PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Verano 2023

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://www.diariovasco.com/economia/trabajo/cuatro-trabajos-cuesta-cubrir-euskadi-corresponde-industria-20230819075730-nt.html

https://www.elcorreo.com/economia/trabajo/profesionales-tecnologicos-plantea-cambiar-empresa-actualidad-20230819003249-nt.html

Saludos.

[Derby]

https://www.barrons.com/articles/buying-a-home-is-getting-out-of-reach-how-much-7-mortgage-rates-need-to-fall-22f4c130

Buying a Home Is Getting Out of Reach. How Much 7% Mortgage Rates Need to Fall.

(...) Buying a home was already difficult before mortgage rates’ ascent back above 7%. A record share of respondents to Fannie Mae ‘s survey measuring housing market sentiment, 82%, said in July that it was a bad time to buy a house. “Unsurprisingly, consumers continue to attribute the challenging conditions to high home prices and unfavorable mortgage rates,” Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said in a statement.

[pollo]

https://www.barrons.com/articles/buying-a-home-is-getting-out-of-reach-how-much-7-mortgage-rates-need-to-fall-22f4c130

Buying a Home Is Getting Out of Reach. How Much 7% Mortgage Rates Need to Fall.

(...) Buying a home was already difficult before mortgage rates’ ascent back above 7%. A record share of respondents to Fannie Mae ‘s survey measuring housing market sentiment, 82%, said in July that it was a bad time to buy a house. “Unsurprisingly, consumers continue to attribute the challenging conditions to high home prices and unfavorable mortgage rates,” Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said in a statement.

Ojo, la conclusión no es que los precios están a tomar por culo, sino que los intereses están altos.

Viendo esta noticia y las anteriores, me pregunto cuándo vendrá de una vez el meteorito.

[Benzino Napaloni]

https://www.barrons.com/articles/buying-a-home-is-getting-out-of-reach-how-much-7-mortgage-rates-need-to-fall-22f4c130

Buying a Home Is Getting Out of Reach. How Much 7% Mortgage Rates Need to Fall.

(...) Buying a home was already difficult before mortgage rates’ ascent back above 7%. A record share of respondents to Fannie Mae ‘s survey measuring housing market sentiment, 82%, said in July that it was a bad time to buy a house. “Unsurprisingly, consumers continue to attribute the challenging conditions to high home prices and unfavorable mortgage rates,” Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said in a statement.

Ojo, la conclusión no es que los precios están a tomar por culo, sino que los intereses están altos.

Viendo esta noticia y las anteriores, me pregunto cuándo vendrá de una vez el meteorito.

Nunca, nunca culpan al precio por intereses obvios. La culpa es del currito que es un vago y no se esfuerza. Cuando a él no se le puede culpar porque canta demasiado, la culpa es de los bajos salarios y de que los bancos no prestan. Todo eso ya se ha visto.

Así hasta que las empresas no puedan operar y la circulación de dinero se detenga o amenace con detenerse. No se va a tocar nada hasta que tengamos el lobo encima y ya nos haya arreado algún que otro mordisco.

[tomasjos]

https://www.barrons.com/articles/buying-a-home-is-getting-out-of-reach-how-much-7-mortgage-rates-need-to-fall-22f4c130

Buying a Home Is Getting Out of Reach. How Much 7% Mortgage Rates Need to Fall.

(...) Buying a home was already difficult before mortgage rates’ ascent back above 7%. A record share of respondents to Fannie Mae ‘s survey measuring housing market sentiment, 82%, said in July that it was a bad time to buy a house. “Unsurprisingly, consumers continue to attribute the challenging conditions to high home prices and unfavorable mortgage rates,” Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said in a statement.

Ojo, la conclusión no es que los precios están a tomar por culo, sino que los intereses están altos.

Viendo esta noticia y las anteriores, me pregunto cuándo vendrá de una vez el meteorito.

Nunca, nunca culpan al precio por intereses obvios. La culpa es del currito que es un vago y no se esfuerza. Cuando a él no se le puede culpar porque canta demasiado, la culpa es de los bajos salarios y de que los bancos no prestan. Todo eso ya se ha visto.

Así hasta que las empresas no puedan operar y la circulación de dinero se detenga o amenace con detenerse. No se va a tocar nada hasta que tengamos el lobo encima y ya nos haya arreado algún que otro mordisco.

Es que estamos otra vez como en 2007 y no veo nada que provoque un catacrack a corto plazo. Aún no veo los anuncios de Cofidis que son el canario en la mina

[Derby]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/business/china-property-crisis-country-garden.html

China Is on Edge as Fallout From Its Real Estate Crisis Spreads

Beijing wanted to cool its housing market, but created a bigger problem, as the fallout from debt-laden developers and sinking sales spreads to the broader economy.

A model Chinese property developer in a sector replete with risk takers is teetering on the edge of default. Short of cash, one of China’s biggest asset managers has missed payments to investors. And billions of dollars have flowed out of the country’s stock markets.

In China, August has been a dizzying ride.

What started three years ago as a crackdown on risky business behavior by home builders, and then an ensuing housing slowdown, has spiraled rapidly this month. The broader economy has been threatened, and the confidence of consumers, businesses and investors undermined. So far, China’s typically hands-on policymakers have done little to ease anxieties and seem determined to reduce the country’s economic reliance on real estate.

“What is happening in the Chinese property market is really unprecedented,” said Charles Chang, who heads corporate credit ratings for Greater China at Standard & Poor’s.

For the last three decades, as China’s population surged and its people flocked to cities seeking economic opportunity, developers couldn’t build modern apartments fast enough, and the property sector became the engine of a transforming economy. Real estate employed millions and provided a store for household savings. Today, the property sector accounts for more than a quarter of all economic activity.

China’s dependence on real estate was lucrative during what seemed like a never-ending property boom, but it has become a liability after years of excessive borrowing and overbuilding. When China was growing faster, the excesses were papered over as developers borrowed more to pay off mounting debts. But now China is struggling to regain its footing after emerging from the paralyzing pandemic lockdowns its leaders imposed, and many of its economic problems are pointing back to real estate.

Chinese consumers are spending less, in part because a slump in housing prices has affected their savings, much of which are tied up in property. Jobs tied to housing that were once abundant — construction, landscaping, painting — are disappearing. And the uncertainty of how far the crisis might spread is leaving companies and small businesses afraid to spend.

Local governments, which rely on land sales to developers to pay for municipal programs, are cutting back on services.

Financial institutions known as trust companies, which invest billions of dollars on behalf of companies and rich individuals, are staring at losses from risky loans handed out to property firms, prompting protest from angry investors.

The current property crisis is a problem of the government’s own making. Regulators allowed developers to gorge themselves on debt to finance a growth-at-all-costs strategy for decades. Then they intervened suddenly and drastically in 2020 to prevent a housing bubble. They stopped the flow of cheap money to China’s biggest real estate companies, leaving many short on cash.

One after another, the companies began to crumble as they could not pay their bills. More than 50 Chinese property developers have defaulted or failed to make debt payments in the last three years, according to credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s. The defaults have exposed a reality of China’s property boom: the borrow-to-build model works only as long as prices keep going up.

As the property crisis has worsened, Chinese policymakers have defied calls to step in with a major rescue package. They have opted instead for modest gestures like relaxing mortgage requirements and cutting interest rates.

In an editorial on Friday, the state-run Economic Daily said it would take time for recent policies to take effect: “We must be soberly aware that the process of defusing risk cannot be completed overnight, and the market must give it a certain amount of patience.”

Policymakers have tolerated the fallout of the real estate crackdown because even the companies that aren’t able to pay all their bills have continued to build and deliver apartments.

China Evergrande, for example, defaulted on $300 billion of debt in 2021 and yet managed to finish and deliver 300,000 apartments out of the more than 1 million that it had taken money for but not completed at the time of its collapse. Evergrande filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States on Thursday.

But a lot has changed in recent months. Households pulled back on big purchases, and apartment sales abruptly plummeted. That shock altered the fortunes of Country Garden, a real estate giant that was once put forward as a model by the government. The company is now anticipating a loss of as much as $7.6 billion in the first half of the year and says it is facing the biggest challenge to its business in its three-decade history.

Country Garden has just weeks to come up with the cash to make interest payments on some of its bonds, or join its peers in default. It also has hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid bills.

These developments have spooked home buyers, who were already wary. In July, new home sales at China’s 100 biggest property developers fell 33 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the China Real Estate Information Corp. Sales also fell 28 percent in June.

Investors worry that policymakers are not acting quickly enough to prevent a bigger crisis.

“I don’t think they have yet found the right solution to solve the problems,” said Ting Lu, chief China economist for Nomura. He and his colleagues have warned that falling home sales and defaulting developers risk a chain reaction that threatens the broader economy.

The fears have spread to other markets. In Hong Kong, where many of China’s biggest companies are listed, confidence has plunged so drastically that stocks have fallen into a bear market, down 21 percent from their peak in January. Over the last two weeks, investors have pulled $7.5 billion out of Chinese stocks.

The real estate troubles are also spreading to China’s so-called shadow banking system of financial trust companies. These institutions offer investments with higher returns than standard bank deposits and often invest in real estate projects.

The latest troubles surfaced earlier this month. Two publicly traded Chinese companies warned that they had invested money with Zhongrong International Trust, which is managing about $85 billion in assets, and said that Zhongrong had failed to pay the companies what they were owed. While it was not clear that those investments were tied to real estate, Zhongrong had been a major shareholder in several property projects of developers in default, according to the South China Morning Post. Zhongrong did not respond to an email seeking comment.

A crowd of angry Chinese investors gathered outside the Beijing offices of Zhongrong demanding that the company “pay back the money” and calling for an explanation. It was not clear when the protest took place; videos of it were uploaded to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, this month.

The demonstration was reminiscent of other acts of defiance in China rooted in the housing crisis. While such occurrences are rare, there are a few recent examples.

In February, thousands of retirees in Wuhan confronted officials to protest cuts in government-provided medical insurance for seniors. The cutbacks were a sign of the strain on local governments caused in part by the downturn in real estate that had hurt land sales, a reliable source of revenue.

Last year, hundreds of thousands of homeowners refused to pay mortgage loans on unfinished apartments. Some staged protest videos on social media, while collectives of homeowners tracked boycotts online.

Both protests drew notice, but the momentum petered out as the government intervened to limit discussion on social media, while adopting some steps to ease tensions. Last week, a new video outside of Zhongrong’s offices showed no demonstrations but police cars and vans were parked in and near the facility.

[Derby]

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4?st=1gd9k20vwinw2th

China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?

The economic model that took the country from poverty to great-power status seems broken, and everywhere are signs of distress

For decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers and roads. The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe.

Now the model is broken.

What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build. Parts of China are saddled with under-used bridges and airports. Millions of apartments are unoccupied. Returns on investment have sharply declined.

Signs of trouble extend beyond China’s dismal economic data to distant provinces, including Yunnan in the southwest, which recently said it would spend millions of dollars to build a new Covid-19 quarantine facility, nearly the size of three football fields, despite China having ended its “zero-Covid” policy months ago, and long after the world moved on from the pandemic.

Other localities are doing the same. With private investment weak and exports flagging, officials say they have little choice but to keep borrowing and building to stimulate their economies.

Economists now believe China is entering an era of much slower growth, made worse by unfavorable demographics and a widening divide with the U.S. and its allies, which is jeopardizing foreign investment and trade. Rather than just a period of economic weakness, this could be the dimming of a long era.

“We’re witnessing a gearshift in what has been the most dramatic trajectory in economic history,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor who specializes in economic crises. 

What will the future look like? The International Monetary Fund puts China’s GDP growth at below 4% in the coming years, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades. Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, figures China’s trend growth has slowed to 3% from 5% in 2019, and will fall to around 2% in 2030.

At those rates, China would fail to meet the objective set by President Xi Jinping in 2020 of doubling the economy’s size by 2035. That would make it harder for China to graduate from the ranks of middle-income emerging markets and could mean that China never overtakes the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, its longstanding ambition.

Many previous predictions of China’s economic undoing have missed the mark. China’s burgeoning electric-vehicle and renewable energy industries are reminders of its capacity to dominate markets. Tensions with the U.S. could galvanize China to accelerate innovations in technologies such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors, unlocking new avenues of growth. And Beijing still has levers to pull to stimulate growth if it chooses, such as by expanding fiscal spending.

Even so, economists widely believe that China has entered a more challenging period, in which previous methods of boosting growth yield diminishing returns. 

Some of these strains were apparent before the pandemic. Beijing was able to keep growth ticking over by borrowing more and relying on a booming housing market, which in some years accounted for more than 25% of China’s gross domestic product.

The country’s initial success in containing Covid-19, and a surge in pandemic spending by U.S. consumers, further masked China’s economic troubles. The housing bubble has since popped, Western demand for Chinese products has ebbed and borrowing has reached unsustainable levels.

The outlook has darkened considerably in recent months. Manufacturing activity has contracted, exports have declined, and youth unemployment has reached record highs. One of the country’s largest surviving property developers, Country Garden Holdings, is on the cusp of a possible default as the overall economy slips into deflation.

Japan-like slowdown?

Without more aggressive stimulus from Beijing, and meaningful efforts to revive private sector risk-taking, some economists believe China’s slowdown could snowball into prolonged stagnation akin to what Japan has experienced since the 1990s, when the bursting of its real-estate bubble led to years of deflation and limited growth.

Unlike Japan, however, China would be entering such a period before reaching rich-world status, with per capita incomes far below more advanced economies. China’s national income per person reached about $12,850 last year, below the current threshold of $13,845 that the World Bank classifies as the minimum for a “high-income” country. Japan’s per capita national income in 2022 was about $42,440, and the U.S.’s was about $76,400.

A weaker Chinese economy could also undermine popular support for Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in recent decades, though there is no current indication of organized opposition. Some U.S. analysts worry Beijing could respond to slower growth by becoming more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad, raising the risks of conflict, including potentially over the self-governing island of Taiwan.

At an Aug. 10 political fundraiser, President Biden called China’s economic problems a “ticking time bomb” which could spur its leaders to “do bad things.”

Beijing fired back with a commentary by its official Xinhua News Agency, saying Biden “intends to take smearing China as part of his ‘grand strategy’ to shoot America’s economic troubles.” The commentary also described China’s economic recovery this year as robust, despite some challenges.

Chinese officials have taken some modest steps to revive growth, including cutting interest rates, and have pledged to do more if conditions worsen. The State Council Information Office, which handles media inquiries for China’s leadership, didn’t respond to questions.

“Certain Western politicians and media have exaggerated and hyped up the current difficulties in China’s post-Covid economic recovery,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Aug. 16. “Facts will prove them wrong.”

‘Chinese Century’

The transition marks a stunning change. China consistently defied economic cycles in the four decades since Deng Xiaoping started an era of “reform and opening” in 1978, embracing market forces and opening China to the West, in particular through international trade and investment.

During that period, China increased per capita income 25-fold and lifted more than 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, according to the World Bank—more than 70% of the total poverty reduction in the world. China evolved from a nation racked by famine into the world’s second-largest economy, and America’s greatest competitor for leadership.

Academics were so enthralled by China’s rise that some referred to a “Chinese Century,” with China dominating the world economy and politics, similar to how the 20th century was known as the “American Century.”

China’s boom was underpinned by unusually high levels of domestic investment in infrastructure and other hard assets, which accounted for about 44% of GDP each year on average between 2008 and 2021. That compared with a global average of 25% and around 20% in the U.S., according to World Bank data.

Such heavy spending was made possible in part by a system of “financial repression” in which state banks set deposit rates low, which meant they could raise funds inexpensively and fund building projects. China added tens of thousands of miles of highways, hundreds of airports, and the world’s largest network of high-speed trains.

Over time, however, evidence of overbuilding became apparent. 

About one-fifth of apartments in urban China, or at least 130 million units, were estimated to be unoccupied in 2018, the latest data available, according to a study by China’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

A high-speed rail station in Danzhou, a city in China’s southern province of Hainan, cost $5.5 million to build but was never put into use because passenger demand was so low, according to Chinese media reports. The Hainan government said keeping the station open would incur “massive losses.” Efforts to reach the local government were unsuccessful.

Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in the country with GDP per capita of less than $7,200 last year, boasts more than 1,700 bridges and 11 airports, more than the total number of airports in China’s top four cities. The province had an estimated $388 billion in outstanding debt at the end of 2022, and in April had to ask for aid from the central government to shore up its finances.

Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University, said China’s economic ascent draws parallels to what many other Asian economies went through during their periods of rapid urbanization, as well as what European countries such as Germany experienced after World War II, when major investments in infrastructure boosted growth.

At the same time, decades of overbuilding in China resembles Japan’s infrastructure construction boom in the late 1980s and 1990s, which led to overinvestment.

“The leading point is they are running into diminishing returns in building stuff,” he said, “There are limits to how far you can go with it.”

With so many needs met, economists estimate China now has to invest about $9 to produce each dollar of GDP growth, up from less than $5 a decade ago, and a little over $3 in the 1990s.

Returns on assets by private firms have declined to 3.9% from 9.3% five years ago, according to Bert Hofman, head of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. State companies’ returns have retreated to 2.8% from 4.3%.

China’s labor force, meanwhile, is shrinking, and productivity growth is slowing. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, productivity gains contributed about a third of China’s GDP growth, Hofman’s analysis shows. That ratio has declined to less than one sixth in the past decade.

Deepening debt

The solution for many parts of the country has been to keep borrowing and building. Total debt, including that held by various levels of government and state-owned companies, climbed to nearly 300% of China’s GDP as of 2022, surpassing U.S. levels and up from less than 200% in 2012, according to Bank for International Settlements data.

Much of the debt was incurred by cities. Limited by Beijing in their ability to borrow directly to fund projects, they turned to off-balance sheet financing vehicles whose debts are expected to reach more than $9 trillion this year, according to the IMF.

Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic research firm, estimates that only about 20% of financing firms used by local governments to fund projects have enough cash reserves to meet their short-term debt obligations, including bonds owned by domestic and foreign investors.

In Yunnan, location of the giant quarantine center, heavy infrastructure spending lifted growth for years. Officials spent hundreds of billions of dollars including on Asia’s tallest suspension bridge, more than 6,000 miles of expressways and more airports than many other regions in China.

The projects boosted tourism and helped expand trade of Yunnan products including tobacco, machinery and metals. From 2015 to 2020, Yunnan was one of the fastest-growing regions in China. Growth has weakened in the past few years. The slumping property market has hit local finances hard, as revenue from land sales dries up.

Yunnan’s debt-to-revenue ratio climbed to 151% in 2021, breaching a 150% level designated as alarming by the IMF, and up from 108% in 2019, according to Lianhe Ratings, a Chinese rating agency. Fitch Ratings earlier this year said financing firms used by the province to fund infrastructure construction were risky because of the size of their borrowings and the government’s strained finances.

Yet Yunnan has continued to hatch big schemes. In early 2020, the Yunnan government said it planned to spend nearly $500 billion on hundreds of infrastructure projects, including a more than $15 billion program aimed at diverting water from parts of the Yangtze River to the dry center of the province.

A February plan issued by Wenshan, a city in Yunnan, listed the “permanent” quarantine center as one of several measures aimed at promoting economic stability. Once the government officially put out a bid in June for its construction, local residents questioned the use of funds.

“It’s such a waste of money,” wrote one user of Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in China.

A Yunnan official confirmed the plan to build the quarantine facility, which is expected to be completed at the end of this year, but declined to comment further.

Tighter control

In Beijing’s corridors of power, senior officials have recognized that the growth model of past decades has reached its limits. In a blunt speech to a new generation of party leaders last year, Xi took aim at officials for relying on borrowing for construction to expand economic activities.

“Some people believe that development means investing in projects and scaling up investments,” he said, while warning, “you can’t walk the old path with new shoes.” Xi and his team so far have done little to shift away from the country’s old growth model.

The most obvious solution, economists say, would be for China to shift toward promoting consumer spending and service industries, which would help create a more balanced economy that more resembles those of the U.S. and Western Europe. Household consumption makes up only about 38% of GDP in China, relatively unchanged in recent years, compared with around 68% in the U.S., according to the World Bank.

Changing that would require China’s government to undertake measures aimed at encouraging people to spend more and save less. That could include expanding China’s relatively meager social safety net with greater health and unemployment benefits.

Xi and some of his lieutenants remain suspicious of U.S.-style consumption, which they see as wasteful at a time when China’s focus should be on bolstering its industrial capabilities and girding for potential conflict with the West, people with knowledge of Beijing’s decision-making say.

The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires.

A plan announced in late July to promote consumption was criticized by economists both in and outside China for lacking details. It suggested promoting sports and cultural events, and pushed for building more convenience stores in rural areas.

Instead, guided by a desire to strengthen political control, Xi’s leadership has doubled down on state intervention to make China an even bigger industrial power, strong in government-favored industries such as semiconductors, EVs and AI.

While foreign experts don’t doubt China can make headway in these areas, they alone aren’t enough to lift up the entire economy or create enough jobs for the millions of college graduates entering the workforce, economists say.

Beijing has spent billions of dollars to try to build up the country’s semiconductor industry and reduce its dependence on the West. That has resulted in expanded production of less-sophisticated chips, but not the advanced semiconductors produced by companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Among the projects that failed were two high-profile foundries that received hundreds of millions of dollars in government support.

Last week, just as Beijing released a barrage of disappointing economic data, the party’s premier journal, Qiushi, published a speech made by Xi six months earlier to senior officials, in which the leader emphasized the importance of focusing on long-term goals instead of pursuing Western-style material wealth. “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” Xi said in the speech.

[puede ser]

Traducción (sospecho que con alguna errata) del artículo de JAMES K. GALBRAITH para PROJECT SYNDICATE. Agradable para los que no dominamos el idioma de "sekspir". E interesante por ponerse en plan meta-análisis tratando del "relato".

https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/economia/2023/08/20/nueva-narrativa-sobre-china-eeuu/0003_202308G20P22991.htm

La «nueva» narrativa sobre China
Para EE.UU., el país ha pasado de ser una amenaza por su ascenso a serlo por su declive
res artículos recientes publicados en The New York Times han dado cuenta de una «nueva» narrativa sobre China. Hace solo unas semanas, China era el temible competidor de Estados Unidos en el escenario mundial. Pero ahora, según se nos cuenta, es un dragón herido. Antes, una amenaza por su irrefrenable ascenso, ahora, porque está en declive.

El presidente de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, estableció los términos de esta nueva narrativa. Como explica Michael D. Shear en The New York Times, a la Casa Blanca ahora le preocupa que «los problemas de China con el alto desempleo y el envejecimiento de los trabajadores conviertan al país en una bomba de relojería en el corazón de la economía mundial». Biden advirtió que «cuando los malos están en problemas, hacen cosas malas», pero no explicó cómo, exactamente, el desempleo y el envejecimiento de la población convertiría a China en una amenaza.

Shear da otra razón para el nuevo declive de China: «El presidente se ha movido de forma agresiva para contener el ascenso de China y restringir su capacidad para beneficiarse militarmente del uso de tecnologías desarrolladas en Estados Unidos». Dado el alcance de las nuevas restricciones de semiconductores de Biden, podría haber agregado «y también de la no militar».

Mientras, Peter S. Goodman, un periodista económico, apunta a «un gran número de desarrollos» que apoyan esa nueva narrativa. Estos incluyen la disminución de las exportaciones e importaciones de China, la caída de los precios «en una variedad de bienes, desde alimentos hasta apartamentos», un declive de la vivienda y un impago inmobiliario que ha llevado a pérdidas de 76.000 millones de dólares (algo considerable, pero nada que se acerca al habitual rescate bancario estadounidense). Al responder, Goodman escribe: «Las autoridades chinas tienen limitadas sus opciones… dadas las crecientes deudas que ahora se estiman en el 282 % de la producción nacional».

Según Goodman (y muchos economistas, incluso en China), sus dificultades tienen su origen en problemas más profundos como una alta tasa de ahorro, grandes depósitos en el sistema bancario, una nueva cautela en el sector inmobiliario y, en consecuencia, una creciente necesidad de «impulsar la demanda nacional». Él y sus fuentes coinciden en que la solución es el estímulo: más consumo y menos inversión.

Además, Goodman cita al economista del MIT Yasheng Huang, que señala que las exportaciones y las importaciones de China son el 40 % del PIB. Pero mientras Huang parece haber dejado a Goodman con la impresión de que reducir este comercio de paso tendría un gran efecto, el hecho es que el efecto sería bastante pequeño, dado que las importaciones son una sustracción del PIB. China solo está perdiendo el valor añadido, una fracción del valor total del producto.

El premio nobel Paul Krugman completa la cobertura del miedo del «tropiezo» de China al ofrecer «la visión sistémica» de un economista. Según explica, China creció «al ponerse al día con la tecnología de Occidente», pero ahora se enfrenta al problema de demasiado ahorro, demasiada inversión y muy poco consumo. Por lo que necesita «reformas fundamentales» para «poner más ingresos en las manos de las familias, y así ese aumento del consumo podrá reemplazar la inversión insostenible».

De hecho, no hay nada nuevo sobre el punto de vista de Krugman sobre el ahorro. Los economistas de Occidente ya impulsaban esa línea hace 30 años, cuando me convertí (durante cuatro años) en asesor técnico jefe de la reforma macroeconómica de la Comisión Estatal de Planificación de China. «Invierta menos, consuma más», el eslogan no tenía sentido para mí, y todavía no lo tiene hoy. Uno incluso se pregunta qué significa. ¿Debe China tener más coches pero peores carreteras y menos gasolineras (sin mencionar el metro y los trenes de alta velocidad)? ¿Necesita más televisiones, pero menos viviendas en las que ponerlas? ¿Necesita la población más alimentos y ropa, incluso aunque hace 30 años ya estaba bien vestida y alimentada?

Es cierto que las familias chinas ahorran para educación, sanidad y para la vejez. Pero pueden hacerlo porque tienen ingresos, que provienen en parte de trabajos en los sectores de inversión pública y privada. A los trabajadores chinos se les paga por construir fábricas, viviendas, líneas de ferrocarril, carreteras y otras obras públicas que han transformado China. Al contrario que Krugman, la familia típica china no tiene restricciones de ingresos. Si los tuviese, no podría ahorrar tanto como lo hace.

Un mensaje a medida para reforzar el triunfo occidental
Además, Si China se quedase sin proyectos de inversión, los ingresos bajarían, los ahorros irían a menos y el consumo como una proporción del ingreso caería. Pero este descenso de los ahorros haría a las familias chinas menos seguras, lo que a su vez profundizaría la desaceleración actual.

No sorprende que el Gobierno haya puesto especial cuidado en mantener el flujo de inversiones a través de programas como la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta. Incluso después de que China esté completamente construida (o sobreconstruida), todavía tendrá mucho que hacer en Asia Central, África y Latinoamérica. Las inversiones de China han sido bienvenidas en estos países, donde se dice que «cuando nos comprometemos con los chinos, tenemos un aeropuerto. Y cuando nos comprometemos con los estadounidenses, tenemos una conferencia».

Sí, la economía de China se está desacelerando. Será difícil escalar algo para estar a la altura de las ciudades y las redes de transporte que ya existen, o la reciente campaña para combatir la extrema pobreza. Las principales tareas de China ahora están en otras partes: en educación y salud, en igualar las habilidades a los trabajos, en atender a los mayores y en frenar la contaminación y las emisiones de dióxido de carbono. No hay garantía de que estos esfuerzos terminen teniendo éxito, pero al menos están en la agenda de China. Eso significa que se perseguirán al estilo chino: paso a paso, con tiempo.

Entonces, ¿qué es esta nueva narrativa? No se trata tanto de China como de Occidente. Se trata de nuestro liderazgo en tecnologías, nuestro sistema de libre mercado y nuestra capacidad para ejercer el poder y mantener a raya a los rivales. Se trata de reforzar lo que a los occidentales les gusta creer: el inevitable triunfo del capitalismo y la democracia. Sobre todo lo demás, se trata de que nuestros líderes estadounidenses ganen contra «las personas malas» que pueden hacer «cosas malas». Es una narrativa hecha a medida para la campaña electoral del 2024.

James K. Galbraith es profesor en la Universidad de Texas en Austin.
©  2023 Project Syndicate. Traducido por S. P.

[asustadísimos]

[Anteayer se firmó en Camp David (Washington) un acuerdo anti-China entre EEUU, Corea del Sur y Japón. Como nos trae Derby, dos días más tarde, un artículo del Washington Street Journal «China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?», escrito por dos periodistas chinas (leemos de la primera firmante que 'she got her start covering U.S. real estate' y, de la segunda, jovencísima, que vive en HK), nos cuenta que el 'MODELO' (sic) del que se ha aprovechado China estaría ya agotado:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4?st=1gd9k20vwinw2th
La economía china seguiría pobretoncilla, pero ahogada en ladrillos y deuda. Y el MODELO popularcapitalista occidental, más bonito que un San Luis, inalcanzable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO2QwTDrlj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uBDe4LDLck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bHpaAOpQcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUNLiNz-EUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMZ8vNPAi2o
Qué poquito queda, señoras, señores.]

[asustadísimos]

[La culpa del cambio de modelo occidental NO la tiene China.]

[asustadísimos]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogt-WgEndsc
¿«Bad folks» (mala gente)? El juicio moral trata de actos, no de personas. ¡Cuidado!]

[Cadavre Exquis]

[Anteayer se firmó en Camp David (Washington) un acuerdo anti-China entre EEUU, Corea del Sur y Japón. Como nos trae Derby, dos días más tarde, un artículo del Washington Street Journal «China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?», escrito por dos periodistas chinas (leemos de la primera firmante que 'she got her start covering U.S. real estate' y, de la segunda, jovencísima, que vive en HK), nos cuenta que el 'MODELO' (sic) del que se ha aprovechado China estaría ya agotado:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4?st=1gd9k20vwinw2th
La economía china seguiría pobretoncilla, pero ahogada en ladrillos y deuda. Y el MODELO popularcapitalista occidental, más bonito que un San Luis, inalcanzable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO2QwTDrlj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uBDe4LDLck
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bHpaAOpQcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUNLiNz-EUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMZ8vNPAi2o
Qué poquito queda, señoras, señores.]

China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?
The economic model that took the country from poverty to great-power status seems broken, and everywhere are signs of distress

By Lingling Wei and Stella Yifan Xie | Aug. 20, 2023

A stalled highway construction project in Guizhou province, China. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

For decades, China powered its economy by investing in factories, skyscrapers and roads. The model sparked an extraordinary period of growth that lifted China out of poverty and turned it into a global giant whose export prowess washed across the globe.

Now the model is broken.

What worked when China was playing catch-up makes less sense now that the country is drowning in debt and running out of things to build. Parts of China are saddled with under-used bridges and airports. Millions of apartments are unoccupied. Returns on investment have sharply declined.

Signs of trouble extend beyond China’s dismal economic data to distant provinces, including Yunnan in the southwest, which recently said it would spend millions of dollars to build a new Covid-19 quarantine facility, nearly the size of three football fields, despite China having ended its “zero-Covid” policy months ago, and long after the world moved on from the pandemic.

Other localities are doing the same. With private investment weak and exports flagging, officials say they have little choice but to keep borrowing and building to stimulate their economies.

Economists now believe China is entering an era of much slower growth, made worse by unfavorable demographics and a widening divide with the U.S. and its allies, which is jeopardizing foreign investment and trade. Rather than just a period of economic weakness, this could be the dimming of a long era.

“We’re witnessing a gearshift in what has been the most dramatic trajectory in economic history,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor who specializes in economic crises. 

What will the future look like? The International Monetary Fund puts China’s GDP growth at below 4% in the coming years, less than half of its tally for most of the past four decades. Capital Economics, a London-based research firm, figures China’s trend growth has slowed to 3% from 5% in 2019, and will fall to around 2% in 2030.

Sources: The Lowy Institute based on UN Population Division data (working-age population); The Lowy Institute (productivity); Bruegel (returns)

At those rates, China would fail to meet the objective set by President Xi Jinping in 2020 of doubling the economy’s size by 2035. That would make it harder for China to graduate from the ranks of middle-income emerging markets and could mean that China never overtakes the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, its longstanding ambition.

Many previous predictions of China’s economic undoing have missed the mark. China’s burgeoning electric-vehicle and renewable energy industries are reminders of its capacity to dominate markets. Tensions with the U.S. could galvanize China to accelerate innovations in technologies such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors, unlocking new avenues of growth. And Beijing still has levers to pull to stimulate growth if it chooses, such as by expanding fiscal spending.

Even so, economists widely believe that China has entered a more challenging period, in which previous methods of boosting growth yield diminishing returns. 

Some of these strains were apparent before the pandemic. Beijing was able to keep growth ticking over by borrowing more and relying on a booming housing market, which in some years accounted for more than 25% of China’s gross domestic product.

Residential buildings developed by Country Garden Holdings. One of the country’s largest surviving property developers, Country Garden Holdings is on the cusp of a possible default. Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News

The country’s initial success in containing Covid-19, and a surge in pandemic spending by U.S. consumers, further masked China’s economic troubles. The housing bubble has since popped, Western demand for Chinese products has ebbed and borrowing has reached unsustainable levels.

The outlook has darkened considerably in recent months. Manufacturing activity has contracted, exports have declined, and youth unemployment has reached record highs. One of the country’s largest surviving property developers, Country Garden Holdings, is on the cusp of a possible default as the overall economy slips into deflation.

Japan-like slowdown?

Without more aggressive stimulus from Beijing, and meaningful efforts to revive private sector risk-taking, some economists believe China’s slowdown could snowball into prolonged stagnation akin to what Japan has experienced since the 1990s, when the bursting of its real-estate bubble led to years of deflation and limited growth.

Source: World Bank

Unlike Japan, however, China would be entering such a period before reaching rich-world status, with per capita incomes far below more advanced economies. China’s national income per person reached about $12,850 last year, below the current threshold of $13,845 that the World Bank classifies as the minimum for a “high-income” country. Japan’s per capita national income in 2022 was about $42,440, and the U.S.’s was about $76,400.

A weaker Chinese economy could also undermine popular support for Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in recent decades, though there is no current indication of organized opposition. Some U.S. analysts worry Beijing could respond to slower growth by becoming more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad, raising the risks of conflict, including potentially over the self-governing island of Taiwan.

At an Aug. 10 political fundraiser, President Biden called China’s economic problems a “ticking time bomb” which could spur its leaders to “do bad things.”

Beijing fired back with a commentary by its official Xinhua News Agency, saying Biden “intends to take smearing China as part of his ‘grand strategy’ to shoot America’s economic troubles.” The commentary also described China’s economic recovery this year as robust, despite some challenges.

Chinese President Xi Jinping inspects construction sites of a rail station and an international trade center in Hebei Province, in May. Photo: Yan Yan/Xinhua/Zuma Press

Construction of a high-speed interchange in China’s Henan Province shown in June. Photo: Cfoto/DDP/Zuma Press

Chinese officials have taken some modest steps to revive growth, including cutting interest rates, and have pledged to do more if conditions worsen. The State Council Information Office, which handles media inquiries for China’s leadership, didn’t respond to questions.

“Certain Western politicians and media have exaggerated and hyped up the current difficulties in China’s post-Covid economic recovery,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Aug. 16. “Facts will prove them wrong.”

‘Chinese Century’

The transition marks a stunning change. China consistently defied economic cycles in the four decades since Deng Xiaoping started an era of “reform and opening” in 1978, embracing market forces and opening China to the West, in particular through international trade and investment.

Source: World Bank

During that period, China increased per capita income 25-fold and lifted more than 800 million Chinese people out of poverty, according to the World Bank—more than 70% of the total poverty reduction in the world. China evolved from a nation racked by famine into the world’s second-largest economy, and America’s greatest competitor for leadership.

Academics were so enthralled by China’s rise that some referred to a “Chinese Century,” with China dominating the world economy and politics, similar to how the 20th century was known as the “American Century.”

China’s boom was underpinned by unusually high levels of domestic investment in infrastructure and other hard assets, which accounted for about 44% of GDP each year on average between 2008 and 2021. That compared with a global average of 25% and around 20% in the U.S., according to World Bank data.

Such heavy spending was made possible in part by a system of “financial repression” in which state banks set deposit rates low, which meant they could raise funds inexpensively and fund building projects. China added tens of thousands of miles of highways, hundreds of airports, and the world’s largest network of high-speed trains.

Over time, however, evidence of overbuilding became apparent. 

About one-fifth of apartments in urban China, or at least 130 million units, were estimated to be unoccupied in 2018, the latest data available, according to a study by China’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.


A high-speed rail station in Danzhou, a city in China’s southern province of Hainan, cost $5.5 million to build but was never put into use because passenger demand was so low, according to Chinese media reports. The Hainan government said keeping the station open would incur “massive losses.” Efforts to reach the local government were unsuccessful.

Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in the country with GDP per capita of less than $7,200 last year, boasts more than 1,700 bridges and 11 airports, more than the total number of airports in China’s top four cities. The province had an estimated $388 billion in outstanding debt at the end of 2022, and in April had to ask for aid from the central government to shore up its finances.

A passenger waits at Yuezhao Airport, in Guizhou province. Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in the country, boasts more than 1,700 bridges and 11 airports, more than the total number of airports in China’s top four cities. Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

The Huajiang Gorge Bridge under construction in Guizhou province, shown in May. Photo: Cfoto/NurPhoto/Zuma Press

Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University, said China’s economic ascent draws parallels to what many other Asian economies went through during their periods of rapid urbanization, as well as what European countries such as Germany experienced after World War II, when major investments in infrastructure boosted growth.

At the same time, decades of overbuilding in China resembles Japan’s infrastructure construction boom in the late 1980s and 1990s, which led to overinvestment.

“The leading point is they are running into diminishing returns in building stuff,” he said, “There are limits to how far you can go with it.”

With so many needs met, economists estimate China now has to invest about $9 to produce each dollar of GDP growth, up from less than $5 a decade ago, and a little over $3 in the 1990s.

Returns on assets by private firms have declined to 3.9% from 9.3% five years ago, according to Bert Hofman, head of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. State companies’ returns have retreated to 2.8% from 4.3%.

China’s labor force, meanwhile, is shrinking, and productivity growth is slowing. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, productivity gains contributed about a third of China’s GDP growth, Hofman’s analysis shows. That ratio has declined to less than one sixth in the past decade.

Deepening debt

The solution for many parts of the country has been to keep borrowing and building. Total debt, including that held by various levels of government and state-owned companies, climbed to nearly 300% of China’s GDP as of 2022, surpassing U.S. levels and up from less than 200% in 2012, according to Bank for International Settlements data.

Much of the debt was incurred by cities. Limited by Beijing in their ability to borrow directly to fund projects, they turned to off-balance sheet financing vehicles whose debts are expected to reach more than $9 trillion this year, according to the IMF.

Source: Bank for International Settlements

Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic research firm, estimates that only about 20% of financing firms used by local governments to fund projects have enough cash reserves to meet their short-term debt obligations, including bonds owned by domestic and foreign investors.

In Yunnan, location of the giant quarantine center, heavy infrastructure spending lifted growth for years. Officials spent hundreds of billions of dollars including on Asia’s tallest suspension bridge, more than 6,000 miles of expressways and more airports than many other regions in China.

The projects boosted tourism and helped expand trade of Yunnan products including tobacco, machinery and metals. From 2015 to 2020, Yunnan was one of the fastest-growing regions in China. Growth has weakened in the past few years. The slumping property market has hit local finances hard, as revenue from land sales dries up.

The Longjiang Bridge, in west Yunnan. Officials spent hundreds of billions of dollars including on Asia’s tallest suspension bridge, more than 6,000 miles of expressways and more airports than many other regions in China. Photo: Imagine China/Reuters

Yunnan’s debt-to-revenue ratio climbed to 151% in 2021, breaching a 150% level designated as alarming by the IMF, and up from 108% in 2019, according to Lianhe Ratings, a Chinese rating agency. Fitch Ratings earlier this year said financing firms used by the province to fund infrastructure construction were risky because of the size of their borrowings and the government’s strained finances.

Yet Yunnan has continued to hatch big schemes. In early 2020, the Yunnan government said it planned to spend nearly $500 billion on hundreds of infrastructure projects, including a more than $15 billion program aimed at diverting water from parts of the Yangtze River to the dry center of the province.

A February plan issued by Wenshan, a city in Yunnan, listed the “permanent” quarantine center as one of several measures aimed at promoting economic stability. Once the government officially put out a bid in June for its construction, local residents questioned the use of funds.

“It’s such a waste of money,” wrote one user of Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in China.

A Yunnan official confirmed the plan to build the quarantine facility, which is expected to be completed at the end of this year, but declined to comment further.
Tighter control

In Beijing’s corridors of power, senior officials have recognized that the growth model of past decades has reached its limits. In a blunt speech to a new generation of party leaders last year, Xi took aim at officials for relying on borrowing for construction to expand economic activities.


“Some people believe that development means investing in projects and scaling up investments,” he said, while warning, “you can’t walk the old path with new shoes.” Xi and his team so far have done little to shift away from the country’s old growth model.

The most obvious solution, economists say, would be for China to shift toward promoting consumer spending and service industries, which would help create a more balanced economy that more resembles those of the U.S. and Western Europe. Household consumption makes up only about 38% of GDP in China, relatively unchanged in recent years, compared with around 68% in the U.S., according to the World Bank.

Source: World Bank

Changing that would require China’s government to undertake measures aimed at encouraging people to spend more and save less. That could include expanding China’s relatively meager social safety net with greater health and unemployment benefits.

Xi and some of his lieutenants remain suspicious of U.S.-style consumption, which they see as wasteful at a time when China’s focus should be on bolstering its industrial capabilities and girding for potential conflict with the West, people with knowledge of Beijing’s decision-making say.

The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires.

A plan announced in late July to promote consumption was criticized by economists both in and outside China for lacking details. It suggested promoting sports and cultural events, and pushed for building more convenience stores in rural areas.

Vendors wait for customers at a store in Shanghai in August. Photo: Raul Ariano/Bloomberg News

A worker monitors production at a semiconductor manufacturer in Suqian city in east China’s Jiangsu province in February. Photo: Fang Dongxu/Avalon/Zuma Press

Instead, guided by a desire to strengthen political control, Xi’s leadership has doubled down on state intervention to make China an even bigger industrial power, strong in government-favored industries such as semiconductors, EVs and AI.

While foreign experts don’t doubt China can make headway in these areas, they alone aren’t enough to lift up the entire economy or create enough jobs for the millions of college graduates entering the workforce, economists say.

Beijing has spent billions of dollars to try to build up the country’s semiconductor industry and reduce its dependence on the West. That has resulted in expanded production of less-sophisticated chips, but not the advanced semiconductors produced by companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Among the projects that failed were two high-profile foundries that received hundreds of millions of dollars in government support.

Last week, just as Beijing released a barrage of disappointing economic data, the party’s premier journal, Qiushi, published a speech made by Xi six months earlier to senior officials, in which the leader emphasized the importance of focusing on long-term goals instead of pursuing Western-style material wealth. “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” Xi said in the speech.

Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com and Stella Yifan Xie at stella.xie@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 21, 2023, print edition as 'China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over, Raising Fears of Extended Slump'.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

40% of Workers Will Have to Reskill in the Next Three Years Due to AI, Says IBM Study
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 20, 2023 @10:34AM from the AI-meets-HR dept.

IBM's business research organization (the IBM Institute for Business Value), released results from a new global study. Its conclusion? "The world of work has changed compared to even six months ago."

Executives surveyed estimate that 40% of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years. That could translate to 1.4 billion of the 3.4 billion people in the global workforce, according to World Bank statistics. Respondents also report that building new skills for existing employees is a top talent issue.

Workers at all levels could feel the effects of generative AI, but entry-level employees are expected to see the biggest shift. Seventy-seven percent of executive respondents say entry-level positions are already seeing the effects of generative AI and that will intensify in the next few years. Only 22% of respondents report the same for executive or senior management roles.

AI can open up more possibilities for employees by enhancing their capabilities. In fact, 87% of executives surveyed believe employees are more likely to be augmented than replaced by generative AI. That varies across functions — 97% of executives think employees in procurement are more likely to be augmented than replaced, compared to 93% for employees in risk and compliance, 93% for finance, 77% for customer service and 73% for marketing...

With AI primed to take on more manual and repetitive tasks, employees surveyed report engaging in impactful work is the top factor they care about beyond compensation and job security — more important than flexible work arrangements, growth opportunities and equity. On top of that, nearly half of employees surveyed believe the work they do is far more important than who they work for or who they work with regularly...

ZDNet explains the report's methodology:

To find answers to these questions, IBM pulled data from two prior studies, one survey of 3,000 C-level executives across 28 countries and another of 21,000 workers in 22 nations...

According to IBM IBV research, tech adopters who successfully reskill to adapt "technology-driven job changes report a revenue growth rate premium of 15% on average" and those who focus on AI "see a 36% higher revenue growth rate than their peers." "AI won't replace people — but people who use AI will replace people who don't," said IBM in the report.

The new skill paradigm shifts technical skills that were typically prioritized, such as proficiency in STEM, which was the most critical skill in 2016, to the least priority in 2023. The reason is that now tools like ChatGPT allow workers to do more with less knowledge, as noted by the report. Now there is a bigger emphasis on people skills such as team management, the ability to work effectively in team environments, the ability to communicate effectively, and the willingness to be adaptable to change, which all shifted to top the most critical skills required of the workforce in 2023.

The report ultimately suggests HR leaders redesign work and operating models "to shepherd their organizations into the future."

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

Meta Threatens to Fire Workers for Return-to-Office Infractions in Leaked Memo
Posted by EditorDavid on Monday August 21, 2023 @03:34AM from the unfriending dept.

In a Thursday memo, Meta's "Head of People" told employees "that their managers would receive their badge data and that repeated violations of the new three-day-a-week requirement could cause workers to lose their jobs," writes SFGate (citing a report from Insider):

In June, the Menlo Park-based firm announced its plan to require that most employees work from an office at least three days each week — it goes into effect Sept. 5... Meta confirmed the update to SFGATE... Goler's note on the return-to-office requirements, Insider reports, reads, "As with other company policies, repeated violations may result in disciplinary action, up to and including a Performance rating drop and, ultimately, termination if not addressed."

As for employees who are grandfathered into a remote work arrangement (the firm bars managers from opening more of these positions), the note lays down a strict policy: If remote employees consistently come into the office more than four times every two months outside major events, they'll be shifted to the three-day-a-week plan.

"We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement sent to SFGATE. "In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we're being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work."

The article notes that Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in 2020 that Meta would become "the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," speculating that half the company could be permanently remote within a decade.

"However, in 2023, which Zuckerberg dubbed Meta's 'year of efficiency,' employees have seen a remote-first culture melt away. In March, as the executive announced 10,000 layoffs on top of a huge cut in November, he wrote that early-career engineers do better when they're working in person at least three days a week."

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2023-08-21/santander-dispara-las-ventas-de-su-gestora-de-suelo-y-refuerza-la-promocion-propia.html

Saludos.