David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Technology

    How Bad Could It Get, Counting the Cost of a Global Trade War

    This report from Bloomberg Economics may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section on the factors that led to the current tensions on trade and tariffs:

    There were also losers:

    U.S. labor groups, it turns out, were right to be suspicious of China’s arrival in the global market. Taken together with a shift toward more capital—intensive production, the result was stagnant wage growth. Between 2001 and 2016, real income for the bottom 20% of U.S. households didn’t rise at all, and wages for the middle 20% managed only a 4% increase.

    Mercantilist policies in China (combined with an irresponsible approach to financial regulation and mortgage lending in the U.S.) resulted in a buildup of major global imbalances. China’s current account surplus ballooned to 9.9% of GDP in 2007 from 1.3% in 2001. U.S. current account deficit peaked at 5.8% of GDP in 2006. The recycling of China’s surplus back into U.S. Treasuries kept U.S. borrowing costs too low for too long, an important background condition for the real estate bubble and financial crisis.

    For foreign policy hawks, the strategic benefits were outweighed by the costs. China didn’t democratize, in fact it doubled down on its single—party model. Worse still from Washington’s point of view, China’s rise means it now jostles with the U.S. for global influence, and on straight—line projections may overtake in terms of economic size in the next decade.

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    Electric Cars May Be Cheaper Than Gas Guzzlers in Seven Years

    This article by Jeremy Hodges for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Electric cars may be cheaper than their petroleum counterparts by 2025 if the cost of lithium-ion batteries continues to fall.

    Some models will cost the same as combustion engines as soon as 2024 and become cheaper the following year, according to a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. For that to happen, battery pack prices need to fall even as demand for the metals that go into the units continues to rise, the London-based researcher said on Thursday.

    The clamor to roll out electric vehicles has grown louder as countries and companies race to clean up smog in their cities and hit ambitious climate goals set by the Paris Agreement. U.K. lawmakers started an inquiry into the market in September, probing the necessary infrastructure and trying to determine whether to bring forward the 2040 deadline to end the sale of gasoline and diesel cars.

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    As Trump Takes On China, Another Trade Challenge Looms in Asia

    This article by Connor Cislo and Jiyeun Lee for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    But at the same time, there’s been a spike in sales to China of precision metal working machines and equipment for making chips from firms like Japan’s Yaskawa Electric Corp. With a Chinese state-backed fund gearing up to pour as much as $31.5 billion into homegrown semiconductor manufacturing, there’s potential for trade flows to start to shift.

    China’s ambitions, set out in its sweeping Made in China 2025 plan, go much further than semiconductors and would see its technical prowess advance in a host of areas, ranging from bio- medicine and artificial intelligence to new-energy vehicles and aircraft. The challenge to Japan, Korea and Taiwan also applies to European exporters like Germany, and comes on top of the risks to global trade from the Trump administration’s embrace of tariffs.

    "The bits of the global supply chain that are currently the preserve of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the U.S., and Germany, are the bits of the supply chain that China has a decade-long industrial strategy to move into," said Tom Orlik, Bloomberg’s chief Asia economist. He said it’s only a matter of time before many components for electronic products are made domestically and the country is on track to become a car exporter. Eventually, it will be selling airplanes, said Orlik.

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    Protectionism Risks? What's Next?

    Thanks to a subscriber for this report from Morgan Stanley which may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Tencent Drops After Warning Spending to Weigh on Profit Margins

    This article by Lulu Yilun Chen for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Tencent’s business revolves largely around its vast social networks WeChat and QQ, the twin platforms through which more than a billion people consume games, news and online entertainment while paying for a plethora of real-world services. Chief Executive Officer Ma Huateng is now angling to grab a larger slice of an advertising pie dominated by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while investing in new areas such as financial, retail and computing services.

    “Tencent needs to invest in new business, it would help the company build a better ecosystem infrastructure to support growth, but it will hurt margins in the short term,” said Benjamin Wu, an analyst at Shanghai-based consultancy Pacific Epoch.

    Analysts at Credit Suisse Group AG and Citigroup Inc. lowered their earnings estimates for Tencent after the results.

    Tencent’s quarterly profit included gains in the quarter of 7.9 billion-yuan thanks mainly to the initial public offerings of Sea Ltd., Sogou Inc. and Yixin Group Ltd. Those are just three of the 600 companies the company has invested in.

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    Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality

    This report from Bain & Co. by Karen Harris, Austin Kimson and Andrew Schwedel may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    We expect the magnitude of workforce change in the 2020s to match that of the automation of agriculture from 1900 to 1940. However, the transition of farm workers into the industrial sector was spread out over four decades. In the case of the automation of manufacturing, the impact was over a shorter time period (roughly 20 years), but the share of labor force in manufacturing jobs was relatively small in the US. Investment in automation is likely to proceed moderately faster than agricultural automation or manufacturing automation unless other forces act to impede its progress, and it will affect a larger percentage of the total workforce.

    The tension between the push to offset slowing labor force growth with automation and the pull to slow automation's rollout to prevent massive disruption will play out over the next 10 to 20 years. But once the first companies begin deploying new forms of automation, others are likely to follow suit rapidly to stay competitive.

    The base-case scenario
    Based on the magnitude and speed of change, our base-case scenario could result in about 2.5 million jobs per year lost or not created because of automation. Previous transformations provide an interesting comparison. The automation of agriculture transformed national economies and disrupted labor markets, culminating in the Great Depression. But if that event occurred today, scaled to the current population and labor force, it would displace 1.2 million workers per year. The rate of reabsorption from the automation of agriculture was about 700,000 workers a year.

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    Facebook Plunges as Pressure Mounts on Zuckerberg Over Data

    This article by Sarah Frier for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are calling on Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to appear before lawmakers to explain how U.K.-based Cambridge Analytica, the data-analysis firm that helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency, was able to harvest the personal information.

    Facebook has already testified about how its platform was used by Russian propagandists ahead of the 2016 election, but the company never put Zuckerberg himself in the spotlight with government leaders. The pressure may also foreshadow tougher regulation for the social network.

    U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota and John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, have called on the chairman of the Judiciary Committee to bring in technology company CEOs, including from Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for public questioning.

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    New study rips into cobalt, lithium price bulls

    This article by Frik Els for Mining.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Prominent commodities research house Wood Mackenzie this week released a report on battery materials that forecasts a decline in the price of cobalt and lithium this year which would turn into a rout from 2019 onwards.

    Woodmac is not lowballing demand growth for lithium and the authors expect demand to grow from 233 kilotonnes (kt) in 2017 to 330kt of lithium carbonate equivalent in 2020 and 405kt in 2022, but:

    … the supply response is under way. Yet it will take some time for this new capacity to materialise as battery-grade chemicals. As such, we expect relatively high price levels to be maintained over 2018. However, for 2019 and beyond, supply will start to outpace demand more aggressively and price levels will decline in turn.

    According to Woodmac data, spot lithium carbonate prices on the domestic market in China are already down 6% from December levels to around $24,500 a tonne while international market prices have remained robust rising to $16,000 at the end of February.

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    Volkswagen Steps Up Tesla Rivalry in $25 Billion Battery Buy

    This article by Chris Reiter and Christoph Rauwald for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

     

    Volkswagen AG secured 20 billion euros ($25 billion) in battery supplies to underpin an aggressive push into electric cars in the coming years, ramping up pressure on Tesla Inc. as it struggles with production issues for the mainstream Model 3.

    The world’s largest carmaker will equip 16 factories to produce electric vehicles by the end of 2022, compared with three currently, Volkswagen said Tuesday in Berlin. The German manufacturer’s plans to build as many as 3 million of the cars a year by 2025 is backstopped by deals with suppliers including Samsung SDI Co., LG Chem Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. for batteries in Europe and China.

    With the powerpack deliveries secured for its two biggest markets, a deal for North America will follow shortly, Volkswagen said. In total, the Wolfsburg-based automaker has said it plans to purchase about 50 billion euros in batteries as part of its electric-car push, which includes three new models in 2018 with dozens more following. 

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