Archive for month: September, 2016

We were knee deep in research for a client this week and chuckling at the fact that the most clicked link this year in one of our posts was for the inflatable Irish pub when red alerts started flashing here at the INTN worldwide headquarters about the great, sudden and unexpectedBrangelexit. We, of course, dropped everything at the news and even wondered whether we would need to cancel this week’s edition of INTN. But calmer heads prevailed allowing us to still dive into the state of the world refugee problem, examine one possible savior of Moore’s Law and speculate about China’s box office. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, paying no attention to the rumor that Angelina Jolie left Brad Pitt for Mr. Brexit, former British Prime Minister David Cameron while we bring you the world’s laundry, dirty and clean, but certainly folded and ironed for your reading pleasure.

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

Refugees from Reason

One of the more tragic, complicated and perhaps misunderstood stories of the last few years has been that of refugees. The huge increase of refugees has stressed national and international political systems. Which countries have taken in the most refugees? Germany takes the top spot. Perhaps consequently, Angela Merkel’s party did the worst it’s ever done in the Berlin state elections earlier this week. Sweden has taken in the most refugees per a percentage of its population. Perhaps also consequently, the ruling party is at its lowest rating in the history of Swedish polls. This is another example of a transnational challenge taking place at a time when people, whether here in the United States or in other countries, are losing their faith in existing institutions. We discussed the loss of confidence in institutions during the Brexit vote, and the subject is likely to come up often in the future. This all takes place even as in many ways the world is more peaceful and prosperous than ever. But perhaps people anticipate a future with different challenges that will require different structures. Or maybe they’re just scared. We have theories about fear and will delve into the emotion and its affect on the world as we go forward, but one of the grand challenges of our time is to refine current and perhaps develop new global structures that people will trust.

  

Moore’s Law Slowing, Quantum to the Rescue?

It’s not been talked about loudly but Moore’s Law is slowing. Instead of computer chips doubling in transistors every two years, it has slowed down to every two and a half years. Intel admittedearlier this year this trend may continue and worsen. There are a number of mid-term solutions in the works to keep Mr. Moore and his law happily churning away but we stop for a moment to consider the long-term solution, the paradigm shifting possibility of quantum computers. Such machine beasts could ” take advantage of odd subatomic interactions to solve certain problems far faster than a conventional machine could.”  So who is working on this technology? Lots of people. But Europe leads the way. The European Union outspends in research and funding and has more published research on quantum computers than both the U.S. and China. Moore’s Law may be slowing down but the globalization of innovation is not.

Bombing China Box Office

In our continuing quest to figure out what is really going on in China we turn to the movies. Specifically the box office numbers for China. In either a worrisome sign for China’s economy or for the state of the movie business nowadays, we see that box office receipts in China are down 18% percent year over year. Some of the decrease apparently is due to online ticket vendors no longer providing discounts in an attempt to gain market share for their businesses. But even so, that’s a huge drop and can’t be blamed only on horrible Hollywood blockbusters since the government limits the number of foreign films shown in China. No, more than likely this is another sign the Chinese economy is not as robust as portrayed in official economic numbers, combined with unsuccessful movies and the rise of other entertainment for our eyeballs and wallets. But what the heck, let’s blame the lame Suicide Squad anyway.

Here at INTN worldwide headquarters, we romanticize beginnings. The evolution of jazz in early 20th century New Orleans is an almost mythical time for us, as are the Sun Studio recordings of the early 1950s. So it is not a surprise that we are a big fan of The Get Down, the new Netflix show that fancifully tells the story of the beginnings of hip hop in 1970s NYC. One of our fondest memories as a youngster is visiting our grandparents on the lower eastside of Manhattan and being allowed at the end of the day to pull the security gate down on their children’s shoe store. The five boroughs back then also had a mythical feel, full of noise, grime, crime, fantastical creatures and above all, creativity. New York is safer and cleaner nowadays but not nearly as interesting. Even as we speculate that somewhere, someplace a new musical or cultural moment is being born today (probably either in an impoverished city overseas or in a down and out suburb of America) we ponder on Asia’s recent rise out of poverty, gaze again at China’s state owned enterprises and at the same time worry about Chinese productivity.  It’s this week’s International Need to Know, using our digital crayon to find the get down on international happenings.

Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.

Asia’s Rise Out of Poverty…

Via Ian Bremmer, we recently saw the graph below from the Harvard Business Review(HBR) showing the amazing income gains of the Asian middle class. As Branko Milonovic of HBR notes, “The ‘winners’ were the middle and upper classes of the relatively poor Asian countries and the global top 1%.” But the relative “losers”, at least for the years 1998-2011, were lower and middle income percentiles in the already rich countries. The researchers also note that, “It’s also the first time that global inequality has declined in the past two hundred years.” They calculate that the global Gini number (a measure of inequality—in our estimation a very crude measure) decreased to 64 from 69 (but not 867-5309–wait, Gini, not Jenny). This is an underreported phenomenon: income inequality has gone up within many countries but for the world as a whole, income inequality is down. But, the Harvard Business Review takes this one step further, believing increases in Asian incomes must occur at the expense of Western incomes: “If we then visualize the world over the next 30-50 years, in which other, even poorer countries, become the ‘new Chinas,’ the stagnation of middle-class incomes in the rich countries may continue.” But there are many roads, highways and even back alleys to prosperity. Most need not be lined with western stagnation. Today’s future has very different starting conditions than the last two decades and so the path forward will lead in a different direction. As the investment advisors say, even while selling swampland in Florida (or southern China), past performance is not an indicator of future results.

    

More on China’s SOE’s

No sooner do we write last week that China’s corporate debt is in many ways government debt because state owned enterprises account for more than 50% of such liabilities, than Fortunemagazine comes out with their list of the 500 largest companies (ranked by revenue) and lo and behold it trumpets that China now has more than 100 companies on the list. Three of these are in the top ten and every single one of them is a SOE—China National Petroleum, State Grid and Sinopec Group. I expect this top ten list to be volatile, partly because the Fortune 500 is volatile(the Global 500 likely even more so) and partly because China is changing so quickly that so too will its companies on this list. We live in a Ferris Bueller world, if you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you’ll miss it. Many of the companies on this list will disappear soon like Cameron’s father’s Ferrari.

The World is Doing Nothing

A number of months ago we noted the worldwide decrease in productivity. The chart we posted showed slowdowns in productivity around the world but did not include China. However, China’s productivity growth, while still above Europe’s, Japan’s, Korea’s and the U.S., is also steadily decreasing, now down to 6.6%. It peaked at 13% growth in 2007 and has gone down ever since. Are Chinese workers just as susceptible to cat videos on the Internet as the rest of us? As we noted in the previous post, the worldwide decrease in productivity is worrisome for the prospects of future GDP growth. GDP can only grow through increased productivity or working age population growth (the latter is decreasing in most countries save Africa and India). More worrisome for China, though their productivity and economic growth has been extraordinary the last 25 years, they have still not caught up to developed countries (see second chart below) or even to the world average. Each Chinese worker is producing far less than a Japanese, European or American, even as the costs of Chinese labor rises, leading to more automation. As we saw above, the Harvard Business Review is worried about Asian workers’ gains causing western income stagnation. The story is likely to be more complicated than that. As always, we await the next chapter eagerly but also with a bit of trepidation.