Japan PM sets targets in latest growth strategy tranche

By Kaori Kaneko

TOKYO (Reuters) - The latest tranche of Japan's growth strategy will aim to triple infrastructure exports and double farm exports by 2020, as well as boost private investment, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday.

The government will set a target for domestic private-sector investment of 70 trillion yen ($687 billion) annually, Abe said in a speech to business executives and academics, the level before the 2008 financial crisis and up about 10 percent from the current figure.

Measures to promote growth constitute what Abe calls the "third arrow" in his policy quiver as Japan battles to end 15 years of deflation and generate sustainable economic growth. The first two arrows of "Abenomics" are massive monetary easing and a burst of government spending.

Abe has promised that structural reform including deregulation will be a key part of the package of steps, to be fully unveiled in June. But it also includes a significant role for government in generating investment and innovation in key sectors, a stance some critics see as outdated and ill-advised.

The monetary and fiscal stimulus already sparked Japan's fastest economic growth in a year in the first quarter, but corporate investment has yet to follow suit.

Promising to be a "top salesman" for Japanese infrastructure exports, Abe vowed to promote private-sector investment at home and asked corporate Japan to do its bit to pass on the benefits of "Abenomics".

"The government will broadly implement a growth strategy starting with making it easier to invest, and I would like you business executives to pass on the fruits of this to working people in the form of jobs and compensation," he said.

Politicians in Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) worry that, while share prices are up and the yen's value is down, boosting corporate profits, Japanese households have yet to see the benefits in the form of higher wages, although prices are starting to rise.

Abe, who took office in December after a big LDP election win, has said he wants to unveil the growth strategy before a June 17-18 Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland. That would also come ahead of a July upper house election his party needs to win to cement its grip on power and set the stage for a long-term government.

JAPAN AS NUMBER ONE

Noting Japan's economy has begun to show signs of recovery, Abe reiterated his pledge to free the economy from the "spell" of prolonged deflation and lost confidence.

"This is an era in which you cannot survive tough competition unless you are No. 1 globally," he said, promising that the government would make it easier for companies to invest on a scale needed to compete with foreign rivals.

Abe said the growth strategy would focus intensively on boosting domestic private investment over the next three years, triple infrastructure exports by 2020 and double farm, fisheries and marine exports to 1 trillion yen by the same date.

In a nod to the farm lobby, which was upset by Abe's March decision to join talks on the U.S.-led Transpacific Trade Partnership free-trade pact, Abe also pledged to double farmers' income over the next 10 years. That would ease the pain of scrapping the high tariffs that currently protect many farmers.

Abe also said the growth strategy would aim to boost the number of annual foreign visitors to Japan to 20 million a year from about 8 million now and triple the overseas sales of "Cool Japan" content such as anime in five years.

Experts have said policy measures announced so far contain some positive steps but fall short of a sweeping overhaul of Japan-style capitalism with "Big Bang" deregulation.

Among the areas where the final package is expected to fall short are steps to free up Japan's rigid labor market to make it easier for firms to shed dying businesses, improvements in corporate governance, and addressing the touchy question of immigration to make up for Japan's shrinking population.

($1 = 101.9600 Japanese yen)

(Reporting by Kaori Kaneko; Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/japan-pm-sets-targets-latest-growth-strategy-tranche-095919014.html

Kate McKinnon gwyneth paltrow Pink moon Champions League Schwab cispa Katherine Russell Tsarnaev

What Games Are: Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Xbox?

With Xbox 360 having started well but ended in a very confused state, I worry that Microsoft is about to carry over much of its baggage to the new console. Will the company make the same mistake of not listening to the market that it has often made in recent years? Will it continue to believe that there is a burgeoning market for an everything box? Or will it refocus on what matters?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/EsqSi43GSG4/

albatross louis oosthuizen phil mickelson 10 year old gives birth c. difficile carmelo anthony nurse jackie

GPS solution provides three-minute tsunami alerts

May 17, 2013 ? Researchers have shown that, by using global positioning systems (GPS) to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in just a few minutes after the earthquake onset. For the devastating Japan 2011 event, the team reveals that the analysis of the GPS data and issue of a detailed tsunami alert would have taken no more than three minutes.

The results are published on 17 May in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Most tsunamis, including those in offshore Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004 and Japan in 2011, occur following underwater ground motion in subduction zones, locations where a tectonic plate slips under another causing a large earthquake. To a lesser extent, the resulting uplift of the sea floor also affects coastal regions. There, researchers can measure the small ground deformation along the coast with GPS and use this to determine tsunami information.

"High-precision real-time processing and inversion of these data enable reconstruction of the earthquake source, described as slip at the subduction interface. This can be used to calculate the uplift of the sea floor, which in turn is used as initial condition for a tsunami model to predict arrival times and maximum wave heights at the coast," says lead-author Andreas Hoechner from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).

In the new Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences paper, the researchers use the Japan 2011 tsunami, which hit the country's northeast coast in less than half an hour and caused significant damage, as a case study. They show that their method could have provided detailed tsunami alert as soon as three minutes after the beginning of the earthquake that generated it.

"Japan has a very dense network of GPS stations, but these were not being used for tsunami early warning as of 2011. Certainly this is going to change soon," states Hoechner.

The scientists used raw data from the Japanese GPS Earth Observation Network (GEONET) recorded a day before to a day after the 2011 earthquake. To shorten the time needed to provide a tsunami alert, they only used data from 50 GPS stations on the northeast coast of Japan, out of about 1200 GEONET stations available in the country.

At present, tsunami warning is based on seismological methods. However, within the time limit of 5 to 10 minutes, these traditional techniques tend to underestimate the earthquake magnitude of large events. Furthermore, they provide only limited information on the geometry of the tsunami source (see note). Both factors can lead to underprediction of wave heights and tsunami coastal impact. Hoechner and his team say their method does not suffer from the same problems and can provide fast, detailed and accurate tsunami alerts.

The next step is to see how the GPS solution works in practice in Japan or other areas prone to devastating tsunamis. As part of the GFZ-lead German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System project, several GPS stations were installed in Indonesia after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami near Sumatra, and are already providing valuable information for the warning system.

"The station density is not yet high enough for an independent tsunami early warning in Indonesia, since it is a requirement for this method that the stations be placed densely close to the area of possible earthquake sources, but more stations are being added," says Hoechner.

Note

Traditional tsunami early warning methods use hypocentre (the point directly beneath the epicentre where the seismic fault begins to rupture) and magnitude only, meaning the source of the earthquake and tsunami is regarded as a point source. However, especially in the case of subduction earthquakes, it can have a large extension: in Japan in 2011 the connection between the tectonic plates broke on a length of about 400km and the Sumatra event in 2004 had a length of some 1500km. To get a good tsunami prediction, it is important to consider this extension and the spatial slip distribution.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/ivC5m9wJeyc/130517085819.htm

Alan Turing brave Stephanie Rice Meet the Pyro Karen Klein Colorado fires supreme court

Column: Does inequality help growth - or hurt it?

By Chrystia Freeland

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - One of the most urgent questions in economics today is the connection between inequality and growth. That is because one of the big economic facts of our time is the surge in income disparity, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. The other big fact is the recession set off by the financial crisis and the consequent imperative to jump-start economic growth. Figuring out the relationship between these two tent-pole issues is therefore a good way for economists to spend their time.

There are two main and contradictory ideas about how that relationship might work. One is that inequality is the price of robust economic growth. If the private sector is thriving, the most successful capitalists will be getting very rich. Creating a system that allows - indeed, encourages - the best and the brightest to pull away from everyone else is how you shift your economy into its highest gear.

There is, however, another theory, and it has been winning adherents in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In this view, rising inequality is not a symptom of a fast-growing economy or an incentive that will help create one. Instead, too much income inequality crushes economic growth.

There are different arguments for why that might happen. One is that high income inequality creates an unstable system that is vulnerable to costly booms and busts. Another is that when too much of the income goes to the very top and not enough goes to the middle, spending slumps - how many yachts does a plutocrat need? - putting a brake on growth.

David Howell, a professor of economics at The New School in New York, has written a draft paper for the Center for American Progress, a progressive research group, that investigates the first argument. Howell argues that the United States and Britain have acted over the past three decades on what he calls the laissez-faire theory, that the equation of rising inequality and increasing gross domestic product is correct.

As Howell puts it, "the laissez-faire case for high inequality is grounded in the belief that growth in output and employment depends mainly on strong incentives to work and invest."

Howell tested that view by comparing the United States and Britain to their peers. He asked whether "compared to other rich countries, U.S. income inequality has paid off in relatively high growth." His answer: not particularly. He finds that "there is no simple correlation between our measures of growth and income inequality."

That may come as a surprise to many Americans, who are accustomed to hearing, as Howell explained, "that the U.S. middle class is doing relatively well, at least compared to Europe, because of productivity growth and because we allow higher inequality."

But the reality is that at least some of those allegedly sclerotic European economies, dragged down by their highly redistributive welfare states, have outperformed the United States.

"What we see is Sweden having really good productivity growth by all measures, despite much more modest increases in inequality and starting at a much lower level," he said.

"The U.S. is anywhere from an O.K. to middling performer in the Age of Inequality," Howell said, using his term for our era. But while his work suggests inequality is not needed to get growth, he does not show that inequality actually hurts growth either: "I don't show a strong measurable inverse effect."

Lars Osberg, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, takes on this second argument - the case that inequality, at least beyond a certain point, can stifle growth.

He, too, adopts a comparative lens, looking at Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Osberg argues that a growing chasm between those at the very top and everyone else imperils the overall economy. His worry is financial instability.

"The added savings of the increasingly affluent must be loaned to balance total current expenditure," he writes, "but increasing indebtedness implies financial fragility, periodic financial crises, greater volatility of aggregate income and, as governments respond to mass unemployment with countercyclical fiscal policies, a compounding instability of public finances."

This is a variation of an argument by Raghuram Rajan, a politically center-right professor at the University of Chicago, who has suggested that rising income inequality was one of the drivers of the financial crisis. As income inequality increased, and the incomes of the middle class stagnated, the U.S. government responded by increasing the consumer credit available to the middle class.

In the short term, that was a win-win solution: consumption, and therefore the economy, grew, and the middle class was quiescent because stagnating incomes were masked by increasing consumer debt. But in the medium term that Goldilocks scenario broke down - the middle class consumption bubble, and the Wall Street bubble it helped finance, popped with devastating consequences.

Both Howell and Osberg are skeptical, at best, of the value of rising income inequality as a driver of economic growth. When you put that conclusion together with the arithmetic of democracy - rising income inequality means a majority of voters are on the losing end of the deal - a political backlash seems inevitable.

"Go back to the 1920s or the 1870s and economists were worried about the stability of the capitalist system," Osberg said. "One of the things the 1930s experience teaches us is there are some catastrophic outcomes which can happen."

The investing class and the academic world are focused on those dangers. "Can capitalism survive?" is one of the trendiest conference topics among red-blooded capitalists and left-leaning professors alike. So far, at the ballot box and on the street, this question has not been as salient. That does not mean it will not be in the future - and in ways we cannot predict.

(Chrystia Freeland is the managing director and editor, Consumer News at Thomson Reuters. Prior, she was U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times. Before that, Freeland was deputy editor of the Financial Times, in London, editor of the FT's Weekend edition, editor of FT.com, UK News editor, Moscow bureau chief and Eastern Europe correspondent. From 1999 to 2001, Freeland served as deputy editor of The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Freeland began her career working as a stringer in Ukraine, writing for the FT, The Washington Post and The Economist.

She is the author of two books: "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else," published by Penguin in 2012 and "Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution," published by Crown Publishing books in 2000.)

(Chrystia Freeland is a Reuters columnist. Any opinions expressed are her own.)

(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/column-does-inequality-help-growth-hurt-183837739.html

chariots of fire Medal Count Sam Mikulak London 2012 diving Tim Berners-Lee Olympics 2012 Schedule Kenneth Branagh

CBS Evening News: Republican Sources Caught Doctoring Emails (Little green footballs)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/306363846?client_source=feed&format=rss

all star weekend undercover boss tupelo honey limp bizkit stations of the cross nike foamposite galaxy bill maher

Dell's dismal 1Q illuminates PC maker's challenges

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Dell's financial decay worsened during its latest quarter as the company slashed its personal computer prices in response to the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets.

The dismal performance announced Thursday provided the latest evidence of a technological shift that is making it difficult to sell laptop and desktop machines. Until recently, consumers had regularly replaced machines with faster ones every few years. The money is going instead to powerful, more convenient mobile devices such as phones and tablets. PC makers have had to cut prices sharply, obliterating their profit margins.

The trend also has hobbled another technology powerhouse, Hewlett-Packard Co., which is scheduled to report its latest quarterly numbers Wednesday.

If there's ever an opportune time for a company to flounder, it's right now for Dell Inc. That's because Dell's board of directors is trying to persuade shareholders to accept a $24.4 billion buyout offer from CEO Michael Dell and other investors. Some shareholders say the offer price of $13.65 per share is too low, but Dell's board contends it's a good deal in light of challenges facing the company.

The results for the fiscal first quarter, which ended May 3, should reinforce the board's point. At the same time, opponents of that proposal may question whether the Round Rock, Texas, company is deliberately finding ways to make the results look as bleak as possible in an effort to get the deal done.

Brian Gladden, Dell's chief financial officer, sought to debunk the conspiracy theories in response to a question posed on a conference call with analysts. "We have not changed the way we are running the business," Gladden said. "The strategy for the company has endured, and I would say we continue to adapt that strategy, given the market conditions."

Michael Dell didn't participate in Thursday's call. Before the buyout offer was announced in February, Michael Dell had regularly appeared on the call.

A shareholder vote on the buyout is supposed to be held by Aug. 2. Two of Dell's largest shareholders, billionaire Carl Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management, are trying to block the sale to Michael Dell with an alternative proposal that would keep the company publicly traded. If Michael Dell's offer is accepted, it would end Dell's 25-year history as a publicly held company.

Both Michael Dell and the dissident shareholders believe the company can bounce back by expanding beyond PCs into more promising technology segments such as business software, services and, of course, tablets. The turnaround promises to be bumpy, and the two sides disagree on whether that is better done as a public company or as a private company that doesn't have to report quarterly numbers and can focus on long-term results. Icahn also doesn't believe Michael Dell, who founded the company 29 years ago, is the right leader. Michael Dell, the company's largest shareholders, would remain CEO under his buyout proposal.

Investors had originally been betting a higher offer would emerge for Dell after Michael Dell and his partners reached their agreement with the company's board in early February. That's not the case any longer, as illustrated by Dell's stock falling below the buyout offer. The stock fell 3 cents to $13.40 in Thursday's extended trading, after the results came out. That's 25 cents below Michael Dell's offer price.

Dell Inc. earned $130 million, or 7 cents per share, in the latest quarter, compared with $635 million, or 36 cents per share, a year earlier.

If not for certain items unrelated to its ongoing business, Dell said it would have earned 21 cents per share. That figure was below the 35 cents per share expected on average by analysts polled by FactSet.

The shortfall doesn't come as a shock. Speculation that Dell missed analysts' earnings target mounted earlier this week after the company disclosed that it would release its results ahead of schedule. The report originally was supposed to be released next Tuesday.

Dell's revenue for the period dipped 2 percent to $14.1 billion, about $600 million above analyst predictions.

The company benefited from an improvement in its non-PC operations, where revenue climbed 12 percent from last year. Some of that came from the September purchase of Quest Software.

But nearly two-thirds of Dell's revenue still comes from PC sales. Even with drastic price cutting, PC demand weakened, particularly for laptop machines. Laptops aren't as inviting now that there are so many sleek smartphones and tablets on the market. The mobility portion of Dell's PC operations ? the part consisting primarily of laptops ? suffered a 16 percent decline in revenue to $3.6 billion in the latest quarter. Overall revenue in Dell's PC division dropped 9 percent to $8.9 billion from last year.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-05-16-Earns-Dell/id-4b765b1909ae4354848a4ddf22e6a126

dallas mavericks washington capitals delmon young amare stoudemire tallest building in the world the pitch brandon inge

Relationship troubles? Some sad music might help you feel better

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Consumers experiencing relationship problems are more likely to prefer aesthetic experiences that reflect their negative mood, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"Emotional experiences of aesthetic products are important to our happiness and well-being. Music, movies, paintings, or novels that are compatible with our current mood and feelings, akin to an empathic friend, are more appreciated when we experience broken or failing relationships," write authors Chan Jean Lee (KAIST Business School), Eduardo B. Andrade (FGV School of Administration), and Stephen E. Palmer (University of California, Berkeley).

Consumers experience serious emotional distress when intimate relationships are broken, and look for a surrogate to replace the lost personal bond. Prior research has reported that consumers in a negative mood prefer pleasant, positive aesthetic experiences (cheerful music; fun comedies) to counter their negative feelings. However, under certain circumstances, consumers in negative moods might choose aesthetic experiences consistent with their mood (sad music; tear-jerking dramas) even when more pleasant alternatives are also available.

In one study, consumers were presented with various frustrating situations and asked to rate angry music relative to joyful or relaxing music. Consumers liked angry music more when they were frustrated by interpersonal violations (being interrupted; someone always being late) than by impersonal hassles (no internet connection; natural disaster).

In another study, consumers were asked to recall experiences involving loss. Preference for sad music was significantly higher when they had experienced an interpersonal loss (losing a personal relationship) versus an impersonal loss (losing a competition).

"Interpersonal relationships influence consumer preference for aesthetic experiences. Consumers seek and experience emotional companionship with music, films, novels, and the fine arts as a substitute for lost and troubled relationships," the authors conclude.

###

University of Chicago Press Journals: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu

Thanks to University of Chicago Press Journals for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 25 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128266/Relationship_troubles__Some_sad_music_might_help_you_feel_better

db cooper fafsa branson missouri davy jones dead monkees last train to clarksville tim tebow taylor swift