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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (16673)	11/23/2004 5:30:11 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Toll of the fast food<g>--McDonald's CEO resigns Cancer prompts Bell to leave post By Delroy Alexander and John Schmeltzer Tribune staff reporters Published November 23, 2004 Only seven months after losing one chief executive to a heart attack, McDonald's Corp. on Monday replaced another who is stepping down to deal with his own life-threatening illness. Charles Bell, the ebullient 44-year-old CEO who took control of the world's largest fast-food company in April, resigned to focus on his battle with the colorectal cancer he was diagnosed with only weeks after getting the top job. chicagotribune.com

To: RealMuLan who wrote (16673)	11/23/2004 6:05:31 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Heinz on China Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 16:02 trotsky (Alberich) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved "The more capital investments are moving over there the better it is for China, but the worse it is for the work force in highly developed countries with a highly paid workforce." luckily this is mostly a misconception. it is true that with the economy in constant flux, upheavals do occur. for instance, when the car was invented, thousands of people connected to the horse related industries lost their jobs overnight. at that time, about 70% of the industrialized nation workforce was actually employed in agriculture. today only 2% of the workforce remain in this sector - which produces more than ever before. and yet, no-one would argue today that this is a great loss somehow, or that our prosperity has declined because all those buggy whip manufacturers went out of business. however, at the time the adjustments took place, people would of course have viewed developments with the same trepidation that is now focused on China. the point here is that China's arrival on the scene has once again produced upheaval that has extremely positive long term effects for all of us - not only China. it simply makes no sense to produce a shirt for $10 in the US when it can be done for $1 in China. critics keep forgetting the most crucial aspect of this debate: economics is about the optimum deployment of scarce resources. by saving $9 per shirt ( which is now produced in China ) , we have now a shirt, PLUS $9 that can be deployed to better effect elsewhere, whereas before, we only had a shirt. so contrary to the widespread popular misconception that this is somehow bad, China is in fact doing us all a big favor by producing those $1 shirts. it allows our own economic development to take a new step forward, toward more demanding and complex stages of production and the introduction of new products that were not available before. the fact that the process of economic restructuring and reorganization involves a certain extent of creative destruction and thus creates temporary upheaval should not detract from this big picture view.