Home » Articles posted by Erik Hare (Page 197)

Author Archives: Erik Hare

A St Paul Moment

Posted on by | 6 Comments

I believe that I am due a few vacation daze in the summer, especially when I’ve had a long, bad day.  Here is a piece on my city from 2010, in part to commemorate National Night Out.

I came home from a meeting with a client and there they were.  A whole team of guys with buzzing and growling equipment filling Irvine Park with motion and clouds of dirt.  It wasn’t an unusual scene, since the Parks Department does their share to mow regularly – but these guys were different.  It was some private company out trimming and mowing and generally making our li’l park look better than it has in a long time.

What makes this a Saint Paul Moment wasn’t clear until I asked one of them what happened.  Did the city contract out the maintenance?  No.  “The owner of our company’s son is getting married here this weekend, and he wanted it to look nice.”  So he just set his crew loose on our public park and made it look great. That is a Saint Paul Moment.  You just do it. Continue reading →

Chair(wo)man of the Fed

Posted on by | 14 Comments

Who will succeed Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve?  It’s come down to two people as far as anyone can tell, Larry Summers and Janet Yellen.  Or, sometimes more accurately, Larry Summers and not Larry Summers.   This is a terrible shame because no person has done more to earn the post than Yellen.

Yet Summers seems to remain Obama’s choice for the job despite growing opposition.   On the other side, support is growing in the popular press for Yellen as an opportunity to break the glass ceiling for women.  It’s heating up as a battle that Obama may avoid by picking a third candidate that no one is concentrating on now, but the loss would be terrible if Yellen doesn’t get the nod.  Here’s why.

Continue reading →

What is Employment?

Posted on by | 23 Comments

There’s been a lot of good economic news lately, the second year in a row that July uncharacteristically surged ahead.   The “ISM Index” poll of manufacturers looked more positive than it has since 2008, even with a strong US Dollar.  Initial claims for unemployment fell to 326k last week, another low since 2008.  US GDP grew at 1.7% in 2Q13, not exactly great news but far better than expected (and accompanied upward revisions to previous quarters).  The ADP employment report showed a net gain of 200k jobs, the rosiest figure of them all.  Only 82k of those came from small businesses, with large companies gaining a new high of 60k jobs added – meaning that for the first time since 2008 big companies are in a hiring mood.

By the time you read this, the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment report for July should have come out, and it should be roughly in line with the more smooth ADP figure.  Now that we are really turning a corner, as Barataria expected in 2013, it’s time to take an in-depth look at what “employment” means and why there’s still so very far to go.

Continue reading →

Coffee & Tea

Posted on by | 10 Comments

Picture yourself in England at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign.  If you have some skills as a part of the growing middle class, things look better every day.  That life comes in part from unskilled workers driven into the growing (and filthy) cities who are more productive than ever before.  The great symbol of the improving standard of living greets you in the morning as a cup of this once luxury beverage, tea.  It comes from China, traded under the barrel of the guns of the Royal Navy through the new colony of Hong Kong.  The latest in technology, the Clipper Ship, brings it to you with great speed and makes it possible to run this enterprise at a distance.   The sun never sets on the British Empire, and tea is both its greatest commodity and emblem of success.

Today, in the waning daze of the American Empire that isn’t an empire, things could hardly be different even as they are the same.  Coffee is the beverage of choice for 54% in the US.   It has always been the workingman’s drink, but it is moving more yupscale – even though 35% of us still drink it black (as it is meant to be, damnit).  It is shipped from tropical, underdeveloped nations in unromantic cargo containers as the second most traded commodity in the world by value ($15B per year), behind only oil.  The nations that produce it are rapidly urbanizing into filthy cities.  The trade is managed over the internet by a cadre of traders and speculators.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes like a street poet hitting a beat.

Continue reading →

Convergence

Posted on by | 18 Comments

The big story of the last 20 years has been a tale of two worlds coming together.  While the developed world experienced a decade of growth in the 1990s followed by stagnation and decline in the 2000s, the developing world saw nothing but growth.  The two phenomena are related in the tremendous expansion of credit and general money supply over this time, and are now starting to come together.   The developing world is feeling the pinch the same as the developed world.

This story first appeared in Barataria back in September 2012, but it’s now quite fashionable to talk of the end of the great boom in “Emerging Markets” (EM).  They have, simply, started to either mature or fall back.  And investors are trying to find the next wave of fantastic growth stories to invest in.

Continue reading →