UK Economic - Sales in Christmas

Stampede for sales as shops fear the worst

Fears that a wave of high street retailers will go bust drove a frenzy of price cutting yesterday as shops made a desperate attempt to entice customers to spend.

Prices were slashed by up to 90 per cent in department stores, fashion outlets and supermarkets across the country for the Boxing Day sales, evidence of the growing sense of crisis in the retail sector.

Retailers called for an urgent government bailout to match financial assistance given to the banking sector and the auto- motive industry to protect three million jobs.

Yesterday hefty discounting, the only option available to shift stock urgently and raise much needed cash, resulted in one of the busiest shopping days in living memory.

Thousands of bargain hunters formed queues outside stores from the early hours of the morning and many shopping centres reported higher footfall rates than during last year’s sales.

Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, turned over almost £1 million between 12pm and 1pm — the most successful hour in the store’s 100-year history.

But despite the huge customer turnout, experts warned of grim times ahead and said that more than ten retail chains risked going under next month.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) called on the Government to support the industry to avert a wave of bankruptcies. Woolworths, the most high-profile of them, will close a quarter of its stores today. On Christmas Eve, as surveys suggested that trading was at its worst levels in 25 years, Zavvi, the music, games and DVD chain, went into administration.

Jason Gordon, retail director at Ernst and Young, said that retailers faced further difficulties in the coming months, including planned tax increases in April. Buying capacity is also being undermined by the weakness of sterling.

Mr Gordon told The Times: “We will certainly see a higher level of profit warnings and companies going into administration in the next year. There are a whole host of challenges for the retailers that survive the first quarter.”

Yesterday the Centre for Economics and Business Research warned that the UK economy would suffer its worst fall since 1946 next year.

Richard Dodd, of the BRC, said that retailers had “no choice” but to discount heavily. “Quarterly rents were due yesterday and a lot of retailers have to find the upfront cash this week,” he said.

Analysts warned that some retailers would be forced to continue discounting into January, and possibly February. The sales continue today.

原文：http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5401197.ece

Human Flesh Search Engines - Two Sides

China's virtual vigilantes: Civic action or cyber mobs?

 

Concerned citizens are targeting anyone from accused pedophiles to activists with 'human flesh search engines' that post people's personal information online.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 28, 2008 edition

Beijing - Some call it a weapon in the hands of a righteous army, forged so that wrongdoers might be smitten. Others say it simply allows a mob of vigilantes to publicly vilify and humiliate anyone they choose to pick on through grotesque invasions of privacy.

Either way, the peculiarly Chinese Internet phenomenon known as the "human flesh search engine," a citizen-driven, blog-based hunt for alleged undesirables, claimed a fresh victim this month when a mid-ranking government official lost his job.

Accused of accosting a young girl, Lin Jiaxiang found his name, address, phone number, and workplace plastered all over Chinese cyberspace for 250 million Internet users to see, and his alleged crime the subject of hundreds of insulting blog postings.

Mr. Lin might be thought to have gotten his just deserts, especially since the police refused to prosecute him because he'd been drunk. Grace Wang, however, a Chinese student at Duke University, was outraged when netizens back home, offended by her efforts to mediate a campus dispute between pro-Tibetan and Chinese students last March, tracked down her parents' address and emptied a bucket of feces by their front door.

Once the actions of Ms. Wang and Lin had attracted attention in Internet chat rooms, both were quickly identified by people who recognized the photos of them posted on the Web.

It was not long before others who knew them had created an ad hoc human flesh search engine, and began posting many other personal details about the two.

With more Internet users than anywhere else in the world, there is no shortage of amateur detectives ready to join the hunt. And with chat rooms the only public space where Chinese citizens can express themselves anonymously and with any real freedom, they have become forums for strong opinions on many issues.

"It is a tradition in China," says Yu Hai, a sociologist at Shanghai's Fudan University. "People here like to moralize. And since traditional media are government mouthpieces, the Internet has become a very convenient channel for ordinary people to vent their feelings."

They can do so pretty much however they like, not only because they can disguise their identities, but also because there is no privacy law in China yet. "There is no practicable, feasible, and concrete legal instrument" to regulate Internet use, says Li Xu, deputy head of Tsinghua University's Institute for Internet Behavior.

One man who found himself the quarry of a human flesh search, Wang Fei, is testing the law by bringing China's first suit against websites that he says carried defamatory statements about him.

Mr. Wang drew the ire of fellow Internauts after his wife committed suicide last year. Her diary, posted posthumously by her sister, voiced suspicions that Wang had an affair with a colleague. The blogosphere blamed Wang for his wife's death, and turned on him with a vengeance.

"You will fall into the endless darkness and abyss of misery hated by billions" read one post, labeling Wang a "beast" and "scum."

The virtual insults spilled over into real life. Someone painted "blood for blood" on Wang's front door, his lawyer said. He and his relatives were bombarded with furious telephone calls, and he was fired from his job at an advertising agency, along with his alleged mistress.

"Those websites published insulting, defamatory, and untrue information about Wang that damaged his reputation ... and violated his privacy," argues his lawyer, Zhang Yanfeng. "He is suing them for damages, for mental distress, and lost earnings."

The case has already taken nine months and will probably not come to judgment until next spring, says Mr. Zhang, because of "a great many disagreements" among the judges and the expert witnesses.

Among the issues the court must resolve, in the absence of any clear legislation, is whether information such as a cellphone number, an ID card number, or an address can be said to be private. The judges must also consider how far website managers are responsible and legally liable for posts on their sites, and weigh the competing interests of free speech and privacy protection.

A poll published earlier this year in the China Youth Daily found that nearly 80 percent of respondents thought that human-flesh search engines should be regulated, and 65 percent thought they invaded people's privacy.

The dilemma, says Dr. Li, is that "allowing arbitrary speech with no regulation ... violates privacy rights. But if you over-regulate citizens' ability to express themselves, the Internet will lose its very nature and its attraction."

Drawing too heavy a cloak around personal privacy, moreover, would protect abusive officials from the public pillorying they deserve, argues Liu Deliang, head of the Asia-Pacific Institute for Cyberlaw Studies.

"Ordinary people have no enforceable right to supervise government officials' behavior or to control the corruption they see everywhere," he says. "So they use the Internet to do that."

"Human-flesh searches are a neutral technology that can be used for good or ill," says Dr. Liu. "But they must strike a balance between public and private interests."

原文：http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1128/p01s01-woap.html

Beyond GDP - Welfare

How Not to Stimulate the Economy

In thinking through the fiscal policy options and their implications, it might be useful to compare a few hypothetical, fanciful scenarios. Suppose that the federal government borrows some money and then...
Case A: uses the money to give a lump-sum payment (such as a tax rebate) to Joe Average, who chooses to spend his free time sitting at home watching Mork and Mindy reruns.
Case B: uses the money to hire Joe to sit at home and watch Mork and Mindy reruns.
Case C: uses the money to hire Joe to sit at home and watch Family Feud reruns, which Joe does not enjoy quite as much as Mork and Mindy.
In all the cases, Joe will spend some of the money he gets on consumer goods and services, leading to a Keynesian multiplier. But those knock-on effects are the same in the three cases, so we can put those aside for now.
Let's begin by comparing cases A and B. These two scenarios are identical in terms of final allocations and economic welfare. Joe is doing the same thing, and all the money flows are the same. But note that the macroeconomic statistics would be different. In Case B, Joe is employed producing a government service. If we used standard data to compare Case B with Case A, Case B would show more hours worked and a higher Gross Domestic Product.
Now look at Case C. It has the same employment and GDP as Case B, but welfare is strictly lower. Joe is, after all, less happy watching Family Feud. Comparing Case C with Case A, therefore, we see greater employment, greater GDP, and lower welfare.
Usually, GDP is a reasonable proxy for economic well-being, so more is better, but that is not true in this example. Part of the problem here is that GDP includes government purchases at cost. If the government hires people to produce stuff that is worthless, that stuff is included in GDP just as much as if the government buys something valuable. When calculating GDP, the national income accountants do not pass judgment on the social utility of government spending. Anyone concerned with economic well-being has to go beyond thinking about GDP.
The moral of the story: If the government spends a fiscal stimulus package on goods and services without much public value (as in Case C), it could well stimulate the economy as measured by macroeconomic aggregates but leave the participants in the economy worse off (compared with a feasible alternative, Case A). Avoiding this trap requires that the government spend taxpayers dollars only those items that pass a strict cost-benefit test. That is hard to do quickly. Willy-nilly spending is a good way to stimulate the economy only if the outcome is judged by the wrong metric.

原文：http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-not-to-stimulate-economy.html

Grieving parents file lawsuit in China

By Edward Wong

Monday, December 22, 2008

DEYANG, China: Parents whose children died in the collapse of an elementary school during the May earthquake that devastated western China have filed a lawsuit against government officials and a construction contractor. The lawsuit is the first filed by grieving parents angered by what they say is shoddy construction that led to the deaths of their children.

The lawsuit was filed Dec. 1 in a court here in the city of Deyang, in Sichuan Province, the region hit hardest by the May 12 earthquake that left 88,000 people dead or missing. It was the deadliest natural disaster in China in more than three decades. The parents who brought the lawsuit said in interviews last weekend that they were waiting to hear whether the court would allow the case to go forward.

Soon after the earthquake, government officials estimated that 7,000 classrooms had collapsed across the quake zone, killing up to 10,000 schoolchildren. The parents who filed the lawsuit Dec. 1 are the fathers and mothers of children who died in the collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School, where at least 127 students were crushed to death.

The issue of school-building collapses has become the focal point for the greatest political challenge to the Chinese government in the aftermath of the earthquake. In the weeks after the earthquake, grieving parents took to the streets in towns across Sichuan to demand that local officials investigate the construction of the schools.

In some cases, crying parents were hauled away by the riot police. Later in the summer, local governments promised compensation payments to parents if they signed agreements stating they would no longer demand investigations or complain about school construction.

Many of the parents of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School signed such agreements, but some decided in the autumn to go ahead with the lawsuit. The school is in the town of Fuxin, near the city of Mianzhu. The lawsuit names as defendants the town government of Fuxin, the education department of Mianzhu, the school principal and the company that built the school.

Chen Xuefang, one of the plaintiffs, said in a telephone interview that the parents were demanding compensation equivalent to $19,000 per dead child. Over the summer, the local government had offered parents the equivalent of $8,800 in cash and several thousand more dollars in post-retirement pension payments if the parents agreed to drop the issue of the collapsed schools.

Zheng Rongqiong, whose 10-year-old daughter died in the school, said in a telephone interview that parents of 57 dead children were taking part in the lawsuit. Officials from the city of Deyang, who oversee the administration of Mianzhu, have been pressuring the parents to drop the lawsuit, she said, but the parents have refused.

Some parents have declined to join the lawsuit because they believe there is little or no chance of winning and money spent on lawyers will be wasted, said Zheng, who is 35. The plaintiffs have contributed nearly $150 each to help pay for the travel expenses of a lawyer from Shanghai who has agreed to represent them.

"We hope that once we win this lawsuit, it will point out all the people responsible for the deaths of our children," Zheng said.

An official at the Mianzhu education department said Monday that he was aware of the lawsuit but declined to discuss it over the telephone. A woman at the offices of the town government of Fuxin said by telephone that she had no immediate response to the lawsuit.

In legal cases that involve politically sensitive issues, judges and lawyers in China often come under great pressure from government officials to keep the cases from going forward, so there is little chance that the parents in the Fuxin lawsuit will get a full hearing in court.

One parent said a court official met with several parents Dec. 8 to say that the court would not accept the case. No formal answer has come yet.

In similar legal action, parents in three provinces filed lawsuits this fall against dairy companies after tens of thousands of children across China fell ill and at least four died from drinking milk and baby formula tainted with a toxic chemical called melamine.

The milk scandal, once it was revealed in September, infuriated many Chinese and quickly became a huge political embarrassment to the Communist Party because local officials had been involved in covering up the poisonings. No lawsuits have yet been heard.

After the earthquake, the central government assigned a committee of experts to look into the school collapses, but the committee has yet to issue a final report. In September, an official from the committee, Ma Zongjin, said at a news conference in Beijing that a rush to build schools during the Chinese economic boom might have led to shoddy construction that resulted in the student deaths. He said more than 1,000 schools had one of two major flaws - they were built on the earthquake fault line or they were poorly constructed.

Government officials at all levels have tried to suppress discussion of the school collapses. A documentary that asks tough questions about a school collapse in the rural town of Muyu in northern Sichuan has attracted intense scrutiny from the central government.

The director, Pan Jianlin, showed the film, "Who Killed Our Children?", at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea in late October. Afterward, he told Reuters, people contacted his relatives and friends to tell them to pressure him to stop his work.

Aside from the parents of children killed in the Fuxin school, those of students who died in other schools are still looking for ways to push the government to do a full and open investigation.

This autumn, the father of a child killed in Dongqi Middle School in the town of Hanwang said by telephone that some parents were planning to travel to Beijing to file a petition with the central government. Exactly how they would go about doing it, he said, was still unclear.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

原文：http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=18862855

Life without bubbles

By Paul Krugman

Monday, December 22, 2008

America.

Whatever the new administration does, we're in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell. After that, things should get better, as President Barack Obama's stimulus plan - O.K., I'm told that the politically correct term is now "economic recovery plan" - begins to gain traction. Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I'm fairly optimistic about 2010.

But what comes after that?

Right now everyone is talking about, say, two years of economic stimulus - which makes sense as a planning horizon. Too much of the economic commentary I've been reading seems to assume, however, that that's really all we'll need - that once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual.

In fact, however, things can't just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that.

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was - profits were terrific, wages not so much - depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn't coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn't coming back either.

To be more specific: the severe housing slump we're experiencing will end eventually, but the immense Bush-era housing boom won't be repeated. Consumers will eventually regain some of their confidence, but they won't spend the way they did in 2005-2007, when many people were using their houses as ATMs, and the savings rate dropped nearly to zero.

So what will support the economy if cautious consumers and humbled homebuilders aren't up to the job?

A few months ago a headline in the satirical New York City newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In." Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment.

But this boom would have to be enormous, raising business investment to a historically unprecedented percentage of GDP, to fill the hole left by the consumer and housing pullback. While that could happen, it doesn't seem like something to count on.

A more plausible route to sustained recovery would be a drastic reduction in the U.S. trade deficit, which soared at the same time the housing bubble was inflating. By selling more to other countries and spending more of our own income on U.S.-produced goods, we could get to full employment without a boom in either consumption or investment spending.

But it will probably be a long time before the trade deficit comes down enough to make up for the bursting of the housing bubble. For one thing, export growth, after several good years, has stalled, partly because nervous international investors, rushing into assets they still consider safe, have driven the dollar up against other currencies - making U.S. production much less cost-competitive.

Furthermore, even if the dollar falls again, where will the capacity for a surge in exports and import-competing production come from? Despite rising trade in services, most world trade is still in goods, especially manufactured goods - and the U.S. manufacturing sector, after years of neglect in favor of real estate and the financial industry, has a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway, the rest of the world may not be ready to handle a drastically smaller U.S. trade deficit. As my colleague Tom Friedman recently pointed out, much of China's economy in particular is built around exporting to America, and will have a hard time switching to other occupations.

In short, getting to the point where our economy can thrive without fiscal support may be a difficult, drawn-out process. And as I said, I hope the Obama team understands that.

Right now, with the economy in free fall and everyone terrified of Great Depression 2.0, opponents of a strong federal response are having a hard time finding support. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, has been reduced to using his Web site to seek "credentialed American economists" willing to add their names to a list of "stimulus spending skeptics."

But once the economy has perked up a bit, there will be a lot of pressure on the new administration to pull back, to throw away the economy's crutches. And if the administration gives in to that pressure too soon, the result could be a repeat of the mistake FDR made in 1937 - the year he slashed spending, raised taxes and helped plunge the United States into a serious recession.

The point is that it may take a lot longer than many people think before the U.S. economy is ready to live without bubbles. And until then, the economy is going to need a lot of government help.

原文：http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/22/news/edkrugman.php