Word: trades
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...transformation. China has come to depend too much upon exports and investment for growth. What's needed is economic rebalancing, so that domestic consumption contributes more to expansion. This transition would help not only China - it would also help to stabilize the global economy by easing China's massive trade and current-account surpluses. With American consumer spending on the wane, China needs to rely less on U.S. markets to absorb its manufactured goods. The country's growing armies of middle-class consumers are being called upon to fill the vacuum to ensure the country can remain on its blistering...
...Iran has also stepped in to fill Russia's shoes as a natural gas middleman. A new gas pipeline connecting Iran and Turkmenistan is expected to open in December, nearly doubling the gas trade between the countries to 700 billion cubic feet a year. Because Iran already has one of the world's largest gas reserves, most of the imported Turkmen gas would be resold for profit. Not to be outdone, China signed a 30-year deal with Turkmenistan in June to buy up to 1.1 trillion cubic feet of Turkmen gas annually, starting in 2011. Work is expected...
...Crazy talk, I know. Where is this coming from? Well, it began with some reading I've been doing about the trade-offs we make for ultra-cheap goods-the child workers in Bangladesh who sew our clothes and brush their teeth with ash since they can't afford toothpaste, the oceanic dead zones that come with $5 factory-farmed salmon filets. They're the sorts of stories that make a person think that buying carts full of cheap stuff-ensuring the production of even more cheap stuff-shouldn't be the social goal we've made...
...long they expected any of their stuff to last. For that's the other big trade-off we make for low-priced goods-often cheap simply means cheap. Shell likes to tell the story of how she once bought three blenders in quick succession; the flimsy blades were no match for the ice that goes into smoothies. When "low cost" is the marketing trope we most respond to, quality easily falls by the wayside. And that state of affairs, Shell concludes based on the response to her book, bothers no one as much as the less affluent people who inexpensive...
...bluster - railing against an "axis of evil" - is easier to sell than a foreign policy based in nuance. Of course, external events count a lot: the ratings of Bushes I and II were bolstered, respectively, by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the flattening of the World Trade Center. Reagan's rating - 53% and headed south - was dampened by a deepening recession. (See TIME's Person of the Year: Barack Obama...