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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (3274)	12/12/2003 10:15:44 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

From today's Merrill Lynch: Morning Market Memo: "And believe it or not, the $'s descent may in fact represent a U.S. competitive picture that is not as rosy as generally believed — a NAM/MAPI survey shows that the relatively high cost of employee benefits and environmental regulations and other non-production expenses like tort costs has actually made U.S. producers less competitive than France, Germany, the U.K., China, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan and ... even Canada! Only in strict wage compensation terms relative to value added in manufacturing is the U.S. highly competitive ... it is in the non-unit-labor cost area that things fall apart. These non-production costs add 22% to total unit costs of U.S. manufacturers relative to their major global competitors. It could very well be these bottlenecks and not China's currency policy that is costing manufacturing jobs over here ... and kudos to Mr. Greenspan for dismissing the notion that a yuan revaluation would reverse the job outflow on its own."