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Room for Debate asks whether John O. Brennan’s connections to harsh interrogations and drone strikes make him a sound choice to head the agency, or a troubling symbol.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/business/economy/consumer-debt-increases-on-car-and-school-loans.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The industrial action, the culmination of months of simmering tension between workers and the airline, led to the immediate cancellation of 600 flights affecting 70,000 travelers, the airline said, forcing Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s beleaguered government to try to broker a settlement. An emergency meeting of the national workplace relations tribunal adjourned without any resolution on Sunday but was to resume later in the day.
More than 60 planes were in the air when the grounding was announced and they continued to their destinations, the company said. Passengers holding tickets were being rebooked onto other airlines at the airline’s expense, Qantas said.
“I’m looking at this dispute as prime minister and at its implications for our economy,” Ms. Gillard said at a news conference.
A series of labor disputes has hit the airline, the world’s 10th largest, as employees have voiced concern about jobs being moved out of Australia. Qantas has been forced to reduce and reschedule flights for weeks because of the actions, which have included strikes and refusal to work overtime.
Alan Joyce, the airline’s chief executive, said that its fleet of 108 aircraft in up to 22 countries would remain grounded until Qantas reached agreement over pay and work conditions with the unions representing pilots, mechanics and ground staff. Qantas employs about 35,000 people in Australia.
The decision drew sharp reaction from the government and labor unions.
A spokesman for the Australian Workers’ Union, one of the country’s oldest and largest unions with more than 135,000 members, criticized the airline’s decision to ground its fleet without notice. “Words can’t express our anger at the unilateral decision Qantas management has taken — as well as the impact it will have on all Qantas workers and the thousands of travelers now left stranded in Australia and around the world,” the national secretary of the group, Paul Howes, said.
“Unions rightly give 72 hours’ notice before industrial action, but Qantas management has given no notice before this wildcat grounding of their fleet,” he said in a statement on the union site.
The airline said that beginning Monday it would lock out all employees involved in the dispute, including pilots and the members of the engineers, catering and ground-handling associations. The grounding of the fleet will cost the airline an estimated $21 million a day. Qantas said it had already been losing $16 million a week in revenue as a result of the job actions.
“This is a very tense environment,” Mr. Joyce said at a news conference in Sydney. “Individual reactions to the lockout may be unpredictable.”
Barry Jackson of the Australian and International Pilots Association told Sky News that Qantas had “hijacked the nation.” Mr. Jackson added, “It’s forcing the government’s hand on this.”
The move immediately threw into disarray travelers’ plans. Australia’s Foreign Ministry was adding emergency staff in Canberra to help Australians who are stranded because of the cancellations.
The leader of Australia’s political opposition, Tony Abbott, wasted no time in weighing in, and he suggested Ms. Gillard’s Labor government was too close to the unions involved and was putting the country’s prestige at risk.
“There’s going to be massive public inconvenience, there’s going to be massive disruption to business and there’s going to be a very big hit on Australia’s international reputation because Qantas really is around the world, to a considerable extent, the face and the symbol of Australia,” he said in televised remarks.
Qantas has several flights a day from Sydney to Kennedy Airport in New York, and to Los Angeles, Dallas and Honolulu.
Near-empty airports and angry customers became a staple of Australian television on Saturday night, as frustrated travelers took to social networking sites like Twitter to vent their frustration.
“Plane door was closed then they announced we were not going,” Christine Walker, a Qantas passenger in Los Angeles, wrote on Twitter in response to a question about her flight.
Matt Siegel contributed reporting from Sydney.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=dfdd85c76dc34bc66799fd786bcd07ca
Notions on high and low finance.
After a week of wild swings, stock markets ended with relatively mild moves for the week, proving there was no need to come home from vacation just because there was a little volatility.
Here are the weekly changes for leading indexes in the United States and the largest countries in Europe and Asia, ranked by price change in local currencies:
1. Britain, FTSE 100: +1.4%
2. Spain, IBEX: -0.3%
3. Italy, FTSE/MIB: -0.8%
4. China, CSI 300: -0.8%
5. United States, S.P. 500: -1.7%
6. France, CAC: -2.0%
7. India, Sensex: -2.7%
8. Japan, Nikkei 225: -3.6%
9. Germany, DAX: -3.8%
Permit me a few observations:
1. The only stock market that rose was the one in the country shaken by riots. Could investors be encouraged by the fact there will now be more investment (in rebuilding stores) and more spending (to restock looted inventories)?
2. The worst performer was the country whose credit has been above reproach. Could bad credit be an advantage? Maybe in this era having a good balance sheet simply adds to the risks that a country will be asked to bail out somebody else. By that logic, the United States should be grateful to Standard Poor’s for the downgrade.
3. Worries about impending disaster in recent weeks have focused on Europe and the United States, while ignoring Asia. But Asian markets as a group underperformed. Could this be a signal that the real problems lie where we are not looking? Or could it indicate that having problems is a good thing in the view of investors? Note that stocks in Spain and Italy did better than those in France and Germany.
If much of the above strikes you as ridiculous, keep that in mind the next time you read an article that confidently uses the newest economic or political developments to explain the newest market moves. If there is one thing I have learned in nearly 30 years of trying to analyze markets, it is that the answers are rarely neat and simple, and that sometimes correlations prove absolutely nothing.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d3ac1e87da4b06239e01c4c2bc45c149