Author Archives: Lily Fleur

Pop Culture Brings in Female Heroes

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Marvel’s Thor, a woman, debuts on newstands.  She joins a growing list of superhuman heroines leading their own comic books — Captain Marvel, Batgirl and Catwoman, among others — as Marvel and DC push to diversify and improve the representation of women on their pages.

Part of this improvement comes through in the way these characters are dressed. Instead of a tight black bathing suit, Captain Marvel now wears a red, blue and yellow jumpsuit that evokes her Air Force roots. Over in Gotham, Batgirl has ditched the tight spandex and bright yellow heels for a leather motorcycle jacket, a detachable cape and Doc Martens.

Genevieve Valentine, lead writer on Catwoman, says having a Catwoman who wears heels in her daily life but not when she’s fighting “seems like a small thing, but of course, it’s not. It’s sort of an institutional recognition of an audience that’s always been there.”

Jeanine Schaefer, Marvel’s senior manager for talent acquisition, says they are “aware that we don’t have as many women working for us as we have men.”  The issue of diversity is one that Marvel executives are seriously considering, but the change is going to take some time, she adds. “Mentoring women when they come in the door, making sure we’re placing them where they can flourish.”

Before they can hire these women, editors and talent scouts like Schaefer have to find them. And that’s where Janelle Asselin comes in.  “A lot of the female creators that are up and coming are unknown quantities,” she says. “It can be hard to know how they will work on a monthly schedule. But editors need to take more risks and give more female creators a chance.”

To make it easier, Asselin started Hire This Woman. In it, she highlights female comics professionals and includes a brief interview about how fast they work, their ideal professional environments — information editors might need or want to know when hiring someone.

Her feature, and the others like it, are all part of a broader conversation happening all over the internet, on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr.

“There’s a growing and outspoken contingent of female fans that are fed up with being treated as not important,” Asselin says.

The harassment doesn’t always stay on the Internet. Asselin’s bank accounts were compromised after her article was published online, and independent comics editor Caitlin Rosberg says, “some people have had stuff mailed to their homes as a threat of ‘I know where you live.’ ”

Marvel’s Jeanine Schaefer believes this behavior is partly driven by extreme fear on the part of some comics fans.

“There’s this perception that, ‘Well, if we let women in, then everything is going to change. They’re going to take away everything that I like about comics,'” Schaefer says.

And Schaefer hopes that bringing more women and diverse voices into the creative process will prove to those fans that their favorite stories will only be enhanced by the different perspectives.

Asselin says the level of vitriol some fans aim at women working in or commenting on the comics industry is “not an OK way to treat people,” no matter the reason, but she thinks it can and will get better. These fans just need to accept that women aren’t going to leave the comics world.

After all, a genre where the unlikeliest of misfits can be heroes should have the best variety of voices to tell those stories.

Super Woman

Women CEOs’ Salaries Lag Behind Men’s in Non Profit Orgs

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New Guidestar report suggests that women CEOs of non-profits are paid less than men.  The report found that for the 14th year in a row, median compensation for female CEOs lagged behind that of respective male CEOs by up to 23 percent depending on the organization size. It also found that only 17 percent of organizations with budgets larger than $50 million had a female CEO, compared to smaller organizations with less than a million dollar budget, the majority of which have women CEOs.The report found that for the 14th year in a row, median compensation for female CEOs lagged behind that of respective male CEOs by up to 23 percent depending on the organization size. It also found that only 17 percent of organizations with budgets larger than $50 million had a female CEO, compared to smaller organizations with less than a million dollar budget, the majority of which have women CEOs.  Non Profit Salaries

Salary Issues Remain

Food Prices Rise in Russia after Counter-Sanctions

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Sanctions are taking their toll on Russia.  When Russia announced counter-sanctions against the European Union, USA, Canada and Australia banning imports of food items from those countries, it was clear there would be imminent consequences. But just how those are playing out isn’t as some had expected.

Gennadi Kaakevitch writes: Russia imports 39% of food.  The immediate result of restrictions on imports should be a considerable increase in prices. It is incorrect to suggest, like various commentators in Russia do, that price increases should only affect luxury imported foods, such as exclusive sorts of French cheese and Spanish ham. They have argued locally produced basic items, such as meat and milk, would not be affected and, therefore, ordinary people consuming ordinary food should not feel the impact.

On the contrary, shoppers facing increases in prices for imported products inevitably switch to domestically supplied alternatives. This results in the price of domestic alternatives being pushed up.  Ordinary people in Russia think that banning imports will help local farmers and the food industry to develop domestic production and keep prices down. But to what extent is the substitution of imports with increasing local produce possible?

Is it possible for Russia to replace imports from the countries subjected to counter-sanctions with products from other countries? Meat can be sourced from Brazil and Argentina, but South American exporters have already increased their prices for Russia, blaming sanctions.

Prices for food items jumped by 30-40% in August alone.

Food in Russia

 

Are Foreign Nurses Replacing Domestic Ones in US?

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The Boston Fed reports on the displacement of local nurses by foreign imports.  Importing foreign nurses has been used as a strategy to ease nursing shortages in the United States. The effectiveness of this policy critically depends on the long-run response of native-born nurses. It was examined how the immigration of foreign-born registered nurses (RNs) affects the occupational choice and long-run employment decisions of native RNs. Using a variety of empirical strategies that exploit the geographical distribution of immigrant nurses across U.S. cities, evidence was found of large displacement effects – over a 10-year period, for every foreign nurse that migrates to a city, between one and two fewer native nurses are employed in that city.  Foreign Nurses in US

Nurses Needed?

Women Chefs Don’t Get as much Press as Men

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Following the release of its “Gods of Food” issue last November, TIME found itself in hot water. Not a single female chef made the list of tastemakers or placed on its lineage chart of culinary influencers. When pressed about it, TIME’s former news editor Howard Chua-Eoan explained it to Eater this way: “I think it reflects one very harsh reality of the current chefs’ world, which unfortunately has been true for years: It’s still a boys’ club.”

Riverfront News interviewed women chefs in St. Louis and here is their take:  Women Chefs Talk

Women Chefs?

Events in Germany Post Bail-outs

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This anti-ECB sentiment in Germany has swelled during 2014, as Draghi’s attempts to increase the eurozone’s low inflation have departed further and further from economic orthodoxy. German conservatives have greeted each new policy with displeasure. The German media has called negative interest rates “penalty rates,” claiming they redistribute billions of euros from German savers to Southern European spenders. On Sept. 25, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble spoke in the Bundestag of his displeasure with Draghi’s program to buy asset-backed securities. Judging from the German hostility to even “quantitative easing-lite” measures, the ECB’s attempts to rope Germany into further stimulus measures could prove troublesome indeed.

All of the measures the ECB has announced so far, however, are mere appetizers. Financial markets have been demanding quantitative easing, a broad-based program of buying sovereign bonds in order to inject a large quantity of money into the market. Up to this stage, three major impediments have existed to such a policy: the German government’s ideological aversion to spending taxpayers’ money on peripheral economies; the political conception that quantitative easing would ease the pressure on peripheral economies to reform; and the court case that has been hanging over OMT (the only existing mechanism available to the ECB for undertaking sovereign bond purchases). Notably, the OMT in its original guise and quantitative easing are not precisely the same thing. In the original conception of OMT, the ECB would offset any purchases in full by taking an equivalent amount of money out of circulation, (i.e., not increasing the money supply itself). Nonetheless, any declaration that OMT is illegal would severely inhibit Draghi’s room for maneuver should he wish to undertake full quantitative easing.

This confluence of events leaves Merkel nervously awaiting the decision of the European Court of Justice. In truth, she is in a no-win situation. If the Luxembourg court holds OMT illegal, Draghi’s promise would be weakened, removing the force that has kept many sovereign bond yields at artificially low levels and permitting the desperate days of 2011-2012 to surge back. If the European Court of Justice takes up the German court’s three suggestions and undercuts OMT to the extent that the market deems it to be of little consequence, the same outcome could occur. And if the European Court of Justice rules that OMT is legal, a sizable inhibitor to quantitative easing will have been removed, and the possibility of a fully fledged bond-buying campaign will loom ever closer, much to the chagrin of the German voter and to the political gain of the Alternative for Germany.   Germany’s Fight

Germany's Bailout

Apple (and Google) in Ireland. A US Problem?

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Leonid Bershidsky writes:  US has to deal with Ireland on taxes.  The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations has tried.

in 1991 and 2007, Apple and Ireland agreed that much of the money flowing into the company’s Irish accounts had nothing to do with its operations in the country, and hence shouldn’t be taxed as profit in Ireland. Instead, the two sides negotiated a deal in which Apple paid tax on a certain percentage of its Ireland-related costs. The deal stood for 15 years, much longer than most European countries would allow such tax rulings to remain in force. Even after some amendments, Apple Sales International paid taxes on less than $80 million in 2011, a year in which the Ireland-incorporated entity recorded $22 billion in pretax income, according to the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In most countries, such revelations would have led to a corruption scandal. Why would a government pass up a chance to levy taxes on billions of dollars in income? In Ireland’s case, the situation is more complicated: It defines a company’s domicile as the location of its central management and control operations, which in the case of Apple’s subsidiaries would be the U.S. By contrast, the U.S. defines domicile as the place of incorporation. So Apple’s Irish subsidiaries don’t really have a home for tax purposes.

Should Ireland care? The Cupertino, California-based company has 4,000 employees at its Cork facility, where it still assembles some computers but mostly handles sales and user support. That’s less than 5 percent of Apple’s total workforce, but a big deal for the depressed city. The taxes calculated on the basis of the small operation’s costs are not a major consideration for the Irish authorities — they are just nice to have.

The EC’s letter says that the deal appears to constitute illegal state aid: Because the tax base is negotiated, rather than calculated according to some predetermined formula, it provides unfair, selective advantages to Apple. Theoretically, the EC could recover billions of dollars in taxes that Ireland has failed to charge since 2003. To do that, the eurocrats would have to prove that Apple had been singled out for tax advantages. The Irish government isconfident it hasn’t violated state-aid rules. If the government in Dublin can show it treats other companies similarly — as Google and other beneficiaries might confirm — it will be difficult for the bureaucrats in Brussels to act.

Ireland is happy to have Apple and the other tech giants invest in its economy. There is no reason why it should pressure a U.S. company to pay more taxes. If the U.S. wants to make its companies pay their fair share, it has the power to do so — either by coercing them or by enticing them with improved corporate tax legislation.

Modi’s State-Led Capitalism

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Nisid Hajari writes:  As a campaigner, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has drawn comparisons to U.S. President Barack Obama. The U.S. president with whom Modi would seem to have the most in common, though, is not the 44th but the 40th: Ronald Reagan. Like the Gipper, Modi was elected at a time of malaise and drift, with an economy hobbled by high inflation and slowing growth. He came to office promising to lead a national revival, in part by eliminating excessive state intervention in the economy.

In fact, Modi is no more Reagan than he is Obama. The U.S. doesn’t even seem to be Modi’s role model for economic policy. His decisions thus far lean more toward the Chinese and Japanese models of state-led capitalism.

Modi  has made it clear that he prefers to give them more managerial autonomy and allow them to reform themselves rather than sell them off outright. His administration’s first budget made no concessions on tax rates.  While some attempt was made to trim spending, the budget included no high-profile initiatives to end wasteful subsidies or dole programs.

On monetary policy, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has repeatedly favored lowering interest rates, despite persistent inflation.  His priority is clearly infrastructure — whether roads, power, ports or railways. All these sectors require massive investments and involve considerable risk in terms of returns. These are not areas where private companies traditionally rush to invest.

On the other hand, companies backed by state-funding or cheap finance from state-owned banks and financial institutions can more safely assume these huge risks. This is precisely why Modi returned from a bilateral visit to Japan with commitments worth $35 billion for infrastructure. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India a few weeks later, he pledged another $20 billion. Modi will bring home no such promises from the U.S.

The prime minister is more statist in his approach than leaders in Beijing. Where China has largely liberalized foreign direct investment across all sectors, Modi has been reluctant to raise FDI caps above 49 percent in sectors such as defense and insurance.

While this approach worked well for Japan and China, it’s far from guaranteed to achieve similar results in India. The Indian state, which is dysfunctional at several levels, is never likely to be even half as efficient as China’s or Japan’s. India’s largely government-owned defense companies have not produced world-class products in six decades. Government-owed insurance companies have not delivered either.

On the other hand, India’s private-sector companies have already shown that they can be as efficient as U.S. corporations. What they need are technology, investment and expertise.

Modi's Economics

Obama: My Dinner with Modi

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As President Obama welcomes new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House for a private dinner, it will be more than US amends for having denied Mr. Modi a visa (and maintaining the ban for nearly a decade) over his handling of sectarian riots in India’s Gujarat state in 2002 when he was chief minister.

It represents an opportunity for both Modi and Mr. Obama to address – and they hope, advance – key issues to both countries. Here are five of those issues:

Economic issues: Modi met with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in New York, and clearly the US and India are doing business and want to do more business. But talks at the top on this subject have failed in the past.

Relations with China: Modi has expressed his interest in economic relations with China, but is fearful of incursions on the border. He wants increase US-India security ties.

Counter-terrorism: The US wants help from India in stemming local recruiting by terrorist organizations. India wants help with Pakistan.

Climate change: Obama has made this a priority. Modi says that the economic costs of addressing climate change should be borne by wealthy countries.

Indian-Americans. A rousing rally from this group greeted Modi at Madison Square Garden. Modi would like them to help build India. Obama would like their votes for Democrats.

Obama and Modi Dine

The Glitter of Gold Gone?

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Mohamed A. Ell-Erian writes:  Gold has let down its loyal investors during the past year, declining by about 8 percent. It has failed to benefit, as one might expect, from a series of geopolitical crises and concerns that stocks are overvalued. It has even failed to keep up with government bonds, usually the other recipient of flight-to-quality trades. Moreover, it has responded weakly to the excitement in India — its biggest physical retail market –– over the prospects for economic reforms under newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Here are three major reasons for gold’s disappointing performance.

First, it usually does badly when the dollar appreciates. The greenback has gained during the past year as foreign-exchange traders have started to take account of less accommodating U.S. monetary policy, including the widening contrast with Europe and Japan.

Second, gold has been hurt by a general slump in commodity markets as global economic growth has fallen short of expectations in both developed and developing nations.

Third, it has found few investors willing to buy on the dip, either directly or through commodity funds.

None of this is likely to change anytime soon absent a bigger conflict in Ukraine or the Middle East.  As such, gold is likely to continue to disappoint its devotees. Yet investors shouldn’t forget that gold has its place and that a well-diversified portfolio should have gold holdings equal to 3 percent to 8 percent of total assets.

The biggest risk facing investors today is a large and sustained fall in assets whose prices have been artificially supported by central banks — particularly bonds and equities. This is especially the case should a decline in global growth be accompanied by greater geopolitical turmoil.

There are good reasons for gold to be unloved at this stage and thus having a position in gold toward the lower end of the allocation range is justifiable. But only brave investors would omit it from their investment portfolios given the fluid world we live in.

Gold?