Article

2004-02-27

The week in economics: Frank currency exchanges

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by rkb 2004-02-27 9:07:25 AM|| || Front Page|| [13 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Love the title!

Posted by Frank G 2004-2-27 9:54:43 AM|| 2004-2-27 9:54:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Great and informative article, but there are no trains in it!

Posted by Dar 2004-2-27 10:59:08 AM|| 2004-2-27 10:59:08 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 No, but we are talking about the engine of growth and making sure the international economy doesn't go off the rails.

Not a model article, I confess - the wrong gauge for this crowd. [smile]

Posted by rkb 2004-2-27 11:03:03 AM|| 2004-2-27 11:03:03 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 rkb--Do you know if Hong Kong's economy is being handled individually from mainland China's? Also, is Hong Kong's economy under the same restrictions as China's, or are they still able to keep the looser rules in place before the unification?

Posted by Dar 2004-2-27 11:12:22 AM|| 2004-2-27 11:12:22 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Frank currency exchanges

Frank, have you been undermining the world economy again?

Posted by Steve 2004-2-27 11:17:47 AM|| 2004-2-27 11:17:47 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 Yeah, I worry so much about my trade imbalance with the supermarket, too. Why, I keep buyin' stuff from them, but they never seems to reciprocate...

Posted by mojo 2004-2-27 11:47:13 AM|| 2004-2-27 11:47:13 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 I do believe the IMF measures Hong Kong's economy as separate from the mainland.

I'm not sure to what degree Beijing has imposed its own controls on HK. It seems to be the case that even on the mainland they allow some de facto differences, whatever the formal laws say.

Posted by rkb 2004-2-27 12:19:31 PM|| 2004-2-27 12:19:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 rkb said: The attitude among Chinese-based groups is that math can be learned by anyone who does the work. They expect skills and they get them. Same attitude at West Point, by the way - EVERY cadet must take at a minimum a sequence of courses in one of the engineering areas. Noone is let off the hook because "math is hard".

Very good point rkb. Having suffered through the Thayer System, I appreciate it even more. What the Chinese and USMA have are discipline. Society at large can't make every little Josh and Brittney take trig in high school because we'd make Josh miss weight training for football, and Brittney miss dance class. Their parents would raise hell. Undisciplines parents, undisciplined kids. The Chinese parents don't give a rat's ass whether their kids are popular. They just want them to be successful. The faculty at USMA doesn't care if you get 4 hours of sleep, six nights a week, they just want you to be an extremely well rounded Army officer and to be able to handle stress.

I read once that the reason that Rome and the British Empire fell was that they stopped building and started arbitraging. It was far more attractive to extract value than to create value and the extracters were by far the more richly rewarded. You don't have to re-create Sparta or Prussia, but you do have to incentivize builders as well as arbitragers and you have to have the discipline as a society to ensure that the arbitragers are educated enough to understand what the hell the builders do. End rant.

Posted by 11A5S 2004-2-27 6:22:22 PM|| 2004-2-27 6:22:22 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 It was always my understanding here at Rantburg that there would be no math...

Posted by tu3031 2004-2-27 7:24:10 PM|| 2004-2-27 7:24:10 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 11A5S, right on.

I'll go farther - the jobs situation in the US is mainly a structural problem due to the fact that in the 90s we reaped much of the easiest commercial potential of technologies originally developed in the 60s - 80s (many of them originally developed for defense and space systems). In addition, most of the boomers got at least some math and science in school and they were central to that commercialization process.

Today we have new emerging technologies, but they aren't fully mature for easy commercialization yet except for some in the homeland security area, some biotech engineering and soon, nanotech. And, worse, where are the engineers to take this forward? US students avoided math and science courses in droves as soon as the "more student centered" curricula emerged in the 70s. So we have a huge group of younger workers without the necessary education (not just skills) and the boomers still needing to work while the gut jobs like network admin get replaced by smart software or sent overseas to be done remotely.

Sorry, guys ... I was about to go off on a favorite rant. [smile]

11A5S is right about West Point, though - my students learn a lot more than they assumed they could, because they're not allowed to stay if they don't work at every required course (and a great deal of their degree is required courses). If they do work, they get all sorts of support and help to succeed.

Posted by rkb 2004-2-27 8:13:22 PM|| 2004-2-27 8:13:22 PM|| Front Page Top

00:33 Lucky
00:27 Lucky
00:16 Anonymous2U
23:51 Mike Sylwester
23:16 Lu Baihu
22:41 Russell
22:40 Weatherman
22:26 Weatherman
22:17 dataman1
22:15 A Jackson
22:14 Frank G
22:13 dataman1
22:12 Weatherman
22:07 dataman1
21:56 Les Nessman
21:54 dataman1
21:51 anymouse
21:49 CrazyFool
21:39 Alaska Paul
21:24 Alaska Paul
21:15 Alaska Paul
20:56 .com
20:56 Tom
20:50 Aris Katsaris