Posts tagged 'Unit Labour Costs'

Productivity, “reindustrialisation” and the US profit share

Kate is FT AV’s Asia Correspondent. She joined FT Alphaville in mid-2011 after carrying out various roles in the FT’s London office since 2005: interactive editor, companies reporter, and founding editor of the FT’s Energy Source blog.

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| Apr 08 16:22 | Comment |

US industrial production has grown at least twice as fast as GDP since the start of the recovery.

“Onshoring” work because wage differentials are narrowing plus falling electricity prices because of shale gas = more growth, so… great! Maybe? Read more

All pain and no (productivity) gains

Masa joined the FT in 2009 and has worked on a number of desks across the paper, including Companies, Markets and Comment. She spent much of 2010 in New York covering the US equity markets. But earlier this year she finally saw the light and moved to Alphaville.

She started her career in the investment banking division at Lehman Brothers in the summer of 2007, timing it perfectly with the beginning of the credit crunch.

She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University.

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| Jan 18 15:35 | Comment |

One of the reasons that the eurozone’s peripherals should be willing to put up with austerity is that it’s helping address internal balances and address falls in competitiveness. That’s the story being sold by the politicians at least. But now that the crisis is coming into its fifth year, there is a decent amount of data that allows us to see if those imbalances are indeed being corrected and that lost competitiveness regained.

James Nixon at SocGen has has done some clever number crunching with unit labour costs in the most crisis-hit eurozone countries since 2000, and found that any apparent improvements in competitiveness are likely to be fleeting. Read more

We’ll settle this internal devaluation question quicker than we thought

Kate is FT AV’s Asia Correspondent. She joined FT Alphaville in mid-2011 after carrying out various roles in the FT’s London office since 2005: interactive editor, companies reporter, and founding editor of the FT’s Energy Source blog.

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| Sep 18 2012 12:09 | Comment |

Unable to benefit from currency depreciation, the peripherals have been urged to seek other ways to improve their balance sheets by means such as ‘internal devaluation’ — regaining competitiveness by lowering costs, particularly wages.

One of the criticisms of “internal devaluation” is that it’s a slower method of improving competitiveness than an old fashioned currency devaluation. There are also questions about whether it even works. Read more

One cheer for slower earnings growth…

Cardiff writes mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics about which he claim no expertise. Before Alphaville, Cardiff spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way he has written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head).

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| Apr 10 2012 20:41 | Comment |

Official earnings season in the US will kick off with Alcoa after the close of trading on Tuesday, and here’s one item that economy-watchers will be minding as companies report in the coming weeks.

First from RBC: Read more