Mitt Romney's campaign has made a big deal of Jeep expanding its manufacturing in China, claiming Jeep is outsourcing jobs and blaming it on President Obama. Is he also going to blame George W. Bush for all the outsourcing that was done between 2000 and 2008?
The fact is that Jeep is expanding its total manufacturing, including manufacturing Jeeps where they will be sold.
What does he think of Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen having factories in the U.S.? Are they exporting jobs from their home countries? Or expanding closer to their markets. Maybe it's the shipping companies that should complain, all that trans-oceanic traffic that is lost and the associated jobs.
See "'Transplant' auto factories in USA turn 30 this year", James R. Healy, USA Today, 2012-04-03.
As Thomas Friedman wrote, "The World is Flat".
Showing posts with label market. Show all posts
Showing posts with label market. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Why so few read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", much less understand it
"Had the Scotch cattle been always confined to the market of Scotland, in a country in which the quantity of land, which can be applied to no other purpose but the feeding of cattle, is so great in proportion to what can be applied to other purposes, it is scarce possible, perhaps, that their price could ever have risen so high as to render it profitable to cultivate land for the sake of feeding them."
- page 124 of the Project Gutenberg HTML version
Your homework assignment is to rewrite this in 21st Century English.
- page 124 of the Project Gutenberg HTML version
Your homework assignment is to rewrite this in 21st Century English.
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Gold is not a good investment
In 1984 I bought a set of gold coins from an investment company that is now defunct. One coin was in a package that showed the coin, the other two were in opaque boxes placed in sealed clear plastic. I've kept them in the house for all this time and decided to sell them yesterday.
I took them to a coin dealer who seemed quite excited to have them and gave me a better price than I had gleaned from a few web sites. This also shows that many people trust others. Each coin was exactly as I received them, one visible and two in boxes that said what they were. I assumed the original dealer had sent me what I ordered, and the buying dealer assumed what I told him.
Today I calculated my rate of return: 3.3375 percent annually! Some good quality stocks return that in annual dividends plus appreciate in value. Many bond funds do even better. Of course, if you could stomach the ups and downs of a company like Apple, your return would have been around 13 percent annually.
Well, the coins are out of the house and won't be stolen or misplaced and I managed to beat the drop in the price of gold by a day. For the dealer's sake, I hope that the price of gold goes up enough soon for him to make some profit.
I took them to a coin dealer who seemed quite excited to have them and gave me a better price than I had gleaned from a few web sites. This also shows that many people trust others. Each coin was exactly as I received them, one visible and two in boxes that said what they were. I assumed the original dealer had sent me what I ordered, and the buying dealer assumed what I told him.
Today I calculated my rate of return: 3.3375 percent annually! Some good quality stocks return that in annual dividends plus appreciate in value. Many bond funds do even better. Of course, if you could stomach the ups and downs of a company like Apple, your return would have been around 13 percent annually.
Well, the coins are out of the house and won't be stolen or misplaced and I managed to beat the drop in the price of gold by a day. For the dealer's sake, I hope that the price of gold goes up enough soon for him to make some profit.
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