Got a reply from Prof. Peter Morici already! And it’s quite interesting. His view is that one of the main contributors to the US current account deficit is the undervaluation of the Chinese Yuan. This is caused in his view by the Chinese government’s direct intervention to print Yuan and buy US dollars. He advocates directly taxing transactions with China to eliminate the artificial advantage Chinese manufacturers have exporting to the US. He says that when countries abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement that set international exchange rates and adopted floating rates, the major flaw was that there was no way to stop foreign governments intervening to unfairly advantage their own economies. I think makes a strong argument.
I did also pose a question for him about the NZ current account deficit, but unfortunately he didn’t react to that.
Just to underscore the seriousness of the NZ current account deficit of 8.3% of GDP, I read an artcle tonight by Professor Peter Morici from the University of Maryland about the dangers of the US current account deficit which currently sits at a far more sedate 5.4% of GDP.
Although he does a great job of laying out the consequences of the deficit and attributes the responsibility for it to the US Government, he doesn’t actually say how they should go about reducing it. I have written to him to ask him to clarify this point.
According to this article at twice.com dated yesterday Dec. 20, 20% of men have yet to start their Christmas shopping.
What??! Some people have started already??!!
The NZ Herald reports the NZ Current Account Deficit has increased from 8.1 to 8.3% of GDP.
This comes days after Finance Minister Michael Cullen claimed “economic forecasts showed the best economic growth period for “a generation” was set to continue longer and stronger than predicted.”
Evidence of the slowing NZ economy in this comment from Noel Leeming Group chief executive Andrew Dutkiewicz in the NZ Herald -
New Zealand retail spending was slowing due to less demand for housing which reduced consumer confidence and in a more direct sense higher interest rates and petrol prices had left people with less money in their pockets.
Full article here.
Nice quote from Mike Moore in the NZ Herald today…
The biggest per capita givers in the US are working-class, conservative Christians.
The smallest per capita givers are liberal public servants who, I suspect, would rather sign petitions and pass resolutions calling for social justice than paying up.
Full story here.
BTW, just found this article that partly addresses the way that IE handles the cases I just described.
http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html#nextfloat
When a block follows a floated element, it should — as a block — ignore the float, but its contents should be displaced by the float: the text in a block-level element next to a left-floated element should flow to the right of the float, and then (if it is longer than the float) continue below the floated element.
This is indeed what happens in both IE and Firefox. However…
But if the block has “layout”, say, a width is set for some reasons, then the whole element is displaced by the float, as if it were a float itself, and so the text content does not wrap around the float anymore (it remains at its right, rectangularly shaped.)
This is what IE does wrongly. As noted here the whole element turns up to the right of a left-floated block, whereas in Firefox, if the non-floated block has an explicit width it turns up aligned with the left edge of the containing block with its text below the float.
Ok, end of today’s lesson on web development.
This is mostly a note to myself – I don’t expect it will mean anything to too many others who read this…
I’ve been wrestling with what seemed like strange behavior of Firefox in rendering floated divs in html/css. Internet Explorer behaves in a way that seems to make sense to me, but as it turns out it is not consistent with the W3C standard.
The issue relates to the way the browser renders a non-floated block element that follows a floated element. My understand was that the non-floated block would move to the right of a preceding left-floated block. But it tiurns out this is not the case, even though IE does do this. The standard specifies that only inline content gets wrapped. The relevant description from the W3C is here -
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2-19980512/visuren.html#floats
Any floated box becomes a block box that is shifted to the left or right until its outer edge touches the containing block edge or the outer edge of another float. The top of the floated box is aligned with the top of the current line box (or bottom of the preceding block box if no line box exists). If there isn’t enough horizontal room on the current line for the float, it is shifted downward, line by line, until a line has room for it.
Since a float is not in the flow, non-positioned block boxes created before and after the float box flow vertically as if the float didn’t exist. However, line boxes created next to the float are shortened to make room for the floated box. Any content in the current line before a floated box is reflowed in the first available line on the other side of the float.
The trick is to know how to interpret the term “block boxes” – because it turns out that if a div containing text follows the float, the behavior depends on whether the div has an explicit width. If it does, it behaves as described in the second paragraph above. The unfloated div box appears on the left (assuming a left float) overlapping the floated box with their tops aligned, but with the contained text appearing below the floated block. On the other hand, if the non-floated div has no explicit width, its box again appears on the left overlapping the floated block, but now the text appears wrapped to the right of the float.
NewstalkZB had a news item in tonight’s 5pm bulletin on increasing violence in NZ middle schools. Ross Tyson, the principal of Cambridge Middle School was quoted as saying, “Much of the violence is born from an attitude that children can say and do whatever they like without regard for others.” I fear that he is correct. Very scary.
His comment follows an incident, also reported in stuff.co.nz, in which two teachers were injured when they tried to protect a teenage girl being attacked by another girl in the playground.
From Joe Klein in the latest Time magazine –
A recent study of Arkansas, conducted by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, estimated that immigrants there pay more in Social Security and sales taxes than they cost in social services like health care and education. That doesn’t begin to take into account the economic impact of the hard work and entrepreneurial energy that illegal immigrants bring to the society.
Good to see a little bit of actual information being brought to the surface in a debate that mostly deals in prejudice and indifference to human need.
The whole story here.
