David Foster

Jimmy Carter v 2.0?

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This writer sees a strong resemblance between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter:

IS IT POSSIBLE that America really wants to return to those depressing days of gas lines and leisure suits? Of malaise and shock over the aggressiveness of America’s enemies? The days when the policies Obama is advocating raised unemployment rates, interest rates and inflation rates into the double digits? When America’s enemies looked the President of the United States in the eye — and found he really wanted to kiss them on the cheek?

(via Common Sense & Wonder)

Speaking of Obama and Carter, here’s what Obama said on April 11 regarding the former President’s overtures toward Hamas:

I’m not going to comment on former President Carter. He’s a private citizen. It’s not my place to discuss who he shouldn’t meet with.

…and on April 16, he “clarified” his position a bit:

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama on Wednesday disagreed with former President Jimmy Carter’s overtures toward Hamas, saying he would not talk to the Islamist group until it recognized Israel and renounced terrorism. …

“That’s why I have a fundamental difference with President Carter and disagree with his decision to meet with Hamas,” Obama said.

(via LGF)

Offshoring Production to the USA

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Chinese entrepreneur Liu Keli, who runs a company making copper cylinders for printing presses, decided to open a factory in South Carolina. He was motivated by a desire to improve his position in the U.S. market, and was surprised to find that substantial cost savings were also possible on some important aspects of his business. Specifically: electricity costs are 75% cheaper, and continuity of service is much better. Mr Liu also got 7 acres of land near Spartanburg for one fourth of what it would have cost him in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he operates three plants.

Labor is, of course, significantly more expensive: about six times as much on a per-hour basis. But with the benefits from reduced power and land costs, and a $1500/employee tax credit from South Carolina, the overall cost picture is closer to that in China than he would have previously imagined.

I’m also kind of surprised by these wide differences in land and electricity costs.

(via Carpe Diem)

Liberals, Conservatives, and Happiness

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An NSF-funded study, and a response.

The Clarity Clue

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A clue to the future performance of a company may be found in the literary style of the CEO’s annual letter. That’s the opinion of Laura Rittenhouse, head of an investor relations consulting firm, who has studied this topic extensively.

A study found that when the letters are analyzed for clarity versus jargon, shares of bottom-ranked companies lost more than 18 percent of their value in a two-year period ending in 2002, compared with a 12.7 percent drop for the top-ranked companies. More recently, another Rittenhouse study focused on newly-appointed CEOs and their content scores versus those of their predecessors. For the group with the highest gains in content scores, stock prices increased an average of of 28.4% (in the year after the new CEOs were named) versus an average decline of 10.5% for the ground with the greatest declines in content scores.

The usual cautions about cause and effect analysis–correlation is not causation, the direction in which the arrow of causality is pointing is not always obvious–of course apply. Nevertheless, this is interesting.

Here’s a presentation which provides a little bit of detail on the Rittenhouse analysis method. Ms Rittenhouse quotes Orwell:

If thought can corrupt language, then language can corrupt thought

…and offers her own version:

If language determines actions and results, then corrupt language will lead to debilitating actions and unsatisfactory results.

See also The Edifice Clue, The Harvard Indicator, and Readin’, Writin’, and the Business Shtick.

See also this comparing writing at J P Morgan in 1933 and in 2006. (Although I thought Jamie Dimon’s letter in the recent annual report was pretty good–not sure what the Rittenhouse analysis process would have to say about it.)

Agflation Watch

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Financial Times (4/24) has an interesting article titled commodities boom drives up land values. In the UK, farmland prices have risen 40% over the past year. There is at least one UK investment fund dedicated to the purchase of farmland, and the operation of farms, on behalf of investors. In the Ukraine, prices for the best farmland are expected to double over the next year. And in Serbia, there’s an increase from of more than 40% over the past year. Farmland prices have been going up significantly in the US, too, although the FT article doesn’t mention any numbers.

On the same page, FT has another article: EU warned over cut in number of pesticides. Excerpt:

European Union plans to restrict chemical use by farmers in Europe could reduce harvests at a time of global food shortages, farmers, academics, regulators and pesticide makers warned on Wednesday.

Crops such as apples and hops could no longer be grown on the continent if EU draft plans are not amended, they said. Wheat and potato yields could drop by almost a third, according to industry-sponsored research.

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Research commissioned from Italian consultancy Nomisma forecast drops in yields of about 30 per cent by 2012. The EU would lose its self-sufficiency in wheat, potatoes, wine and cereals.

(Here’s a letter to the editor from someone who strongly disagrees with the thesis that these pesticide controls will be devastating to European agriculture.)

Via the interesting site Gongol, here’s an article about the growing shortage of fertilizer, with comments by Norman Borlaug.

As a counterpoint, both John Hussman and Anatole Kaletsky argue that the current commodities situation has some attributes of a bubble.