Published On: 04-02-2010 11:57 AM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: g 20 summit, the u s economy

The U.S. economy appears to be stabilizing after declining for four straight quarters, but the recovery has been tepid so far.



Financial markets have shown signs of improvement, and interbank lending has largely returned to normal. Consumer spending is still shrinking due to ongoing job losses and difficult credit conditions, but it has been stabilizing over the past quarters. Furthermore, home sales and new home construction are beginning to make a long-awaited comeback.



Businesses have continued to cut back on spending and have sharply reduced their inventories. But many economists believe that companies are largely done with their cuts, which could lay the groundwork for economic growth this quarter. The massive $787.2 billion stimulus bill is also expected to give GDP a boost in the current quarter.



"The recession is very likely over at this point," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week. But he also added, "It's still going to feel like a very weak economy for some time."



That's because unemployment continues to rise, retail sales are still slipping, factories have cut output to the bare bones and wages remain depressed.



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Published On: 03-30-2010 11:34 PM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: privacy laws, technology coalition

A broad coalition of technology companies, including AT&T, Google and Microsoft, and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum said Tuesday that it would push Congress to strengthen online privacy laws to protect private digital information from government access.

The group, calling itself the Digital Due Process coalition, said it wanted to ensure that as millions of people moved private documents from their filing cabinets and personal computers to the Web, those documents remained protected from easy access by law enforcement and other government authorities.

The coalition, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, wants law enforcement agencies to use a search warrant approved by a judge or a magistrate rather than rely on a simple subpoena from a prosecutor to obtain a citizen’s online data.



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Published On: 03-30-2010 11:26 PM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: ford, volvo, geely, economy, ekonomi

IT TOOK more than a decade for Ford to create what it called its Premier Auto Group around a bunch of classy European brands—starting in 1987 with its purchase of Aston Martin, followed by the acquisitions of Jaguar, Volvo and then Land Rover. It all proved a terribly expensive distraction. Now, it has taken Ford three years of tricky negotiations to dismantle the group, selling the European marques at a considerable loss. Aston Martin went to a British-led consortium in 2007, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was snapped up by Tata of India in 2008 and, on March 28th, a deal was signed to sell Volvo to Geely, a small but vastly ambitious Chinese carmaker.

The sticker price is $1.8 billion, a fraction of the $6.45 billion that Ford paid for Volvo in 1999. The cost to Ford is worse even than those figures suggest: it has had to support the Swedish carmaker through years of losses and even now it faces further expenses associated with the sale to Geely that will eat up much of the meagre sum it is getting for Volvo.



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