Word: gdp
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...about Dubai World, the government's main holding company for investments and real estate developments. "We are not worried," said Dubai's Emir, Sheik Mohammad bin Rashid al-Maktoum, at a press conference two months ago, despite the fact that Dubai has debts that are at least 100% of GDP - and may be closer to 125%. When critics later complained that Dubai had no realistic plans for paying off its debts, al-Maktoum told them to "shut up." But on Thursday, as Dubai's government announced it was seeking a halt to its debt repayments ahead of a $4 billion...
...Bonifaz, an economist at Peru's University of the Pacific, calculates in a new book that the road will generate close to $2 billion for local communities in the coming two decades. The government forecasts that the highway could add a full percentage point to GDP. Brazil will be the big beneficiary at the start, sending minerals, meat and soybeans through Peru for export to China, instead of using the Panama Canal. But local authorities expect the Peruvian entreprenerus to slowly catch up with exports headed across the Atlantic...
...Society of Civil Engineers (which gave mostly C's and D's) estimated that the U.S. needed to spend $1.6 trillion to bring our roads, highways, bridges and dams into good shape. Sure, the engineers are looking for work but know that the U.S. spends only 2.4% of its GDP on infrastructure, as opposed to 5% in Europe and 9% in China. Here again, why should a politician spend money today to fix something that won't collapse until tomorrow? Especially if he or she could get re-elected by cutting taxes instead...
...Jesper Koll, president and CEO of Tantallon Research Japan, argues that when falling prices are factored in, the country's nascent recovery is weaker than recent positive GDP growth numbers suggest. "We've got the consumer price index falling by 2.5%, wages falling by about 2.0%, winter bonuses falling by about 14%, and the Nikkei (stock market index) going down," he says. "All the growth we're seeing is because of arithmetic." Complicating matters is the strength of the Japanese yen, which has gained 6% on the dollar in the last three months. Prices generally decline in a strong currency...
...Taggart Murphy, a professor at the University of Tsukuba's business school in Tokyo, points to a now familiar Keynesian solution to deflation: more fiscal stimulus. But he says additional government spending is constrained by the country's already high debt load, which is approaching 200% of GDP. "Even if the DPJ (the Democratic Party of Japan, the country's ruling party) decided that their principle policy objective would be to end deflation," he says, "it's not quite clear to me how they'd go about...