markstore's Profile

International Fight at U.N.'s $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Agency Over Secrecy

Friday , September 19, 2008
By George Russell

FC1
ADVERTISEMENT

Nearly 18 months after the United Nations Development Program promised to shed daylight on its internal operations to the countries that pay its bills, is the U.N.'s flagship anti-poverty agency going to live up to the deal?

That is one of the main issues in a tussle currently taking place within UNDP's 37-member executive board, which supervises the organization, and which winds up its semi-annual meeting today in New York.

The battle is led by the U.S. and a number of other Western nations that pay most of the UNDP's bills (the U.S. alone donates roughly $500 million annually to UNDP). Some of the Western states are concerned that UNDP is still trying to keep its $5 billion operations — and any problems it has with them — under as many wraps as possible. For its part, UNDP says it is happy to cooperate if only all the countries that make up its board can agree. The outcome of the battle is still uncertain.

The issue revolves in part around UNDP's disclosure of its internal audits to U.N. members that request them — a policy that became a hot button a year ago, when the U.S. demanded to look at UNDP audits for North Korea. The audits, conducted periodically of all UNDP programs, examine how the organization is spending its money and whether it is following its own rules while doing so. Traditionally, UNDP's top managers have considered them to be "management tools," and insisted they be kept confidential, even from the governing executive board.

But all that began to change in 2007, when U.S. diplomats got to examine a series of UNDP audits of its programs in North Korea. After reading them the U.S. accused UNDP of funneling millions of dollars in hard currency to the Kim regime, hiring North Korean government em

Analysis: Reckless Mortgages Brought Financial Market to Its Knees

Thursday , September 18, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.
ADVERTISEMENT

The stock market has fallen dramatically from its peak a year ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has declined by about 25 percent, a significant drop, though not anywhere near as large as the 36 percent drop that occurred over two months from August to October 1987. Few would argue, though, that the financial market is not in a mess.

Meanwhile the economy has kept growing. In the second quarter of this year from April to June, GDP grew at a fairly fast 3.3 percent. For the first half of this year GDP has grown at about 2.2 percent, near the historical average. Obviously some sectors of the economy have been doing well, while others, such as housing, have been in a real mess.

With the government takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as other bankruptcies in the financial sector, there are a lot of questions. The strangest fact is that the housing sector is having such problems when the economy otherwise has been doing well. Why have there been so many defaults when the economy has not been in a recession? Defaults have been at historically high rates despite reasonable economic growth and a relatively low unemployment rate of 6.1 percent.

The Folly of Obama’s Tax Plan

By Alex Brill and Alan D. Viard Friday, August 8, 2008

Filed under: Economic Policy, Government & Politics
Senator Obama’s proposed ‘tax cuts for the middle class’ are actually marginal rate hikes in disguise.

Senator Barack Obama declared recently that he wants to “reform our tax code so that it rewards work and not just wealth.” We think that is a great goal if it means a simple tax system with low marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, a close inspection of Obama’s proposals reveals something disquieting: he would raise marginal tax rates for many middle-income taxpayers, a bad move for anyone seeking to promote economic growth.

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives. First, whether or not you get those breaks will depend on your income. In Washington, taking away tax breaks as families work harder to make more money is called a “phase-out.” Economists have a different name for it—we call it a tax. Reducing a person’s tax credit as his income goes up also reduces his incentive to earn more income.

America the Uncompetitive
August 15, 2008; Page A14

The new international tax rankings are out for 2008, and congratulations to Washington, D.C., are again in order. Our political class has managed to maintain America's rank with the second highest corporate tax rate in the world at 39.3% (average combined federal and state).
[America the Uncompetitive]

Only Japan is slightly higher overall, though if you are silly enough to base a corporation in California, Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or other states with high corporate levies, your tax rate on business income is even higher than in Tokyo. For the first time, the U.S. statutory rate is now 50% higher than the average of our international competitors, continuing a long-term trend as the rest of the world keeps reducing corporate tax rates. (See nearby chart).

Environmental Activists, Not Oil Companies, Blocking Domestic Drilling

Thursday , August 14, 2008
By Ben Lieberman
ADVERTISEMENT

It’s true: Hundreds of promising oil leases on federal lands are being stonewalled, contributing to lower supplies and higher prices at the pump. But the blame lies not with the oil companies, but with environmental activists.

Much of America’s energy potential lies underneath federally controlled lands and waters, but some of those areas are off-limits to oil exploration and drilling. In response to high gasoline prices, several Washington lawmakers want to open these areas, including some of the 85 percent of our territorial waters that are restricted, as well as a small portion of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Polls show that the public endorses this step, but the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, fearing a loss of support from anti-drilling environmental activists, has thus far blocked these measures.

Their argument? The oil companies don’t need new leases in restricted areas because they aren’t diligently pursuing leases in areas that are currently open to them. “Why should we be giving big oil additional leases when they have 68 million acres under lease already that they’re not drilling on right now?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked.

Home wireless without the power trip
By Bill Ray
Published Wednesday 6th August 2008 10:02 GMT

A new generation of low-power radio technologies is creeping into our homes, in the form of wireless light switches and remote-controlled plug sockets. But the next generation of home-automation kit is all going to communicate every which way, assuming a common language can be agreed upon.

Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Bluetooth Low Energy would all like to play in this space, and Intel is even trying to squeeze Wi-Fi into the role. The industry believes the time is right for watches, key fobs and door locks to be wirelessly enabled, and that it's finally time to replace the aging infrared remote controls that have been controlling our TVs for the last few decades.

The Data Center's Green Direction is a Dead End



By Steve Denegri, Storage Consultant, Financial Analyst

A study on data center electricity usage published a year ago by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to receive attention in the storage industry. The study illustrates that storage is not keeping pace with servers and networking equipment as it relates to the amount of energy each of these hardware categories uses in the data center. In fact, the EPA study shows that storage is consuming an increasing portion of the data center's power budget as networking equipment and servers are maintaining a steady appetite for electricity, not a good trend in these times of skyrocketing utility costs. No wonder the EPA study recommends that the storage industry dramatically improve upon its power management semantics for disk and tape systems. And the industry pundits are taking this data and running with it, with talk of underutilized storage resources and customers not getting the most of the equipment they've purchased, as if that's a new theme. Regardless, many vendors in the storage industry are salivating at the thought of bringing new energy-efficient products to market, believing that this problem has all the ingredients of a paradigm shift that could rearrange the competitive playing field.

The Register » Hardware » Storage »

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/green_storage/
Is green storage a dead end?
By Chris Mellor at Blocks and Files
Published Friday 1st August 2008 13:20 GMT

The SCSI Trade Association website has run an article (http://www.serialstoragewire.net/Articles/2008_07/denegri.html) entitled The Data Center's Green Direction is a Dead End by Steve Denegri. It argues that the storage industry is effectively in denial and that we need more energy, not less, for the health of our industry.

Denegri is a storage consultant and financial analyst. His pitch is that: "Countless industries have reached an energy ceiling over the past half century, only to realize soon after that revenue potential had peaked." Storage could be becoming one of these and suffering the consequent industry contraction and "massive shakeout".

"The cold, hard truth is that an ample supply of energy is necessary to grow any business over the long-term, and the storage industry is shying away from the harsh reality that a sufficient amount of energy is, unfortunately, not available to keep the industry growing." We need to "expand the capacity of the power grid" instead of "embracing the energy efficiency paradigm".

Why Give Taxpayers' Money to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae's Shareholders?

Monday , July 28, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.

FC1
ADVERTISEMENT

Should the government cover a private company's losses during bad times, but let it keep its profits during good ones? It doesn't sound like a very good deal for taxpayers. But that is how we treat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big corporations that make loans and loan guarantees as well as handle the secondary mortgage market in the US.

As most probably suspect, this whole approach is pretty dubious. If you subsidize risk, you get more of it. If you don't have to bear the cost of the risk, why not shoot for the moon? Economists believe that the federal government subsidizing risk is what caused the whole saving and loan meltdowns during the 1980s.