "the fact that the U.S. national debt growth had outpaced economic growth and fiscal revenue, hurting the country's debt-paying ability."

China's central bank, on the other hand, welcomed the U.S. debt deal on Wednesday though official media have issued several scathing commentaries in recent days accusing the U.S. of not doing enough to cut its debt. China is the largest holder of U.S. Treasurys and has foreign exchange reserves of $3.2 trillion.

Dagong's ratings cut though is unlikely to have any major implications in the bond market, given that most investors rely on ratings from the big three firms - Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch.

Franklin Templeton, one of the world's biggest fixed income managers, also said Dagong's ratings lacked transparency.

"The challenge with that rating agency out of China is that there's not a lot of transparency and so it's a little difficult to take too much out of that," Michael Hasenstab, senior vice president and portfolio manager of the international bond department at the firm told CNBC on Wednesday.

Hasenstab, however, said Dagong's action raised an important issue that politicians had been unable to deal decisively with the debt issue and the bruising political fight had hurt confidence in the U.S.

"(The) process, I think, has unnerved the markets and unnerved the world," he said.

© 2011 CNBC.com

Source
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43996450

CDC: Most U.S. Hospitals Don’t Support Breastfeeding

CDC: Most U.S. Hospitals Don’t Support Breastfeeding

Published August 02, 2011

| FoxNews.com

Studies have long shown the benefits of breastfeeding, but a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that less than four percent of U.S. hospitals provide the full support that new mothers need to be able to successfully breastfeed.

The report, published in the current issue of the CDC’s Vital Signs, examined data from the National Survey of Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care, and found that only 14 percent of hospitals actually have a written model of a breastfeeding policy. The report also found that in nearly 80 percent of hospitals, healthy breastfeeding infants were given formula even when there was no medical reason. Experts say this can make it very difficult to learn how to breastfeed and continue at home.

“Hospitals play a vital role in supporting a mother to be able to breastfeed,” said CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden in a press release. “Those first few hours and days that a mom and her baby spend learning to breastfeed are critical. Hospitals need to better support breastfeeding, as this is one of the most important things a mother can do for her newborn. Breastfeeding helps babies grow up healthy and reduces health care costs.”

U.S. mothers are also not getting the breastfeeding support they need after leaving the hospital, according to the study. Almost 75 percent of hospitals don’t schedule a follow-up visit with moms, a phone call, or referrals to lactation consultants.

The CDC survey proves that most U.S. hospitals are not in compliance with the WHO/UNICEF Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, including:

-Not giving healthy, breastfeeding infants food or drink other than breast milk unless there is a medical need for it;

-Encouraging mothers to room in, staying with their baby 24 hours a day;

-Connecting mothers with support groups and other resources to help with breastfeeding after they leave the hospital.

“In the United States most women want to breastfeed, and most women start,” said Ursula Bauer, director of CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “But without hospital support many women have a hard time continuing to breastfeed, and they stop early. It is critical that hospitals take action to fully support breastfeeding mothers and babies so they can continue to breastfeed long after their hospital stay.”

This study coincides with World Breastfeeding Week, which takes place every year from August 1-7 in more than 170 countries worldwide.

Click here to read the full study.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/08/02/cdc-most-us-hospitals-dont-support-breastfeeding/#ixzz1TuBQuqQ4

Norway still facing Islamist threat: head of populist right

Norway still facing Islamist threat: head of populist right

By Pierre-Henry Deshayes (AFP) – 44 minutes ago 

Siv Jensen , leader of Fremskrittspartiet (Progress party) speaks during an interview with AFP (AFP, Odd Andersen)

OSLO — The deadly twin attacks carried out by a right-wing extremist should not overshadow the fact that Norway still faces a serious Islamist threat, the head of the populist right Progress Party told AFP Tuesday.

"All the debates that we had prior to July 22 will come back. All the challenges that Norway was facing and the challenges that the world was facing are still there. Al-Qaeda is still there," insisted Siv Jensen in an interview at her office in parliament.

"The new thing is that we have been in a horrible way reminded of the fact that terrorism can come in many different forms, with different rhetoric behind it, with different crazy ideas behind it," she said.

In the five years since she took over as head of the anti-immigration party, Jensen has repeatedly cautioned against the "rampant Islamisation" of Norway, and Tuesday she stressed it was important to remain "aware of the threats that we had before July 22, because they are still there."

Jensen, 42, has however been careful to distance herself from the July 22 self-confessed killer, Anders Behring Breivik, who described his murderous rampage as part of a "crusade" against Islam and multiculturalism.

Behring Breivik targeted the ruling Labour Party, which the 32-year-old blamed for its multicultural policies, first bombing government offices before going on an 80-minute shooting spree on the nearby island of Utoeya, where the party was holding a youth summer camp.

The attacks were the deadliest carried out on Norwegian soil since World War II, killing a total of 77 people, many of them teenagers.

"I resent everything that he stands for. I resent his actions and will not be associated with this guy. Really, I will not," Jensen declared, refusing however to say whether she would tone down her negative rhetoric about Islam.

In Nordic neighbour Denmark, Pia Kjaersgaard who heads the far-right Danish People Party (DPP) also on Tuesday said she would not temper her public comments following the killing spree in Norway.

"Under no circumstances do I intend as a politician to be afraid of what I say. I have feelings, I have views and I express them." she told the Politiken newspaper.

She equally rejected suggestions that Behring Breivik's actions can be linked to the anti-immigration policies advanced by some European political parties like the DPP.

"It must be made very clear that the only person responsible for this terrible massacre (in Norway) is the mass murderer, instead of all sorts of people beginning to feel guilt, start soul searching and I don?t know what," she said.

Jensen's Norwegian anti-immigration party has grown over the past decade to become Norway's second largest party and counted Behring Breivik as a member between 1999 and 2006.

"I was really, really sad, sadder than I already was, when I realised that he had for a certain period of time been a member of my party," she said, adding though that she had not managed to find anyone who could remember him.

"He didn't take part in any debate, he didn't make much of himself, he was very quiet and nobody remembers him," she said.

In a message posted on the www.document.no debate forum in 2009, Behring Breivik aired his own grievances with Jensen's Progress Party, which he said "thirsted to satisfy (society's) multicultural expectations and the suicidal ideals of humanism."

"We are facing a guy with a very strange mindset and the ability to do horrible things to society," Jensen said Tuesday.

She also distanced herself from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former head of France's right-wing National Front party, who wrote last week that the Norwegian government's "naivety" was to blame for the mass killing.

She said she has "always resented everything that Monsieur Le Pen and his party have advocated."

Jensen, who usually never misses an opportunity to butt heads with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, even had rare words of praise for the government chief.

"Prime minister Stoltenberg is someone that I fight verbally every day, but during this period of time, he's also been my prime minister," she said.

But while Stoltenberg has been widely hailed for his handling of the crisis and has seen his Labour Party soar in the polls, Jensen's Progress Party has seen support dwindle for some time.

Opinion "polls go up, they go down and they change," Jensen argued. "The important thing is not polls, the important thing is the election."

Source

http://bit.ly/p6nxg3

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved. More »

Historic Day ... Most exchanges in the red .. debt deal signed

Courtesy : Google Finance