‘Happiness' and GDP France is following Buthan's example and wants to add “happiness” as an indicator to calculate its GDP. Sarkozy, the ever innovative one, wants to push this idea at the G-20 meeting. Other new indicators would include access to health care, well-being and leisure time. This would reduce the gap between US and France's GDP per capita. Speaking today on the Lehman-anniversary and ahead of the G-20, the AP reports that Sarkozy said: “A great revolution is waiting for us. The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so.” All in all, adding a happiness parameter could be a good idea. The problem is that defining happiness and measuring do not seem like activities in which governments would excel. What's more, the timing seems a bit off. As the Wall Street Journal reports today, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is requesting an extraordinary board meeting at France Telecom, to discuss the ongoing series of suicides at the 26 percent-government owned company. The company has cut 22,000 jobs within the last three years, though only through attrition and without any layoffs, the WSJ says. There have been 23 suicides at the company since February 2008, the most recent one occurring last Friday, when an employee threw herself through a window from her office building. So maybe France isn't quite as happy as it thinks. —www.businessinsider.com/apple Trade war! Sit back folks, I think we're heading for a big time trade war with China. Obama announced that the US is going to start imposing tariffs on Chinese imported tires. The US has placed a 35 percent tariff on the almost $1.8 billion in tire imports from China. This was not done out of sound trade policies, but to appease his buddies who work for the UAW. They claim that this measure will save 7000 UAW jobs. Yeah, sure, just like the millions of jobs created or saved by the Stimulus bill? As they say, no good deed goes unpunished and China has already retaliated by investigated subsidies and claims of dumping of American chicken and auto products. China (rightly) claims that this is unfair trade practices prohibited under the WTO. Dumping is basically a forming of underpricing goods and subsidizing the cost so that they are more competitive in the international market. Now, to be fair, China does this all the time, but that's no reason for the US to start doing it as well. China is also appealing the decision to impose these tariffs to the WTO, which, if it has any brains, will rule in China's favor and block this tariff. What is so mind-numbingly stupid about this move is that it once again shows the Obama administration has no clue about anything when it comes to economic matters. Most economists agree that one of the triggering factors that led to the Great Depression was the passage of restrictive tariffs, thus causing what was a recession to certainly spiral into a depression. The great fear is that this can lead to ever escalating retaliatory responses from other governments as we start to enact protectionist policies to “save” American jobs.
