If the President, Congress and regulators would just leave matters alone--go on a long vacation, say--the economy would show positive growth by the second half of this year. Call me nuts, but I think a second-quarter positive surprise would be possible.
The Fed has done its job. (Maybe too well, but that's another story for another day.) Consumer sentiment and spending have bounced back. The headwinds that remain have less to do with bank stress tests and more to do with CEO mood. The Business Roundtable, which represents big business, reported "record low" CEO confidence in April:
- 71% of CEOs plan more layoffs in the next six months.
- Most see declines in capital spending.
- The CEO Economic Outlook Index was negative for the first time.
Let me say this again: The yield curve predicts growth. Check. Consumer sentiment and spending are up. Check. But CEO confidence is lousy, and CEOs are not investing for growth. Whoops. This raises the question: Why are CEOs in such a low mood?
Answer: If you are a CEO in financial services, manufacturing, energy production or health care, you will see more regulation. Period, end of story. Your response to forthcoming regulation of yet-to-be-determined complexity will be to hunker down. Keep your name out of the news. Improve the balance sheet. Hold tight. This is why the U.S. economy--which wants to turn the corner--is still stuck in the intersection.
My friend the economist Brian Wesbury disagrees: "Businesses can't contract forever if consumers are bouncing back. With Fed policy supereasy, velocity reviving and inventories shrinking, a revival on the business side of the economy is on tap for later this year." Brian, I hope you're right.
In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes wrote that the 1937--38 "depression within the Depression" occurred when capital went on strike. President Roosevelt's willingness to "try anything" (including retroactive taxation, laws against discount pricing and an attempt at packing the Supreme Court) had businesses and their backers so confused over FDR's rules that they simply withdrew.
This is the risk of President Obama's willingness to "do what it takes." Those words sound positive and action-oriented. They really mean "anything can happen." The tearing up of legal contracts? That can happen. Limits to salary and travel? That can happen. Bullying by the Environmental Protection Agency? That can happen. Nationalization of General Motors (GM) and Citigroup (C)? That can happen. Nobody knows for sure what will happen. Government is sorting it out day by day.
The yield curve predicts good news. Consumers are bored with the recession and are ready to come back. But CEOs are nervous about deploying capital for growth, and understandably so.
GE's Holographic Disc Challenges Cloud Streaming
WE'VE ALL HEARD of browser wars and platform wars, but it seems a new battle may be looming large on the horizon, and that battle will be waged on the media storage front, with the amorphous but growing cloud pitted against the disc.
Yestertday, General Electric said its R&D department had made a "major breakthrough in the development of next generation optical storage technology". The firm announced its boffins down in the labs had been toying with a new holographic optical storage disc, which could allegedly support up to 500GB of data, roughly equivalent to 100 DVDs - Blu-ray discs hold between 25GB and 50GB.
The disc - purportedly the same physical size as a regular DVD - is micro-holographic, meaning it can store data in three dimensions and allows for both read and write.
GE reckons that by the time it gets its discs out of the labs and onto shelves, they'll appeal not only to the archive industry, but also to the general public who could also put the potential terabyte of data to good use.
The firm says it will also be able to build players for the discs with backwards compatibility so that they can support existing DVD and Blu-ray tech.
Brian Lawrence, who leads GE's Holographic Storage programme said GE's research meant "The day when you can store your entire high definition movie collection on one disc and support high resolution formats like 3D television is closer than you think.''
But Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of Otoy and Lightstage, sees the future of multimedia storage very differently indeed from GE.
Urbach's project, the Fusion Render Cloud/FRC (http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050580/amd-charlie-boswell-talks-fusion-render-cloud), embraced and adopted by chip giant AMD, is all about live streaming of media directly to a user's device, with the contents stored in the cloud.
"FRC supports 8kx8k streaming at up to 120 fps on a single GPU," Urbach told the INQ adding that FRC and OTOY "can encode uploaded streams to the cloud with the same codec as the downstream content".
"Live streaming is the real next frontier, not bigger discs," went on Urbach, adding that his technology gave users the best of both worlds as it allowed them to both stream HD content in real time and store it locally for offline viewing anytime.
Urbach noted AMD and Otoy were working on adding virtual worlds and even linear content to FRC, ensuring it carried on evolving, and spanning Terabytes of data.
"So," concluded Urbach, "going back to storing everything on a fixed disc the consumer has to physically possess seems like a step backwards to me."
2020 Forecast: The Future of Learning
"You as a pupil will be placed in the centre. Personalised education means that the school and the teachers start from and adapt themselves to your goals, your ambitions and your potentials ....The fundamental principle behind our method of learning is the conviction that all pupils are different and that they learn in different ways and at different rates, and that it is the school´s task to meet these differences."
"You will have a teacher as a personal tutor who will follow you through your school years, help you and train you in planning and developing your learning strategies, follow up your school work and be available for support and control. As you learn to set your goals yourself and to plan your own time, you will be allowed to take a greater responsibility for your own studies. Thus, our method of working will teach you to take personal responsibility and to become independent."
This quote is not from a future scenario planning exercise, it's a description of a school, actually 22 schools with 10,000 students, but as you may have guessed from the spelling, they're not in the US. The chain is Kunskapsskolan in Sweden where a national voucher system supports innovative schools. Their web site is a pretty good description of where learning is headed--at least in places where leadership is focused more on kids and the future than adults and the past.
The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released the Future of Learning, a map that points into the fog. Like Clayton Christensen's book Disrupting Class, Future of Learning is really a list of change forces more than a forecast. Both are important contributions.
Like Kunskapsskolan, the Forecast points to personalization as the biggest change on the learning horizon. The "emerging toolset for designing personalized learner-centered experiences and environments" will utilize "data about preferences and interactions." Think 1) World of Warcraft for science, 2) Facebook for homework help, and 3) YouTube for a customized series of selected learning videos and lectures.
The second big change force is the development of a global learning economy....
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