Friday, October 15, 2010
Education from the heart for the heart
Walter, wow, this is a beautiful story.
Mine centers on John S. Moir at U of T. I had the good fortune to take his one-year graduate course on Canadian religious traditions.
In it were Moir, myself, and a woman from Montreal! The three of us met from September to May, 1969-1970.
It was like the old Oxford system. He simply said, "Go to the library and read on this topic and tell me what you find next week."
When Christmas came, he was the only professor to invite us to his home! The other faculty with whom I worked prattled about humanity, and their love for it. But it was John Moir who invited us into his home, and since we had lost our country, this gesture was very powerful. Ever since I have a disgust for professional sentimentalist who are really careerists.
When I had flu in the spring of 1970 he called our apartment to check up on me. He expressed concern about my losing weight, down to 145 pounds in my desire to do straight A work, which in fact I did for my Toronto M.A.
Later, when I was in Wiarton, Ontario, he invited me to become his Ph.D. student. My wife resisted. Moir and his wife Jackie invited us down to their living room in Markham. The four of us sat in his living room, and he asked my wife, "Will you help him." "No" was her answer; it was one of the first nails to go into the coffin of our marriage.
John S. Moir has remained my hero, and whenever we can we stop to visit with him in Brantford, where he lives now to take kidney dialysis. He can no longer write or type; his granddaughter must copy his notes to me. At my best, I try to be to my students what Moir has been to me.
He was the Ph.D. student of Donald Creighton, probably the greatest historian of Canada to date. He would walk with Creighton during the lunch hour in Queen's Park, Toronto. I wanted, longed to be the next link in this chain of loyalty to what matters.
Moir loved to tell Diefenbaker stories, and his wife Jackie and he enjoyed highland dancing. He did not engage in the politically correct drivel that permeated the rest of the curriculum, thank God. He kept track of the battle order of the army regiments of Canada as they would be called to the flag if Canada mustered for war. He had served in army intelligence in Ottawa during World War II where he translated German documents.
I shall always remember him bringing a brick of Stratford cheese to one of our weekly "classes," actually a tutorial. He bought it on a return trip from Windsor, where had had attended the annual meeting of Canadian Historical Association! He was proud, proud, proud of that cheese! My God, Walter, it is sanity in this crazed world to know, respect good cheese when you find, taste it!
Only three other men come close to Moir in my list of educational greats, but John S. Moir stands above all of them. To this day, this very minute, your humble servant here wants to be worthy of his faith in me.
As I told him during our first Brantford visit, "You will always be my professor, and I shall always be your student." Yes, it is about people if it is about anything.
Or as Parker Palmer, a Madison, Wisconsin Quaker writer puts it, "It is education from and to the heart." It is more than facts, techniques. It is caring about and sharing from the heart. God has blessed me with these memories. God has blessed me with and through Professor John Sargent Moir, Ph.D., D.D., Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The future belongs to small and medium-sized countries like Canada
Ancient Chinese Taoism teaches that small and medium-sized countries in fact are superior to super powers. The super powers simply bully others.
Small and medium-sized countries on the other hand must offer value to other countries, since they are not strong enough to bully other countries.
For example, Canada offers American know-how to other countries without the threats.
Canada also exports food, products, and services in large quantities to the USA. My wife, for example, purchases tomatoes grown in Ontario, Canada here in Wisconsin!
This writer also purchased a snow blower recently at the local Wal-Mart. Yes, it too came from Canada!
The bank down the street just became part of the Bank of Montreal's American subsidiary Harri Bank!
Americans are so busy waging war, bullying others, that they no longer seem to know how to grow tomatoes, build snow blowers, or run banks.
Thus ends our lesson on Taoism for today.
Small and medium-sized countries on the other hand must offer value to other countries, since they are not strong enough to bully other countries.
For example, Canada offers American know-how to other countries without the threats.
Canada also exports food, products, and services in large quantities to the USA. My wife, for example, purchases tomatoes grown in Ontario, Canada here in Wisconsin!
This writer also purchased a snow blower recently at the local Wal-Mart. Yes, it too came from Canada!
The bank down the street just became part of the Bank of Montreal's American subsidiary Harri Bank!
Americans are so busy waging war, bullying others, that they no longer seem to know how to grow tomatoes, build snow blowers, or run banks.
Thus ends our lesson on Taoism for today.
American obsession with guns will benefit Canada.
Annette, in fact, your humble servant is reading a 2007 book by Richard Florida entitled The Flight of the Creative Class. In it, he argues, observes that talent today has many geographic options. America, the USA, is no longer the only destination of talent. Options like Toronto, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand exist, and we in effect are competing now internationally for talent, not just locally. The best talent will not automatically consider the USA its first choice.
This will become a huge issue if and when people are allowd to carry pistols in holsters openly in public in the USA. This is, believe it or not, a key rising political issue in our Madison, Wisconsin area. People are going to public places, e.g. restaurants, with loaded weapons in holsters, and they are claiming a constitutional right to do this in America. If this becomes legal, accepted practice, look for the flight of the creative class from America to become a race for the exits from the USA to other geographic locations that do not allow cowboy antics in the Information Age.
The local politicians here claim to want to bring, create jobs; after saying this, they start pushing public display of loaded weapons! Your humble servant literally heard a candidate for Wisconsin State Senate say this at a dinner last night. Canada, where this writer has options, looks better and better. Your professor is an example of the new creative class who has geographic options and is not place-bound as in the factory, farm age.
This writer has placed an election sign for the opponent of this "gun nut" in his front yard now.
The other danger is the public arming of persons of a certain political persuasion could result in overt violence against persons who disagree with them. Imagine having a political rally and your opponents show up with loaded weapons. It would have a chilling effect on politics and could quickly degenerate into "politics by the gun," not the ballot. This is a very real potential and lethal danger to democratic processes. It is not just the danger of increased, random public violence because of "bad hair days" or drunken feuds in and outside taverns.
The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida sadly sounds a warning about the future loss of critical human resources from the USA if this trend toward Wild West gun-slinging takes root.
This will become a huge issue if and when people are allowd to carry pistols in holsters openly in public in the USA. This is, believe it or not, a key rising political issue in our Madison, Wisconsin area. People are going to public places, e.g. restaurants, with loaded weapons in holsters, and they are claiming a constitutional right to do this in America. If this becomes legal, accepted practice, look for the flight of the creative class from America to become a race for the exits from the USA to other geographic locations that do not allow cowboy antics in the Information Age.
The local politicians here claim to want to bring, create jobs; after saying this, they start pushing public display of loaded weapons! Your humble servant literally heard a candidate for Wisconsin State Senate say this at a dinner last night. Canada, where this writer has options, looks better and better. Your professor is an example of the new creative class who has geographic options and is not place-bound as in the factory, farm age.
This writer has placed an election sign for the opponent of this "gun nut" in his front yard now.
The other danger is the public arming of persons of a certain political persuasion could result in overt violence against persons who disagree with them. Imagine having a political rally and your opponents show up with loaded weapons. It would have a chilling effect on politics and could quickly degenerate into "politics by the gun," not the ballot. This is a very real potential and lethal danger to democratic processes. It is not just the danger of increased, random public violence because of "bad hair days" or drunken feuds in and outside taverns.
The Flight of the Creative Class by Richard Florida sadly sounds a warning about the future loss of critical human resources from the USA if this trend toward Wild West gun-slinging takes root.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Canada and world economy decouple from US economy
Wall Street Sees World Economy Decoupling From U.S.
By Simon Kennedy - Oct 4, 2010 Wall Street economists are reviving a bet that the global economy will withstand the U.S. slowdown.
Just three years since America began dragging the world into its deepest recession in seven decades, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc. and BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research are forecasting that this time will be different. Goldman Sachs predicts worldwide growth will slow 0.2 percentage point to 4.6 percent in 2011, even as expansion in the U.S. falls to 1.8 percent from 2.6 percent.
Underpinning their analysis is the view that international reliance on U.S. trade has diminished and is too small to spread the lingering effects of America’s housing bust. Providing the U.S. pain doesn’t roil financial markets as it did in the credit crisis, Goldman Sachs expects a weakening dollar, higher bond yields outside the U.S. and stronger emerging-market equities.
“So long as it doesn’t turn to flu, the world can withstand a cold from the U.S.,” Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch, said in a telephone interview. He predicts the U.S. will expand 1.8 percent next year, compared with 3.9 percent globally.
That may provide comfort for some of the central bankers and finance ministers from 187 nations flocking to Washington for annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on Oct. 8-10. IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard last month predicted “positive but low growth in advanced countries,” while developing nations expand at a “very high” rate. He will release revised forecasts on Oct. 6.
‘Partially Decoupled’
“The world has already become partially decoupled,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at New York’s Columbia University, said in a Sept. 20 interview in Zurich. He will speak at an IMF event this week.
Sixteen months after the world’s largest economy emerged from recession, the U.S. recovery is losing momentum, with factory orders falling 0.5 percent in August and unemployment forecast to increase to 9.7 percent in September from the previous month’s 9.6 percent, according to the median estimate of 78 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.
Their predictions don’t include another contraction, with growth estimated at 2.7 percent this year and some indicators showing progress. Orders for capital goods rose 5.1 percent in August and the number of contracts to purchase previously owned homes increased 4.3 percent; both were higher than forecasts.
China Manufacturing Accelerates
Even so, emerging markets are showing more strength. Manufacturing in China accelerated for a second consecutive month in September, and industrial production in India jumped 13.8 percent in July from a year earlier, more than twice the June pace.
“It seems that recent economic data help to confirm the story of emerging-markets outperformance,” said David Lubin, chief economist for emerging markets at Citigroup Inc. in London.
The gap in growth rates between the developing and advanced worlds is widening, he said. Emerging economies will account for about 60 percent of global expansion this year and next, up from about 25 percent a decade ago, according to his estimates.
The main reason for the divergence: “Direct transmission from a U.S. slowdown to other economies through exports is just not large enough to spread a U.S. demand problem globally,” Goldman Sachs economists Dominic Wilson and Stacy Carlson wrote in a Sept. 22 report entitled “If the U.S. sneezes...”
Limited Exposure
Take the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. While exports account for almost 20 percent of their gross domestic product, sales to the U.S. compose less than 5 percent of GDP, according to their estimates. That means even if U.S. growth slowed 2 percent, the drag on these four countries would be about 0.1 percentage point, the economists reckon. Developed economies including the U.K., Germany and Japan also have limited exposure, they said.
Economies outside the U.S. have room to grow that the U.S. doesn’t, partly because of its outsized slump in house prices, Wilson and Carlson said. The drop of almost 35 percent is more than twice as large as the worst declines in the rest of the Group of 10 industrial nations, they found.
The risk to the decoupling wager is a repeat of 2008, when the U.S. property bubble burst and then morphed into a global credit and banking shock that ricocheted around the world. For now, Goldman Sachs’s index of U.S. financial conditions signals that bond and stock markets aren’t stressed by the U.S. outlook.
Weaker Dollar
The break with the U.S. will be reflected in a weaker dollar, with the Chinese yuan appreciating to 6.49 per dollar in a year from 6.685 on Oct. 1, according to Goldman Sachs forecasts.
The bank is also betting that yields on U.S. 10-year debt will be lower by June than equivalent yields for Germany, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Norway. U.S. notes will rise to 2.8 percent from 2.52 percent, Germany’s will increase to 3 percent from 2.3 percent and Canada’s will grow to 3.8 percent from 2.76 percent on Oct. 1, Goldman Sachs projects.
Goldman Sachs isn’t alone in making the case for decoupling. Harris at BofA Merrill Lynch said he didn’t buy the argument prior to the financial crisis. Now he believes global growth is strong enough to offer a “handkerchief” to the U.S. as it suffers a “growth recession” of weak expansion and rising unemployment, he said.
Giving him confidence is his calculation that the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk to about 24 percent from 31 percent in 2000. He also notes that, unlike the U.S., many countries avoided asset bubbles, kept their banking systems sound and improved their trade and budget positions.
Economic Locomotives
A book published last week by the World Bank backs him up. “The Day After Tomorrow” concludes that developing nations aren’t only decoupling, they also are undergoing a “switchover” that will make them such locomotives for the world economy, they can help rescue advanced nations. Among the reasons for the revolution are greater trade between emerging markets, the rise of the middle class and higher commodity prices, the book said.
Investors are signaling they agree. The U.S. has fallen behind Brazil, China and India as the preferred place to invest, according to a quarterly survey conducted last month of 1,408 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to Bloomberg. Emerging markets also attracted more money from share offerings than industrialized nations last quarter for the first time in at least a decade, Bloomberg data show.
Room to Ease
Indonesia, India, China and Poland are the developing economies least vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown, according to a Sept. 14 study based on trade ties by HSBC Holdings Plc economists. China, Russia and Brazil also are among nations with more room than industrial countries to ease policies if a U.S. slowdown does weigh on their growth, according to a policy- flexibility index designed by the economists, who include New York-based Pablo Goldberg.
“Emerging economies kept their powder relatively dry, and are, for the most part, in a position where they could act countercyclically if needed,” the HSBC group said.
Links to developing countries are helping insulate some companies against U.S. weakness. Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch Group AG and tire maker Nokian Renkaat of Finland are among the European businesses that should benefit from trade with nations such as Russia and China where consumer demand is growing, according to BlackRock Inc. portfolio manager Alister Hibbert.
“There’s a lot of life in the global economy,” Hibbert, said at a Sept. 8 presentation to reporters in London.
Asset Bubbles
The increasing focus on emerging markets may present challenges for their policy makers as the flow of money into their economies risks fanning inflation, asset bubbles and currency appreciation. Countries from South Korea to Thailand have already intervened to weaken their currencies, along with taking steps to restrict capital inflows.
Stephen Roach, nonexecutive Asia chairman for Morgan Stanley, remains skeptical of decoupling. He links the optimism to a snapback in global trade from a record 11 percent slide in 2009. As that fades amid sluggish demand from advanced economies, emerging markets that rely on exports for strength will “face renewed and formidable headwinds,” he said.
“Decoupling is still a dream in much of the developing world,” said Roach, who also teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Year of Recoupling’
The Goldman Sachs economists argue history is on their side. The U.K., Australia and Canada all continued growing amid the U.S. recession of 2001 as the technology-stock bust passed them by, while America’s 2006-2007 housing slowdown inflicted little pain outside its borders, they said. The shift came when the latter morphed into a financial crisis, prompting Goldman Sachs to declare in December 2007 that 2008 would be the “year of recoupling.”
The argument finds favor with Neal Soss, New York-based chief economist at Credit Suisse. While the supply of dollars and letters of credit that fuel international commerce dried up during the turmoil, that isn’t a problem now, so the rest of the world can cope with a weaker U.S., he said.
“Decoupling was a good idea then and is a good idea now,” Soss said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy at skennedy4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story John Fraher at jfraher@bloomberg.net
.®2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
By Simon Kennedy - Oct 4, 2010 Wall Street economists are reviving a bet that the global economy will withstand the U.S. slowdown.
Just three years since America began dragging the world into its deepest recession in seven decades, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Credit Suisse Holdings USA Inc. and BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research are forecasting that this time will be different. Goldman Sachs predicts worldwide growth will slow 0.2 percentage point to 4.6 percent in 2011, even as expansion in the U.S. falls to 1.8 percent from 2.6 percent.
Underpinning their analysis is the view that international reliance on U.S. trade has diminished and is too small to spread the lingering effects of America’s housing bust. Providing the U.S. pain doesn’t roil financial markets as it did in the credit crisis, Goldman Sachs expects a weakening dollar, higher bond yields outside the U.S. and stronger emerging-market equities.
“So long as it doesn’t turn to flu, the world can withstand a cold from the U.S.,” Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch, said in a telephone interview. He predicts the U.S. will expand 1.8 percent next year, compared with 3.9 percent globally.
That may provide comfort for some of the central bankers and finance ministers from 187 nations flocking to Washington for annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on Oct. 8-10. IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard last month predicted “positive but low growth in advanced countries,” while developing nations expand at a “very high” rate. He will release revised forecasts on Oct. 6.
‘Partially Decoupled’
“The world has already become partially decoupled,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at New York’s Columbia University, said in a Sept. 20 interview in Zurich. He will speak at an IMF event this week.
Sixteen months after the world’s largest economy emerged from recession, the U.S. recovery is losing momentum, with factory orders falling 0.5 percent in August and unemployment forecast to increase to 9.7 percent in September from the previous month’s 9.6 percent, according to the median estimate of 78 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.
Their predictions don’t include another contraction, with growth estimated at 2.7 percent this year and some indicators showing progress. Orders for capital goods rose 5.1 percent in August and the number of contracts to purchase previously owned homes increased 4.3 percent; both were higher than forecasts.
China Manufacturing Accelerates
Even so, emerging markets are showing more strength. Manufacturing in China accelerated for a second consecutive month in September, and industrial production in India jumped 13.8 percent in July from a year earlier, more than twice the June pace.
“It seems that recent economic data help to confirm the story of emerging-markets outperformance,” said David Lubin, chief economist for emerging markets at Citigroup Inc. in London.
The gap in growth rates between the developing and advanced worlds is widening, he said. Emerging economies will account for about 60 percent of global expansion this year and next, up from about 25 percent a decade ago, according to his estimates.
The main reason for the divergence: “Direct transmission from a U.S. slowdown to other economies through exports is just not large enough to spread a U.S. demand problem globally,” Goldman Sachs economists Dominic Wilson and Stacy Carlson wrote in a Sept. 22 report entitled “If the U.S. sneezes...”
Limited Exposure
Take the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. While exports account for almost 20 percent of their gross domestic product, sales to the U.S. compose less than 5 percent of GDP, according to their estimates. That means even if U.S. growth slowed 2 percent, the drag on these four countries would be about 0.1 percentage point, the economists reckon. Developed economies including the U.K., Germany and Japan also have limited exposure, they said.
Economies outside the U.S. have room to grow that the U.S. doesn’t, partly because of its outsized slump in house prices, Wilson and Carlson said. The drop of almost 35 percent is more than twice as large as the worst declines in the rest of the Group of 10 industrial nations, they found.
The risk to the decoupling wager is a repeat of 2008, when the U.S. property bubble burst and then morphed into a global credit and banking shock that ricocheted around the world. For now, Goldman Sachs’s index of U.S. financial conditions signals that bond and stock markets aren’t stressed by the U.S. outlook.
Weaker Dollar
The break with the U.S. will be reflected in a weaker dollar, with the Chinese yuan appreciating to 6.49 per dollar in a year from 6.685 on Oct. 1, according to Goldman Sachs forecasts.
The bank is also betting that yields on U.S. 10-year debt will be lower by June than equivalent yields for Germany, the U.K., Canada, Australia and Norway. U.S. notes will rise to 2.8 percent from 2.52 percent, Germany’s will increase to 3 percent from 2.3 percent and Canada’s will grow to 3.8 percent from 2.76 percent on Oct. 1, Goldman Sachs projects.
Goldman Sachs isn’t alone in making the case for decoupling. Harris at BofA Merrill Lynch said he didn’t buy the argument prior to the financial crisis. Now he believes global growth is strong enough to offer a “handkerchief” to the U.S. as it suffers a “growth recession” of weak expansion and rising unemployment, he said.
Giving him confidence is his calculation that the U.S. share of global GDP has shrunk to about 24 percent from 31 percent in 2000. He also notes that, unlike the U.S., many countries avoided asset bubbles, kept their banking systems sound and improved their trade and budget positions.
Economic Locomotives
A book published last week by the World Bank backs him up. “The Day After Tomorrow” concludes that developing nations aren’t only decoupling, they also are undergoing a “switchover” that will make them such locomotives for the world economy, they can help rescue advanced nations. Among the reasons for the revolution are greater trade between emerging markets, the rise of the middle class and higher commodity prices, the book said.
Investors are signaling they agree. The U.S. has fallen behind Brazil, China and India as the preferred place to invest, according to a quarterly survey conducted last month of 1,408 investors, analysts and traders who subscribe to Bloomberg. Emerging markets also attracted more money from share offerings than industrialized nations last quarter for the first time in at least a decade, Bloomberg data show.
Room to Ease
Indonesia, India, China and Poland are the developing economies least vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown, according to a Sept. 14 study based on trade ties by HSBC Holdings Plc economists. China, Russia and Brazil also are among nations with more room than industrial countries to ease policies if a U.S. slowdown does weigh on their growth, according to a policy- flexibility index designed by the economists, who include New York-based Pablo Goldberg.
“Emerging economies kept their powder relatively dry, and are, for the most part, in a position where they could act countercyclically if needed,” the HSBC group said.
Links to developing countries are helping insulate some companies against U.S. weakness. Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch Group AG and tire maker Nokian Renkaat of Finland are among the European businesses that should benefit from trade with nations such as Russia and China where consumer demand is growing, according to BlackRock Inc. portfolio manager Alister Hibbert.
“There’s a lot of life in the global economy,” Hibbert, said at a Sept. 8 presentation to reporters in London.
Asset Bubbles
The increasing focus on emerging markets may present challenges for their policy makers as the flow of money into their economies risks fanning inflation, asset bubbles and currency appreciation. Countries from South Korea to Thailand have already intervened to weaken their currencies, along with taking steps to restrict capital inflows.
Stephen Roach, nonexecutive Asia chairman for Morgan Stanley, remains skeptical of decoupling. He links the optimism to a snapback in global trade from a record 11 percent slide in 2009. As that fades amid sluggish demand from advanced economies, emerging markets that rely on exports for strength will “face renewed and formidable headwinds,” he said.
“Decoupling is still a dream in much of the developing world,” said Roach, who also teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Year of Recoupling’
The Goldman Sachs economists argue history is on their side. The U.K., Australia and Canada all continued growing amid the U.S. recession of 2001 as the technology-stock bust passed them by, while America’s 2006-2007 housing slowdown inflicted little pain outside its borders, they said. The shift came when the latter morphed into a financial crisis, prompting Goldman Sachs to declare in December 2007 that 2008 would be the “year of recoupling.”
The argument finds favor with Neal Soss, New York-based chief economist at Credit Suisse. While the supply of dollars and letters of credit that fuel international commerce dried up during the turmoil, that isn’t a problem now, so the rest of the world can cope with a weaker U.S., he said.
“Decoupling was a good idea then and is a good idea now,” Soss said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy at skennedy4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story John Fraher at jfraher@bloomberg.net
.®2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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