Paid Ad in Wall Street Journal - 13 men and 1 woman!

As you turn the pages of Wall Street Journal, you are bound to find a page long ad which tries to look like something other than an ad. Most often, it is about a WSJ CEO conference in which a top WSJ journalist is interviewing some titan of Wall Street or CEO of a large company. Sometimes, you have ads for other things, like a feature about Russia, proclaiming bountiful opportunities. Or an ad by BP proclaiming its environmental record in the wake of Deepwater Horizon.

In any case, once in a while you come across something really interesting. A few months ago, I came across an ad for high performers in some company (I totally blank out the details). What stood out in that ad was that all of them were men. There was no woman at all. I found that rather surprising, even though it is well-known that the percentage of women drop as part of workforce as one climbs the ranks of management.

I came across one such ad in WSJ recently. It was a page long paid ad for a conference on economic prognostications for 2014. It was somehow related to Jim Cramer. Enough said, some of you may say. No, there is more, I retort. The ad, shown below is not as discriminatory because it contains one token woman, alongside thirteen other men. As I was sulking that this ad did not quite help prove my point about the make up of the finance industry, I realized this was even more precious. It turns out that the lone woman is Lynn Tilton, CEO of the appropriately named "Patriarch Partners!"

Arguments against the Free Trade Agreement. With Canada. 1987

As I was listening to some of the Congressional proceedings regarding NAFTA, I came across this video from 1987 in which Senators William Cohen (Republican) and George Mitchell (Democrat) of Maine argue against the free trade agreement with Canada on account of subsidies, especially to agriculture industry, by Canadian government. It is worth listening to.

Actually, the FTA with Canada did not provoke much discussion in the US. It, apparently, was front page stuff in Canada. Obviously, they were dead scared that the US would ruin them completely, and maybe even annex them. Maybe those fears continue to this day!

Random tangents:
William Cohen went on to become the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton. His wife, Janet Langhart, is, among other things, a playwright. It was when her one-act play Anne & Emmett was to be screened at the US Holocaust Museum that James von Brunn shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns.The premise of the play is quite interesting - an imaginary conversation between Emmett Till and Anne Frank!

The Magnificently Moustached Craig Merrilees

The received wisdom is that free trade is good for all. At least, that is what most economists and policy makers believe. So, if you want to read or hear arguments against free trade as it is practiced now, you would have to scour carefully for sources. I dont watch any of the TV channels - so FOX, MSNBC, etc are useless to me. My sources are usually public talks and congressional hearings on these topics. Once in a while, you encounter the same person in multiple such talks and you realize that this person might have contributed in one way or another to  the debate on free trade. It is important to stress that these people are not necessarily critics of free trade as much as they are of trade policy.

One such person is Craig Merrilees and I got to know of him through his testimonies to the USTR and the House Agriculture Committee (chaired by Rep. De La Garza) during the NAFTA debate. Yes, from 1991. Sadly, when I tried to find if any of the newspapers had written about him or his testimonies, I found nothing, at least in the archives of New York Times. When I did a more extensive search on Factiva, which is owned by Dow Jones, I found few articles. It turns out that Craig Merrilees had been quite active in the environmental and labor movements. I'm not sure what it takes to be a spokesman for different causes, but Mr. Merrilees has been one for various organizations. In fact, before he became a spokesman for organizations interested in trade related issues, he was one for "Veterans Peace Convoy," an organization opposing the invasion of Nicaragua. You can find here an article related to a demonstration by the peace convoy at the White House. Since he was involved with opposing the invasion of Nicaragua, I wonder if Mr. Merrilees was a colleague of Mr. De Blasio, the current mayor of New York City.

A good article on the opposition to NAFTA in, what we would now call the mainstream press, is by Bob Davis ("Fighting NAFTA: Free-Trade Pact Spurs a Diverse Coalition of Grass Roots Foes." Wall Street Journal, December 23, 1992). Since this article is not available online, I post here some excerpts. 

"The anti-free-trade movement began to branch out from its labor-union roots in 1987 when a Minnesota farm activist named Mark Ritchie became fascinated with GATT. The 40-year-old organizer of food co-ops and the early-1980s Nestle infant-formula boycott (based on the Swiss company's pushing formula in the Third World) moved his family to Brussels for six months to study the workings of the intricate trade organization.
 

He hit on a little-known facet of the broad round of trade liberalization being negotiated: Under new GATT rules, foreign governments would have firmer ground for challenging U.S. environmental laws as barriers to trade. Returning home, Mr. Ritchie, a mesmerizing speaker, spread the alarm in meetings with environmentalists and foundations over the next three years. With family-farm groups, already fearful of Reagan administration efforts to slash farm subsidies, he preached that a free-trade pact would further reduce prices for farmers.
 

He hit pay dirt when Barbara Dudley, executive director of the Veatch Program, a Unitarian Church charity that bankrolls environmental causes, heard a talk at an Adirondack Mountain lodge in early 1990 and donated $50,000 to his cause. Mr. Ritchie hired Mr. Merrilees, a veteran environmental organizer, and they launched the Citizen Trade Campaign. "We weren't just talking about tariffs," Ms. Dudley says. "We were talking about threats to environmental, health and safety regulations." 

That is how Mr. Merrilees comes into the picture. In any case, Mr. Merrilees makes pretty powerful case for opposing Fast Track, or the Trade Promotion Authority. This video clip, in particular highlights all the points that opponents of Fast Track are now making. Basically, the reasons have not changed much. Just that the country has changed - its no longer Mexico. You'll see that he comes across as a passionate opponent to Fast Track.

Anyway, Mr. Merrilees is now a communications director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). If you see the video clip, you'll see why the title of this post is right. He looks like a left-leaning version of John Stossel!

An update to this post: Bob Davis, whose article I referenced above still writes for WSJ. He mostly writes on business/economics in China. He is also the co-author with David Wessel of a book titled "Prosperity: The Coming Twenty-Year Boom and What It Means to You." Written in the throes of the tech boom, it would be an understatement to say that Bob and David did not foresee the future. I've not seen any interviews of Bob Davis but David Wessel, whenever he has to talk about this book, admits gracefully that he was way off target. 

Fast Track and Free Trade

Fast track negotiating authority, or the more benignly named Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), is a Presidential authority granted by the Congress to negotiate trade deals with other countries. Under this process, once a trade deal has been signed, Congress can vote only to accept or reject it in toto. The Congress does not have the right to modify any portion of the trade deal. In addition, it has only 60 working days to study and discuss the deal.

Unless you don't follow any politics, you would have no doubt come across a few articles with words like "TTIP", "TPP", or "TAFTA" in the headlines, and most likely ignored it because it did not seem related to the economy. Well, wrong decision. The Obama administration, i.e. the executive branch, is seeking fast track or TPA authority once again to negotiate trade deals with EU (TTIP - Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and TAFTA - Trans Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) and a bunch of Asian countries (TPP - Trans Pacific Partnership). All these trade deals are made under the assumption that increased trade benefits all parties involved. There is, perhaps, recognition that it affects adversely at least some segments of society, but that the overall benefits outweigh them.

I'm not sure what kind of public discussion took place when the original fast track authority was granted to the Nixon/Ford administrations in 1974-75. I could go back to newspaper articles from then to find out what was happening. For reasons I will explain below, I don't expect to find much in the newspapers. The most famous or infamous free trade deals signed under the fast track authority are the Canadian-American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was signed in 1988, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was signed in 1993. Actually, I'm not sure about when exactly these deals were signed. There is some time lag (the 60 days) between the USTR (United States Trade Representative) signing the deal and it coming into effect. Still, 1988 and 1993 seem quite right.

When you try to look into accounts of public discourse on these trade deals in the US newspapers, you hardly come across anything substantive. Apparently, there was quite some discussion about CAFTA in Canada. Hardly anything in the US. By the time it came to NAFTA, because Mexico was involved, there was lot more discussion in the US. I'm not sure how much was reported (I really dont know - I did not scour through the nytimes archives). One important source of information - first person accounts - is CSPAN. Search for "NAFTA" and you'll have at your fingertips hours and hours of videos of discussions on free trade from 1987 to 2013. Of course, listening to hours and hours of video is, unless your work is related to aspects of trade policy, a terrible pain. Fortunately, CSPAN allows you to make clips from videos and I have identified a few videos from the CSPAN archive that I found particularly useful in becoming better educated about trade policy. You can find the full videos and clips here. I will write more about the contents of the videos themselves in a few days.

In the meantime, if you are interested in reading about trade, you can read some of the articles by Alan Tonelson, who writes incessantly on trade related issues at www.americaneconomicalert.org, literature at Global Trade Watch, and a book titled "Taking Trade to the Streets: The Lost History of Public Efforts to Shape Globalization" by Prof. Susan Ariel Aaronson, now at George Washington University. I'm sure there are many other books on this topic but this the only one I've read a little of and it is interesting. Lori Wallach, one of those few people who tried to argue against NAFTA and Fast Track in 1991 and also against TPP/TTip/Fast track now is out with a book "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority," which from her involvement on this issue then and now, seems to be worth reading. How can I forget to mention DemocracyNow?

You can also listen to some of the events related to trade at well-known think tanks. However, you will be sorely disappointed if you think there will be debate. Almost all of them believe that free trade is manna from heaven. I have rarely seen substantive debate on these issues at the think tanks. Even left-leaning think tanks like Center for American Progress hardly pay any attention to trade related issues or the trade deficit. What is sad is that newspapers do not write enough about this. It looks like in business and economics journalism, writing about trade and labor related issues is not sexy enough! Wall Street Journal may create a twitter handle called @WSJCentralBanks but I doubt they'll ever create one called @WSJTrade or even @WSJFreeTrade and report all that is unreported on this issue.

Another dessert to end the day with - Banackers

My sweet tooth forced me to conjure a new dessert a few days ago. We don't, usually, stock up on off-the shelf sweets. Apart from ricotta cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, and honey to make my other go-to dessert. On my way back from work, I had an epiphany about a dessert. I love bananas, especially when cooked with oats or in banana bread or cookies. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a baker. It requires attention to detail that I'm incapable of. Also, I hate using the kitchen oven to bake a puny little thing. Way too much waste of energy.

I decided to make banana cookies with Graham crackers. All you have to do is crush a few graham crackers. In fact, you don't want to remove them from their pouches - just crush them inside the pouch and then transfer the power to a tupperware or glass container. It should not be all powder. Add as many bananas as you wish - you should get a pretty sticky doughy paste when you mix the two. Usually, I add about 3 or 4 bananas to 2 or 3 pouches of Graham crackers (a pouch contains about 5 or 6 wafers). To this add a small amount of butter. Flatten this in your tupperware/glass container so that you have a layer about 0.5 inches thick. Cook it in a microwave oven for about 6 minutes.

What you get out is awesome banana cracker cookies. They are not hard or crumbly like cookies - a little moist in the inside, and maybe a little crusty or dry on the outside. After eating them, and getting to know what is in them, my son christened this "banacker," and so it shall be known, at least in our household.

I tried this in the traditional oven too (usual conditions - 350 F, 40 minutes, covered most of the time). While the entire layer was more uniformly cooked, it lacked the moistness of the output from the microwave oven. All a function of the time taken to cook. I prefer the microwave version. Also, its much faster.

Happy eating.

Starting and finishing off the day with great food

Once in a while I have a craving for something really nice and sweet. The only sweet that can really satisfy me then is a really good baklava, with pistachios and honey. However, that is not always in supply. In any case, good baklava is pretty expensive. Moreover, something like baklava is OK as a dessert but not to start off the day, though people in the Mediterranean might object.

Since I decided to reduce my rice consumption to near-zero, I have been consuming lots of oats. Rolled oats, usually purchased at Costco. Pretty reasonably priced stuff. I'm not sure how you go about making your oats but I hit upon a method, with some help from the chef at the day care which my son attends. Its pretty straightforward - to the desired quantity of oats, add roughly twice the quantity of water. Add some brown sugar and a pinch or two of salt. To this, add a good dose of powdered cinnamon (hopefully you just powdered it just then). Now comes my own addition - add some powdered cloves. We have cloves that my wife purchased in 2002! It was a really big packet and we hardly used it until recently. Anyway, add the powdered cloves. To this, mash a banana or two. Hopefully, you've used a ceramic bowl or tupperware. If not, transfer it to one and cook in a microwave oven for about 6 or 7 minutes. What you get out is delightful bliss. But I'm about to make it even better. Add some yogurt to this - just plain, whole milk yogurt. It makes for a super creamy oaty breakfast.

OK, that is good for the morning. What about the evening dessert? Something equally healthy but not as heavy as oats. I hope you have yogurt, Greek yogurt, ricotta cheese, and cottage cheese in your refrigerator. You should also have walnuts and/or almonds. Some raisins wont be bad too. You certainly need to have good honey. Toast the walnuts in a toaster over for a few minutes. Four or five minutes. A few more minutes for almonds. In the mean time, take a scoop of each - yogurt, Greek yogurt, ricotta cheese, and cottage cheese - in a bowl. Drop your toasted walnuts/almonds into this. Ideally you should hear the sizzle as walnuts make contact with yogurt. Drizzle, or better still, pour honey onto this. Top it with raisins. Do I need to say what you should do next?

Happy eating!

Listening to Bernanke during Christmas

Soon, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, will be stepping down after 8 dramatic years at the helm. Since I like to work with some form of aural stimulation, I decided, after having exhausted all available episodes of Covert Affairs and James Bond flicks,  to listen to some of Bernanke's testimonies to the US Congress. Not as dramatic as Bond but as riveting. I picked a testimony from Feb. 2007 as my first hearing as I did not want it to be tainted with the stench of the financial crisis. I wanted to see how things were before we were exposed to terms like "quantitative easing," "taper," etc.  It is difficult to follow 2 or 3 hours of the testimony, especially when you are trying to multitask. Still, I was not disappointed. I would have posted links to newspaper articles discussing this hearing but I could not find appropriate ones so far. I'm sure I'll find appropriate ones soon and post links to them too.

Barney Frank and Spencer Bachus started off the hearing by viewing the economy through their respective tinted glasses, with Bachus' being distinctly rosier. Ron Paul went directly for the jugular - he harangued about Congress not having the authority to create the Federal Reserve in 1913 and that any subsequent actions of the Fed were illegal too. It was also peppered with words like "fiat," "fiat,"....., and "fiat." Later, Paul questioned Bernanke on the current account deficit and currency manipulation by China and Japan.  In response, Bernanke talked about how the current account deficit is a result of the imbalance between the rate of savings and investments in the US and abroad. Savings rate is usually high in China and the oil producing nations, whereas it is comparatively low in the US.There was interesting back and forth with Bachus in which Bernanke said, with regards to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the portfolio of the GSEs attained enormous size with complex derivatives necessary to maintain those portfolios. He was also worried that they posed a systemic risk to the economy. Little might he have known that the Fed portfolio would also attain a gargantuan size, though the two may not be the same.

Many of the people who questioned Bernanke later expressed great surprise at the apparent ease with which they could understand the Chairman. Mel Watts (NC) said "I happen to like your predecessor but I didn't understand a damn word he said." Shays (Connecticut) said: "I thought the responsibility of the Chairperson is to speak in tongues!"

Barney Frank had a zinger on the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve: "I appreciate the fact that you have two children and that you love them both. But I'm afraid that one might get more for Hanukkah than the other!" Wonder if Jeb Hensarling will have any during the hearings reviewing the "many mandates of the Fed" on the centennial anniversary of the Federal Reserve.

One important take away I had from the hearing was the focus on inequality and wage gap. Basically, the focus on 1% and 99% was not born with the Occupy Movement. The discussion on the topic is may in fact have been better before the financial crisis, though I am not sure how much the Federal Reserve or monetary policy can really do to alleviate this particular problem. Congresswoman Maxine Waters seemed to show genuine respect for Bernanke for a speech he had given on income inequality and the wage gap (I think this is the speech she was referring to). I wonder whether the respect I observed continues to this day.

For those interested in further details of the hearing, here is the link:
The State of the Economy, the State of the Labor Market, and the Conduct of Monetary Policy Feb. 15, 2007.