America's aging capital stock, Japan's trade union breakthrough, instant noodles taking over the world & the decline of hobbies.
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Rigobert Nimi, « La Cité des étoiles » exposée à la Fondation Cartier, Paris. Siegfried Forster / RFI
Thank you for reading Chartbook newsletter. What keeps the project going are subscriptions from readers like you. To see the subscription options, click here
America’s aging capital stock
Source: FT
Japan’s trade union breakthrough
Japan's largest labor confederation said Friday that its member unions won an average 5.28% increase in wages this year, the biggest raise since 1991, providing impetus for a possible interest rate hike by the Bank of Japan next week. Every spring, unions and management hold talks, known as shunto, to set monthly wages ahead of the start of Japan's fiscal year in April. Negotiations at some of the country's biggest companies, including Toyota, Hitachi and Panasonic, concluded this week, with many fully meeting union demands. Nippon Steel exceeded demands, raising monthly wages by a record 35,000 yen ($237), or 14%. The 7 million-member Japanese Trade Union Confederation, or Rengo, announced its first tally of the results on Friday, covering 771 unions. The hike, which includes increases in base pay and seniority based hikes, was 1.48 percentage points higher than last year. "The important thing is whether these wage increases will spread beyond large corporations," Okumura added. "The market currently expects policy normalization to proceed at a very gradual pace. If strong wage increases are also reported among smaller companies, the BOJ would accelerate the pace of policy normalization."
Source: Nikkei Asia
America’s home price plateau
For subscribers only
Rigobert Nimi, Navigator, metal, plastic,glass & electrical components, 2011
Source: African Contemporary
America’s failing archive
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is requesting less funding for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 than it received in FY 2024, threatening to worsen an already dire budget crisis for the steward of priceless U.S. government records. NARA is seeking only $481.1 million in discretionary budget authority for FY 2025—a $9.2 million decrease from the FY 2024 annualized continuing resolution level. At the same time, its responsibilities are increasing, its facilities and technologies are aging, and requesters are waiting over a decade for responses to their declassification requests. The inadequate budget request for FY 2025 continues a trend first identified by the National Security Archive in 2022, when we found that NARA’s budget had flatlined over the previous three decades while the number of records that had to be preserved had increased exponentially. A more appropriate budget, and one that would represent less than 1/500th of a percent of President Biden’s overall budget, would nearly double NARA’s discretionary funding to $900 million. It is improbable that NARA wants this cut in funding and seems far more likely that the reduction was dictated by the Office of Management and Budget. Evidence suggests that the current situation at NARA is already grim, and a smaller budget portends a deepening crisis.
Current failures include:
A zero real-dollar increase of NARA’s budget since 1991 when accounting for inflation.
A “FOIA backlog of an estimated 183 million pages at the George W. Bush Library and [a] 128-million-page backlog at the Barack Obama Library” alone, with the ability to declassify only 500,000 pages per year in response to presidential records requests. At current rates, it would take NARA 622 years to declassify the pending declassification requests at just these two presidential libraries.
Outdated systems for accepting and preserving presidential records, which are often accessioned to NARA in newer and more varied formats than federal agency records.
A 12-year backlog at the National Declassification Center (NDC).
The lack of secure video-conferencing capability at the NDC to resolve declassification disputes.
Rapidly dwindling archival storage capacity.
A backlog of over 1,200 requests at the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which had previously been a success story for common-sense declassification of national security information.
The situation is unsustainable, but it is fixable. Without a significant influx of funds, NARA will not be able to meet its core mission to preserve and provide equitable public access to government records. Additional money would give NARA a fighting chance to correct the problems cited above, address critical staff and technology gaps, and help the agency fulfill many of the commitments it made in its FY 2022-2026 Strategic Plan—among them, to process 85 percent of its archival holdings by FY 2026, digitize 500 million pages of records (out of 12 billion pages) and put them online in the NARA Catalog
Source: National Security Archive
Instant noodles are taking over the world
If the entire (cooked) length of instant noodles sold around the world in a single year were laid out in a line, the resulting 6.2bn kilometre giga-noodle would stretch well beyond Pluto and into the depths of space. It is a fact as miserable as it is marvellous. … This ready-to-eat grub, pioneered in the late 1950s to feed a ruined Japan in the protracted aftermath of war, takes the prize for being cheap and fast, but delicious…. instant noodles are a global market that analysts estimate to be worth north of $54bn. In 2022, according to the World Instant Noodles Association, humanity collectively bought a record 121bn servings of instant noodles — some 17 per cent more than in 2018. In countries as diverse as Nigeria, Bangladesh and Turkey, the surge has been far more acute, with increases ranging from 53 per cent to 425 per cent. That represents instant noodles doing their thing: rising from the shelves to provide affordable and durable calories to inflation-hit masses. … in a term chillingly used by Japan’s instant noodle makers — households have been pulled into a global cycle of “food product down-trading”. By the end of 2022, both the US and UK consumption of instant noodles had risen 14 per cent over five years. Japan, having entered an era of inflation after decades of deflation, now eats more of them than it did in 2018, even though its population is smaller. The empowerment of instant noodles as the favourite currency in US jails points (albeit in extreme terms) to the increasing gaps that the food is called upon to fill. In his 2022 book Orange Collar Labor, the academic Michael Gibson-Light uses the testimonies of inmates and staff to describe a prison system that, in part because of financial incentives for private operators to cut costs, no longer provides enough food to sustain an adult. The instant noodles, in this environment, become critical units of survival. Much like cash, says Gibson-Light, a single noodle packet can store value for some time, act as a standardised unit of account and be easily exchanged for services and goods between buyers and sellers.
Source: FT
China’s art market bounces back
For subscribers only
Rigobert Nimi’s structures in storage
Source: Felix Features
Abolitionist John Brown in a Yiddish anarchist newspaper 1891
The decline of hobbies
In the US, membership of the American Philatelic Society peaked in 1988 at nearly 58,000. Last year, there were fewer than half that amount. In the UK, the average age of a collector is over 60. Those kinds of hobbies seem to be disappearing and the eccentric collections — old postcards, matchbooks, shells, cigar or luggage labels and the rest — seem to be in terminal decline.
Source: FT
Rigobert Nimi Ville Intergalactique, 2005
If you have scrolled this far and enjoyed the mailing, why not click below