Taiwan and Chinese Tax

Chinese government decided to cancel the tax of fruit importing from Taiwan. The Taiwan ministerialist said that Chinese government intented to devide the emotion of the government(Democratic Progressive Party) and farmer.Most of the vote of Shuibian Chen, the president of Democratic Progressive Party, is from the farmer in the North in 2000. However, the government agree to talk about this issue with Mainland China because of the pression from local farmer. Chinese government choosing Taiwan Farmers Association to talk with was because that this system blonged to Nationalist Party which was alway against Democratic Progressive Party.

Why the downsizing

Recently Morgan Stanley said that they would ahve to cut jobs, about 1,000 brokers to be exact. The firm says that they will see those who are not up to the standards of the company and then let them go. Why the reason for the sudden downsizing? Did they have a surplus of investment bankers? Are citizens not needing the help of investment bankers to invest their money as much as they used to? Perhaps the stock market is down, but from what I have heard, investment banking is extremely difficult and it takes a lot of intelligence to be one, so the ones that are not "up to standard" aren't by any means underqualified.

Competition

The two biggest medicine companies announced to incorporate. It showed that both of these two companies agreed that the competition would never disappeared.

Investors supported Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. to purchase the stock of Ivax Corp by 7 billion 400 million dollars yesterday. The stock of Ivax Corp. had increased by 10% to 25.17 dollar; in contrast, the stock of Teva only had increased by 0.2% to 31.23 dollar.

A lot of companies insists that competition is able to improve the development of the medicine market, but in these two companies point of view, competition will opress the price of production.

Fighting Pollution

Pollution is an externality of driving cars, burning gasses, and running factories. The government has placed emissions taxes on companies and other regulations as a way to clean up the air and to limit pollution. Scientists are now trying to develope concrete and paint that will help to break up the pollutants in the air. Do you think that this will be an effective way to cut down on pollution? Will this new technology cause the government to be more lax with emissions amounts?

Smart business or a monopoly??

AMD filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel last year. AMD alleges that Intel's size gives it an unfair advantage in the market and that giving perks to customers who buy more, and other Intel practices control the market. Intel says these are just smart business practices. So what do you think- is Intel really a monopoly or are they just doing smart business? And is AMD turning out to be real competition-they controlled twenty percent of the market at the time of this article?

Is it a monopoly?

Recently, Microsoft held a conference in which it told consumers of its new OS, Windows Vista. I told about how it would be clearer and more user friendly than Windows XP is. A while ago though, Microsoft had some trouble with Congress because people started accusing it of being a monopoly.

The reason I am showing you this article is to demonstrate that there are no other OS (Operating Systems) for a PC that I am aware of. Even if there is, I have never seen it advertised. Just because other companies do not want to go into the market for fear that they could not compete with Microsoft, does this make their company a monopoly? This case is slightly different than the Intel situation because there were other companies producing a chip.

Smoking in Public Places

A recent debate has ocurred on whether smoking sections in public restaraunts should be banned. Second hand smoke is an externality. Basically, a person or group of people are affected by acts that they themselves are not committing. Second hand smoking is then a negative externality because it has negative effects on others who are not smoking. I have read that some ways to correct some negative externalities are through taxes. Can you think of any other ways to correct this problem without any taxing being paced into effect?

AMD files antitrust suit against Intel

A contemporary monopoly case: AMD against Intel.

According to the complaint, Intel has forced major customers such as Dell Inc., Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp., Gateway Inc. and Hitachi Ltd. into exclusive deals in return for cash payments and other deals.

Intel has bullied 38 companies, including large-scale computer-makers, wholesale distributors and retailers, to secure a monopoly in the highly competitive x86 microprocessor market.

I don't think this is a monopoly. Intel through its hardwork and correct marketing strategy established a right position and a right product in the market. Having a huge share of the market has two sides. One is Intel is really big, two is consumer's preference. I personally think that AMD is inferior to Intel chips. So i buy Intel. Why I think Intel is inferior? becuase I know AMD's history is shorter than Intel, and everyday I saw high quality ads on TV promoting Intel product. Intel put much more effort to promote its product than anyone else. So consumers have some brand loyalty to Intel. And Intel can give its customers: Dell, Sony, etc. a better deal than AMD. It is a natrual thing when company shopping around for cheap chips and choose the better deal.

a right position and a right product in the market is not a fault and should not be considered monopoly.

Harry VI's first day: 8.9 million

The sixth volume of the Harry Potter saga sold more than 8.9 million copies in the first 24 hours it went on sale in the United States and Britain to become the fastest-selling book in history, publishers said.

"British book chain WH Smith reported sales of 13 books per second across the 391 shops it opened into the early hours of Saturday, compared with eight per second for the fifth Harry Potter adventure."

seems publisher had full preparation for the first day sale, if they didn't print enough copies, then people would have to wait for the back order. They had foreseen the huge demand in advance.

Apple: Beware back to school blues

$0.99 for each song downloaded, iTune on apple.com counts for 38 percent of Apple's total sales, up from 16 percent a year ago. When i see this number, I couldn't believe it. I did expect the music downloading could be so huge. So I think the music on iTune is elastic. But if it increase its price for one more cent, it will decrease the quantity demanded dramatically. And it will affect the total revenue which will decrease.

Apple sold 6.2 million iPods for the second quarter. i think the music for downloading and the iPod is complements. When the quantity demanded for Ipod goes up, the quantity demanded for music must go up because each 20 giga bytes harddrive can download approximately 2000 songs. And downloading from peer to peer software is illegal, so people would go to iTune to download legal music.

anybody have any idea? or anybody know the elasticity for music online? i mean the exact number.

Poge's Purchase

A manager of Pogo Producing Co. said that Pogo Producing Co. announced to purchase the Northrock Resources in Canada of Unocal Corp by 1,800,000,000 U.S dollar.

It was a huge deal and decision for Pogo, because this Co. was only valued $3,300,000,000, and Pogo had to sell its assets in Thailand Hungary for this purchase.

The Chief Director of Pogo, Paul G. Van Wagenen said that this deal could make the cycle of petrol storing and exploitation of this Co., which had 35 year-history, up to 9.3 years.

Number of People Losing Job

Whereas in Asian more and more people taking up an occupation, the percentage of obtaining employment continuing decreasing in American during these two months. It shows that the market sin Asian countries, especially most developing countries, are improved now.

The Labor Department of the U.S announced that the number of people taking up occupations except farmer is only 146,000 June, higher than April and May, but much lower than the expectation, 200,000.

This percentage should attract government's attention, because it is a reflection of the society developement. People lacking job will not have the ability to shop. More and more companies will be affected.

What caused this?

You may have been hearing about the slump (the worst in two decades) in Hollywood dealing with the fact that the movie industry isn't generating as much revenue as it had before. Perhaps it was the fact that more people stopped going to the movies to pay for the rising gas prices, but whatever it is, there was obviously a surplus of movie tickets. The movie Fantastic Four was able to help out if not reverse the slump with the opening of their film. War of the Worlds also helped out and with Wedding Crashers and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory coming out, the movie industry seems to be doing great. What have we discussed during microeconomics that could explain the ups and downs of the movie industry?

http://money.cnn.com/2005/07/10/news/newsmakers/boxoffice_ff.reut/index.htm

The Realestate Market

This article investigates the current market for homes in the greater Cleveland area. In the current state of this market there is a surplus in the number of homes available, while the demand for homes has remained stable. Although sellers are faced with a market that appears to inhibit sales, there has been an increase in the number of homes sold in the area. This article also states that most sellers are receiving about 96% of their listed price. Are the spreading and dimishing-returns effects applicable in this case, and why?

Ohio Raises Cigarette Taxes

The State of Ohio recently raised cigarette taxes by 70 cents, to a total of $1.25 per pack. Since a pack of cigarettes now sells for around $4.00 a pack, this represents about a 20% increase in price. Governments generally impose taxes in order to generate revenue to pay for various spending priorities (to fund education, roads, and the salaries of police officers, among others). Governments may also levy taxes to curb undesireable behaviors such as cigarette and alcohol consumption--such taxes are often referred to as "sin" taxes. Crucial to both government objectives is the nature of the demand curve for cigarettes and alcohol. Most economic studies indicate that the demand for cigarettes and alcohol are fairly inelastic. For cigarettes, the elasticity of demand is somewhere between -0.3 and -0.5. If we take -0.4 as a reasonable estimate, then the 20% increase in cigarette prices can be expected to reduce consumption by about 8%. What impact do you think this will have on cigarette tax revenues? Do you think it will cause any smokers to stop altogether? One interesting question for border cities like Marietta is what will happen to local retail sales given that the tax in West Virginia is only $0.55 per pack.