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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ggersh who wrote (117180)	3/15/2016 10:23:31 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217802

investors seem convinced that the government of the unpopular, incompetent Dilma Rousseff is about to fall and be replaced by a team of reformist technocrats, apparently poised to take power. Brazil does not have economic problems. Only political ones :-) Message 30502620

To: ggersh who wrote (117180)	3/16/2016 12:26:40 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217802

China Seeks to Avoid Mass Layoffs While Cutting Production BEIJING — China must avoid mass unemployment from failing mines and factories even as it cuts back on its vast production of unwanted coal and steel, Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday. His remarks, at the end of a legislative meeting that focused on revitalizing China’s economy, reflected the difficult — some say unsustainable — policy combination that Mr. Li and China’s top leader, President Xi Jinping, hope to achieve. They want to drastically reduce the surplus industrial capacity that is sapping China’s growth, while avoiding economic disruption and widespread layoffs that could lead to unrest. “We’ve already chosen steel and coal as the two sectors for achieving initial breakthroughs in reducing production capacity,” Mr. Li said at a news conference at the end of the annual full meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled legislature. “At the same time, we must avoid a wave of mass layoffs,” Mr. Li continued. Using a well-known Chinese metaphor for a secure livelihood, he said, “We must proceed with reducing industrial capacity, but the great numbers of employees cannot lose their rice bowls, and we must strive to find them new rice bowls.” Even as the congress was underway in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, protests by workers at a vast, failing state-owned coal mine in northeastern China illustrated the resistance that industrial retrenchments could create. The protests last week drove Lu Hao, the governor of Heilongjiang Province, where the mine is, to apologize for wrongly claiming that all the people working underground for the mine, run by the Longmay Mining Group, had been paid on time. Since the demonstrations, in the city of Shuangyashan, officials have scrambled to placate workers there whose wage payments have fallen months behind. Longmay said in September that it wanted to eliminate 100,000 jobs by the end of 2015 in Shuangyashan and at other mines that have taken on far too many workers. But Mr. Lu indicated last week that the company was well short of that goal. Document: Chinese Premier’s Annual Work ReportMr. Li did not mention the miners’ protests on Wednesday. But he suggested that the government had enough funds to avoid a return to the early 2000s, when layoffs of tens of millions of employees from state industry fueled widespread unrest, especially across the rust belt provinces of the northeast. If new jobs cannot quickly be found for laid-off workers, “central and local finances have the capacity to make suitable arrangements,” Mr. Li said. The central government has set aside 100 billion renminbi, or about $15 billion, largely to help find work for displaced employees, and more could be allotted for the task, he said. More broadly, Mr. Li said he would free up private businesses, cut red tape and overhead and create new opportunities for investment and employment. That recipe, he said, would not demand any hard trade-offs between growth and adjustment. “We must achieve win-win,” he said, using a phrase beloved by politicians here. “Strike a balance between cutting industrial capacity, spurring development and stable employment.”