Eis aqui uma interessante entrevista do jornalista americano Charlie Rose com dois especialistas em TICs (Leo Apotheker, co-CEO of SAP e Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School), no dia 06/01/2009, retirada do seu blog (www.charlierose.com)! A entrevista começa aos 33 minutos!
=======
Here Charlie Rose interviews Leo Apotheker, co-CEO of SAP, and Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School about enterprise software. The interview begins at 33:00.
Um artigo promissor que saiu no blog www.voxeu.org aponta a primeira (que este blog verifica) projeção do fim da recessão dos EUA!
===============
The recession will be over sooner than you think
Nicholas Bloom
Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University
Max Floetotto
PhD Candidate in Economics, Stanford
12 January 2009
A key source of the today’s economic weakness is uncertainty that led firms to postpone investment and hiring decisions. This column, by the authors whose model forecast the recession as far back as June 2008, report that the key measures of uncertainty have dropped so rapidly that they believe growth will resume by mid-2009. This means any additional economic stimulus has to be enacted quickly. Delaying to the summer may mean the economic medicine is administered just as the patient is leave the hospital.
Many pundits (e.g. Krugman) are warning that a dire recession is in the offing. We would have agreed with them three months ago; indeed, we wrote a VoxEU column predicting a severe recession in 2009; based on the analysis of 16 previous economic shocks, we forecasted a 3% drop in GDP and a 3 million increase in unemployment in each of Europe and the US with these predictions made from VAR forecasts (see Bloom 2008 for details).
We also worried about a far worse outcome – Europe and the US slipping into another Great Depression due to damaging policy responses. Luckily, using the latest data on uncertainty measures, our model predicts that the worst has been avoided.
Good news: Great Depression II avoided and growth resumes mid-2009
Much like today, the Great Depression began with a stock-market crash and a melt-down of the financial system. Banks withdrew credit lines and the inter bank lending market froze-up. What turned this from a financial crisis into an economic disaster, however, was the compounding effect of terrible policy. The infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was introduced by desperate US policymakers as a way of blocking imports to protect domestic jobs. Instead of helping workers, this worsened the situation by freezing world trade. At the same time policymakers were encouraging firms to collude to keep prices up and encouraging workers to unionize to protect wages, exacerbating the situation by strangling free markets.
In fact economic uncertainty is now dropping so rapidly that we believe growth will resume by mid-2009.
Uncertainty is now falling
It now appears that the global policy response to the credit crunch has avoided repeating those mistakes. Instead, it has focused on delivering a massive dose of tax and interest rate cuts, and spending increases. Policies restricting free-markets have largely been avoided. This has calmed stock markets as the fears of an economic Armageddon have subsided. At the same time political uncertainty has dropped as world leaders have clarified their stimulus plans.
Figure 1 shows one measure of uncertainty – the implied volatility on the S&P 100 – commonly known as the financial “fear factor”. This jumped over three fold after the dramatic collapse of Lehman’s in September 2008. But it has fallen back by 50% over the last three weeks as both economic and political uncertainty has receded. Other measures of uncertainty have also fallen; this is even true for the frequency of the word “uncertain” in the press!
Fig1
As uncertainty falls the economy will rebound
The heightened uncertainty after the credit crunch led firms to postpone investment and hiring decisions. Mistakes can be costly, so if conditions are unpredictable the best course of action is often to wait. Of course, if every firm in the economy waits, economic activity slows down.
But now that uncertainty is falling back growth should start to rebound. Firms will start to invest and hire again to make up for lost time. Figure 2 shows our predicted impact of the spike in uncertainty following the credit crunch. This is based on our detailed analysis of 16 previous financial, economic and politically driven uncertainty shocks. After falling by 3% between October 2008 and June 2009, we forecast GDP will rapidly rebound from July 2009 onwards.
Fig 2
So it’s now or never for expansionary policy
Many economists make the case for a stronger policy response. That might be right, but policy makers need to act fast. Any additional economic stimulus – be it a spending package, quantitative easing or a couple of rounds of liquidity injections – has to be enacted quickly. Dithering over different courses of policy will actually make things worse by adding uncertainty (see Caballero 2008). This is exactly what happened after 9/11 when the Federal Reserve Board criticized Congress for creating unnecessary uncertainty with its lengthy debates on investment tax credits.
Delaying the stimulus package until the summer may mean that it is too late. The economic medicine will be administered just as the patient is trying to leave the hospital!
References
Caballero, Ricardo (2008). “Normalcy is Just a Few Bold Policy Steps Away,” December 17, 2008.
Bloom, Nick, Max Floetotto and Nir Jaimovich (2008). “Really Uncertain Business Cycles.”
Bloom, Nick (2008). “The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks,” Stanford mimeo, forthcoming Econometrica.
Krugman, Paul (2009). “Ideas for Obama,” New York Times column, 11 January 2009.
Footnotes
1 See “Really Uncertain Business Cycles” by Bloom, Floetotto and Jaimovich for a more detailed discussion ; here is the abstract from that paper: “This paper proposes uncertainty shocks as a new impulse driving business cycles. We first demonstrate that uncertainty, measured by a number of proxies, appears to be strongly countercyclical. When uncertainty is included in a standard vector-auto-regression, uncertainty shocks lead to a large drop and rebound in economic activity. Guided by this we build a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model that extends the benchmark neoclassical growth model along two dimensions. It allows for heterogeneous firms with non-convex adjustment costs for both capital and labor, and time varying uncertainty defined as fluctuations in the variance of technology shocks. Increases in uncertainty lead to large drops in employment and investment. This occurs because uncertainty makes firms cautious, leading them to pausing hiring and investment. This freeze in activity also reduces the reallocation of capital and labor across firms, leading to a large fall in productivity growth. Taken together, the freeze in the hiring and investment, and the drop in relocation, lead to a business cycle sized drop and rebound in output, investment and productivity growth after a rise in uncertainty.”
This article may be reproduced with appropriate attribution. See Copyright (below).
Matéria da nova The Economist que saiu hoje!
==========
Lost Jobs
Jan 15th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
ON JANUARY 5th Steve Jobs, the revered and controversial boss of Apple, disclosed that “a hormone imbalance” had been “robbing” him of proteins all last year, which was why he has appeared so gaunt. He insisted that the cure would be “simple and straightforward” and declared defiantly that this was “all that I am going to say about this.”
But on Wednesday January 14th he had to say more: “I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.” He announced that he was taking medical leave until June, during which time his number two, Tim Cook, would run Apple. “I look forward to seeing all of you this summer,” Mr Jobs ended his latest letter to his firm’s employees. But there is a real possibility that Mr Jobs, who had surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004, will not come back.
And so the era of Steve Jobs at Apple may already have ended. Investors, customers, employees and fans have barely begun to absorb the consequences. No boss today embodies and defines his company as completely as Steve Jobs. “I don’t see an Apple, the way we would define the company, without Steve,” says Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, a technology think-tank.
Two separate dramas will now begin playing out. One is the unfolding of Mr Jobs’s personal story. He founded the company with a friend in the 1970s. He pioneered the era of the personal computer in the 1980s. He was thrown out of the company in a boardroom coup in 1985. He spent 12 years remaking himself, then returned to lead the then-struggling firm to its greatest triumphs: the iMac, which reinvigorated its computer business; the iPod, which has transformed music; and the iPhone, which has shaken up the mobile-phone industry.
The other drama is the unfolding of Apple’s story. The closest to a successor that the company has is Mr Cook, who is chief operating officer and briefly ran Apple while Mr Jobs was having his cancer surgery. Mr Cook keeps a very low profile, as Mr Jobs prefers his staff to do. He is single and a workaholic. He has a southern drawl and is as cool as Mr Jobs runs hot. He is the master of Apple’s operational minutiae. But not a single gesture by him or Mr Jobs has ever suggested that he might become the permanent chief executive.
To take his own place on a stage this month, Mr Jobs instead chose Apple’s marketing boss, Philip Schiller. Mr Schiller put on a gamely performance, but in subtle ways the absence of Mr Jobs, a consummate showman, was felt throughout. Mr Jobs likes to tease audiences toward the end of speeches with “one more thing”; Mr Schiller, as though emphasising that he was not trying to replace Mr Jobs, turned it into “one last thing”.
It is unknown whether Apple has a pipeline of innovative new products on the scale of the iPod or iPhone. A tablet-like device to contest Amazon in electronic-book readers, or an internet-capable television set, is possible. A new line of laptops has just been announced.
But the real question for Apple is whether the person of Mr Jobs is the glue that holds the talent underneath him together. Apple’s magic is part design, part engineering, part logistics and part vision. Design is the domain of Jonathan Ive, a shy Briton; engineering is split into hardware and software; logistics is run by Mr Cook. And the vision thing belongs entirely to Mr Job. Without him, will all the other pieces, and the magic, come unglued?
A revista Technology Review reproduz pesquisa que aponta que os sites de redes sociais são um fenômeno de jovens!
==================
Facebook, MySpace still mostly for the young
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
NEW YORK (AP) — More people are embracing social networks like MySpace and Facebook, but use of these friend-gathering sites remains a much bigger phenomenon among the young, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Of the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who go online, 35 percent use social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn, Pew found in a survey of 2,250 people late last year. Just 8 percent of adult Web users were on social networking sites four years ago.
Through the most recent survey and other polls last year, Pew determined just how much more likely it was for younger people to be participating in social networks. Some 65 percent of online teenagers 12 to 17 use the sites, and three-quarters of Internet users between 18 and 24 have a profile. In comparison, just 7 percent of Internet users who are 65 and older are on the sites.
Among the more surprising of Pew’s findings released Wednesday: Some 17 percent of adults have multiple profiles on one site and 4 percent have profiles for “different parts of their personality.”
But before you start wondering just how many of your friends have multiple personalities, Pew senior research specialist Amanda Lenhart noted that these accounts often emphasize different parts of someone’s life, such as sports or hobbies. Someone might have a hockey-focused profile and a separate one indulging his interest in gardening.
Men and women used the sites in equal proportions, but there were differences when it came to race. About 31 percent of white Web users said they have a profile on at least one social network site, compared with 43 percent of black and 48 percent of Hispanic adults.
Lenhart said the difference can be attributed to the respondents’ ages, as “younger segments of the population (are) much more diverse.” Similarly, because young people tend to make less money, the survey also found that respondents with lower household incomes were more likely to use social network sites than their richer counterparts.
The median ages of MySpace and Facebook users were 26 and 27 years old, respectively. At the career-focused LinkedIn, it was 40.
Though a growing number of companies have a presence on social networking sites, friendship is people’s main reason for logging on. The bulk of adults, 89 percent, said they use their online profiles to stay in touch with friends. Only 28 percent said they use it to make business or professional contacts and promote themselves at work.
To flirt was the least popular reason: Only 20 percent of grown-ups said this is a reason they log on.
Facebook has about 150 million active users, mostly outside the U.S., with people over 30 the fastest-growing demographic. MySpace boasts 125 million active users, with 76 million of them in the U.S. and the grown-up demographic its biggest growth area in December.
Pew’s surveys had margins of error ranging from 2.4 to 6 percentage points.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
