FTA:  “The altered financial landscape of the university, and of the wider world, necessitates a shift away from rapid development in Allston,” Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, wrote in a letter released Thursday.

As part of a larger long-term expansion into Allston — a pet project of Lawrence H. Summers, Dr. Faust’s predecessor at Harvard and now President Obama’s chief economic adviser — the university also bought a string of buildings there over the last 20 years. But many have remained vacant, to the chagrin of Allston residents who have accused the university of buying land and holding onto it, a practice known as land banking.

The four-building science center, estimated to cost at least $1 billion, was originally scheduled to be finished in 2011. Dr. Faust’s announcement comes 10 months after she announced plans to slow the pace of the project while the university assessed whether it could continue. Harvard has since disclosed that its endowment declined 27 percent from June 2008 to June 2009, to $26 billion, and the university has made several cost-cutting moves.

In her letter, Dr. Faust said Harvard would step up efforts to revitalize Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, even as it delayed the science center.

But Harry Mattison, an Allston resident who serves on the Harvard Allston Task Force, an advisory group, said he was skeptical.

“There’s nothing new here,” Mr. Mattison said. “We need to get past vague assurances about leasing some of these decrepit buildings, to a comprehensive plan with follow-through.”

The Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, voted Tuesday to formally stop the construction. Dr. Faust, who succeeded Mr. Summers in 2007, said the university would continue to expand into Allston “as resources allow,” but only after an evaluation by a new “work team” made up of experts in design, urban planning, real estate and business strategy.

The evaluation will start in January. Meanwhile, the scientists who were supposed to occupy the new complex will work elsewhere indefinitely.

“This delay will in no way slow Harvard’s significant momentum in the life sciences,” Dr. Faust wrote.

She raised the possibility of Harvard’s teaming up with private industry, hospitals or philanthropic foundations to continue the science center construction and other Allston projects — an idea that Mr. Mattison found encouraging.

“We’re going to have to cast a wide net for creative solutions or funding for whatever is going to happen here,” he said, “because Drew Faust isn’t going to write a check. That’s clear.”

Katherine Lapp, the university’s executive vice president, said it was premature to confirm whether the science center, when construction resumes, would ultimately look the same — or have the same function — as originally proposed.

“It’s possible,” Ms. Lapp said. “The work team will determine as it goes forward what options might make sense.”

The construction will stop by March, when the first phase — the foundation and a street-level concrete deck — is finished, university officials said. But Harvard will more aggressively seek tenants for surrounding vacant buildings, Dr. Faust wrote.

Harvard will also develop and support education and job-training programs in Allston, she said, as well as plant trees and finish a new public park.

Harvard has struggled to find the kind of tenants — like shops and cafes — that Allston residents want for the vacant properties, many of which are along a dingy thoroughfare with an industrial feel. But Ms. Lapp said she was optimistic, especially since Harvard would now look to lease an additional 100,000 square feet of space in buildings that had been used to support construction of the science center.

“We think we can bring some very interesting activities into the community,” she said

Source

Check out the latest Digg Dialogg with the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Julius Genachowski, appointed under Obama’s administration in June 2009. Prior to his appointment, he spent ten years in the technology industry, working as both an executive and an  entrepreneur. Genachowski has a history of public service, serving previously at the FCC as well as clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court for two years. He received a JD from Harvard where he was co-Notes editor of the Harvard Law Review, and has a BA from Columbia University.

 Click here to view the latest vid

Digg Dialogg lets you submit your questions to notable leaders and luminaries. Rather than editors or journalists, the Digg community decides the most popular questions to be posed in the interview

Dubai.  The land of wonders, mystery, and 30% of the entire worlds crane supply.  As some of you may know, Dubai had been on an economic boom over the course of 10 years, quickly becoming the “hot spot” when it came to almost anything in the world.  Development grew at a staggering rate and international investors jumped on any opportunity they could to get a piece of the action. As a frequent visitor to Dubai and someone who owns property in the area, I have been closely following the recent events surrounding Dubai’s economic crisis and the huge effect it has on the rest of the world.  Massive amounts of international investments lost, property on a decline, but who will come to the rescue? Heres an interesting article from todays MarketWatch:

Dubai, which until last week loomed tall – literally – as an enterprising, cosmopolitan, glitzy and happy antithesis to the Middle East’s economic stagnation, has now emerged as a sad monument to all that is ill about the pan-Arab economy, which includes more than a quarter-billion people but is smaller than Spain’s.

Once the dust settles over Dubai World’s debt-default announcement last week, its many Western victims would do well to probe not only the way the emirate’s authorities treated their money but also the relationship between the entire petrodollar elite and the pan-Arab economy.

The Dubai crisis originated in a brave dream: that the Gulf’s oil riches would buy rather than produce a great financial center.

Had this transpired, it would have defied historical precedent, whereby the great modern financial centers — from London, Frankfurt and New York to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore — both followed and fed monumental industrial revolutions.

Those financial centers rose after millions had moved from the countryside to factories, where the process of their economic empowerment began, eventually giving rise to the broad, educated, affluent and socially mobile middle classes that are the backbone of healthy economies.

Metropolis in the Dunes

In the Gulf, despite the complete absence of middle classes and an industrial base, a financial metropolis was emerging from the Arabian dunes.

Dominated by Burj Dubai, the $1 billion turret that at 2,500 feet is the world’s tallest structure and by its trademark palm-shaped system of artificial islands, Dubai invested $200 billion in tourism infrastructure. On top of that, it put $20 billion into a property venture that included 30,000 houses, luxurious hotels and an artificial lake, and an additional $4 billion for 300 artificial islands.

Dubai’s emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Makhtoum, openly spoke of the need to prepare for the morning after oil, which some suspect will arrive within several generations, whether because the resource will be exhausted or alternative energies will take precedence.

But the construction frenzy transcended Dubai. To the north, the Bahrain Financial Port was planned to employ 8,000 bankers and insurance agents, while at the other end of the Arabian Peninsula the Saudis laid the cornerstone for the $27 billion King Abdullah Economic City.

And real estate was but the most visible aspect of a spendthrift Zeitgeist that swept the entire Gulf area during this decade’s seven fat years of record oil prices.

It was the time when Emirates Airlines bought a $37 billion fleet including 45 state-of-the-art double-decker Airbus A380s; when Abu-Dhabi-based Mubadala Development bought a stake in Ferrari, and Dubai International shopped for U.S. seaports while other Gulf sheikhs bought skyscrapers in Manhattan and a chunk of London’s Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

No one abroad, let alone locally, seemed to ask who makes all those decisions and how, why and at what social cost, just as western governments never questioned their steady supply of Saudi Arabia’s estimated $20 billion annual military spending — about the size of Russia’s defense budget — and its social costs.

Westerners preferred to look at the happy side of all this financial momentum, which besides welcoming rich foreigners included a genuinely progressive quest, like Qatar allowing U.S. universities to open local campuses for Arab students, a large number of them women, and like Saudi Arabia earlier this decade launching a $50 billion plan to build new roads, hospitals and schools.

The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago Inc. said today its barometer rose to 56.1, the highest level since August 2008, from 54.2 the prior month. Readings above 50 signal expansion. Milwaukee and Texas also showed gains in manufacturing, other reports showed.

Rising sales, spurred in part by government incentives, and growing demand from abroad have led to a drawdown in inventories that will boost production and sustain the recovery. Mounting job losses raise the risk spending will retrench, one reason why Federal Reserve policy makers have pledged to keep borrowing costs low “for an extended period.”

“There is definitely room for production to be coming back,” said David Semmens, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York, who forecast the index would rise. “There will be some export-led growth.”

Stocks rose, extending a monthly gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index as concern eased over a possible default by Dubai World. The S&P 500 climbed 0.4 percent to close at 1,095.63. The gauge rose 5.7 percent in November.

Economists projected the Chicago index would drop to 53, based on the median estimate of 53 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Forecasts ranged from 50 to 57.

More Orders

The Chicago purchasers’ new orders gauge climbed to 62.8, the highest level since May 2007, from 61.4 the previous month.

“The ongoing strength in that measure, a leading indicator of activity, bodes well for production gains going forward,” Michelle Girard, a senior economist at RBS Securities Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a note to clients.

An increase in bookings also propelled other regional measures this month. The National Association of Purchasing Management-Milwaukee said its factory gauge climbed to 57 from 50 in October. Manufacturing activity in Texas expanded in November for the first time in two years, according to a report from the Fed Bank of Dallas.

The figures underscore gains in earlier reports. The Fed Bank of New York’s Empire State Index showed manufacturing in its district expanded in November for a fourth month, while the Philadelphia Fed’s gauge climbed to the highest level in more than two years.

Production, Employment

Today’s report showed the Chicago group’s production index fell to 57.6 from a one-year high of 63.9 in October. The employment index improved to 41.9 from 38.3, the report showed.

A measure of prices paid for raw materials increased to 52.6 from the prior month’s 48.6, while a gauge of inventories rose to 34.9 from 32.2.

Economists watch the Chicago index for an early reading on the outlook for overall U.S. manufacturing, which makes up about 12 percent of the economy.

The Tempe, Arizona-based Institute for Supply Management group’s nationwide manufacturing index probably fell this month to 54.8 from a three-year high of 55.7 in October, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Those figures are due tomorrow.

The world’s largest economy expanded at a 2.8 percent pace from July through September after a yearlong contraction that was the worst since the 1930s, figures from the Commerce Department showed last week.

Auto Production

Automotive companies have been at the forefront of increases in manufacturing. General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. had their first combined sales gain in three years in October, helping the industry rebound from a drop in demand after the “cash for clunkers” program expired.

Sales climbed 4.1 percent from a year earlier at GM, its first monthly gain since January 2008, and 3.1 percent at Ford, the companies said Nov. 3.

“Clearly, we’re seeing improvement in the economy and in the industry,” Michael DiGiovanni, GM’s sales analyst, said on a conference call.

Many companies are counting on government stimulus to help boost profits. Eaton Corp. may win $1 billion in orders in 2010 and 2011 from stimulus spending to spur construction of schools and renovation of military bases, said the top executive of the Cleveland-based maker of circuit breakers and fuel pumps.

“We will benefit from a lot of these building projects,” Chief Executive Officer Sandy Cutler said last month in an interview. “These infrastructure-related programs always take longer to get out and get going. The time the economy is going to be recovering in 2010 is when a lot of these opportunities will actually be adding up.”

So far a few items have sold for more than expected, with boats going for a cool $1 million a piece and a custom-made jacket for $14,000, 20X the predicted sale price.  This may seem like a smart way to gain some of the funds back, but how many boats, jewels, and cars need to be sold to make up for the total $65 billion?  The chart below puts it in perspective and gives a clear picture of just how much money this SOB stole. (pardon my French, but what else do you call such a human?)

-Bilal Asgher

Click on the image to view a larger version

How much would need to be sold to pay all the victims back?

Madoff is currently serving a 150 year sentence. Details of his prison life were made public last month when it was revealed he shares his cell with a 21-year-old convicted drug offender, and “eats pizza cooked by an inmate convicted of child molestation.”

Take a look at the auction:

President Obama said before going to China this week that Asia can no longer live by shipping goods to Americans already in debt to their ears

With once being thought of as an engine of growth to help the exhausted West, China is now making matters worse. Its policies are reeking havoc on global trade and bring about the risk of tipping the world into a second leg of the great recession.  What is causing this? Why can’t we stop it before it happens? Click below to continue reading.

- Bilal Asgher

“The inherent problems of the international economic system have not been fully addressed,” said China’s president Hu Jintao. Indeed not. China is still exporting overcapacity to the rest of us on a grand scale, with deflationary consequences.

While some fret about liquidity-driven inflation, Justin Lin, World Bank chief economist, said the greater danger is that record levels of idle plant almost everywhere will feed a downward spiral of job cuts and corporate busts. “I’m more worried about deflation,” he said.

Western capitalists are complicit, of course. They rent cheap workers and cheap plant in Guangdong, then lobby Capitol Hill to prevent Congress doing anything about it. This is labour arbitrage.

At some point, American workers will rebel. US unemployment is already 17.5pc under the broad “U6″ gauge followed by Barack Obama. Realty Track said that 332,000 properties were foreclosed in October alone. More Americans have lost their homes this year than during the entire decade of the Great Depression. A backlog of 7m homes is awaiting likely seizure by lenders. If you are not paying attention to this political time-bomb, perhaps you should.

President Obama said before going to China this week that Asia can no longer live by shipping goods to Americans already in debt to their ears. “We have reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path,” he said. Failure to take that path will “put enormous strains” on America’s ties to China. Is that a threat?

It is fashionable to talk of America as the supplicant. That misreads the strategic balance. Washington can bring China to its knees at any time by shutting markets. There is no symmetry here. Any move by Beijing to liquidate its holdings of US Treasuries could be neutralized – in extremis – by capital controls. Well-armed sovereign states can do whatever they want.

If provoked, the US has the economic depth to retreat into near autarky (with NAFTA) and retool its industries behind tariff walls – as Britain did in the 1930s under Imperial Preference. In such circumstances, China would collapse. Mao statues would be toppled by street riots.

Mr Hu sounded conciliatory last week. China is taking “vigorous” steps to cut reliance on exports, still 39pc of GDP. “We want to increase people’s ability to spend,” he said.

Beijing is indeed boosting pensions and extending health insurance to the countryside so that people feel less need to save, but cultural revolutions take time. All we have seen so far are “baby steps”, says Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach.

The reality is that much of Beijing’s $600bn stimulus has been spent building yet more plant and infrastructure so that China can ship yet more goods, or has leaked into property and stocks.

Credit has exploded. Allocated by Maoist bosses for political purposes, it has become absurd. China is rolling as much steel as the next eight producers combined. It is churning more cement than the rest of the world. Fixed investment is up 53pc this year. Once you know that Hunan authorities have torn down two miles of modern flyway so that they can soak up stimulus by building it again, or that the newly-built city of Ordos is sitting empty in Inner Mongolia, you know what must come next.

Pivot Asset Management said lending has touched 140pc of GDP, “well beyond” levels that have led to crises in the past. With the revolution’s 60th birthday out of the way, the central bank has begun to tighten. New yuan loans halved in October. So be careful. Pivot said a hard-landing in China could prove as traumatic for world markets as the US sub-prime crash.

The world economy is still skating on thin ice. The West is sated with debt, the East with plant. The crisis has been contained (or masked) by zero rates and a fiscal blast, trashing sovereign balance sheets. But the core problem remains. The Anglo-sphere and Club Med are tightening belts, yet Asia is not adding enough demand to compensate. It is adding supply.

My view is that markets are still in denial about the structural wreckage of the credit bubble. There are two more boils to lance: China’s investment bubble; and Europe’s banking cover-up. I fear that only then can we clear the rubble and, very slowly, start a fresh cycle.

Source

Microsofts founder and billionaire, who in 2008 steped down from his main role at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropy work, blames a US law created in 1993 that capped the salaries of executives at $1 million and warned that any further attempts to try and limit Wall Street pay could also potentialy backfire.

“It was a bad milestone in controlling executive salaries when that $1 million cap went on,” Gates told a discussion on philanthropy in New York.

“The compensation problem is a very interesting problem. I do think compensation is often too high, but it’s a very tough problem to solve,” said Gates, who was recently ranked by Forbes as the tenth most powerful man in the world.

“What happened was a surprise to people and it comes from everybody being so optimistic and over ebullient and having a view of risk and price appreciation that was completely out of kilter.  I do worry that when the government owns an entity like AIG that you can greatly devalue that entity by having it essentially have to behave as though it part of the government,”

“It’s an unnatural situation when the government owns a lot of a private company. Unfortunately there is a view that that should exist for a long term. There’s some devaluation of what that asset would have been worth if it hadn’t had to go through that kind of management structure. It’s unavoidable,” he said

 - Bilal Asgher

The mogul said, in an interview with Sky News Australia, that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely, after enacting plans to charge people for reading their stories via their websites.  This is ridiculous. In the day and age that we live, with the internet at many of our fingertips every second of the day and the endless amount of sources out there, it’s an impossible task.  Not to mention one that most definitely will result in a mass boycott of some sort.  Web users will not stand for this and for Mr Murdoch to think otherwise is crazy.  Trying to step in and change the dynamic by which people obtain their news and information and slapping a price tag to read news online? Please.  They, like myself, will find another of the 100000000 FREE sites that provide the same quality information as those owned by the mogul.  The days of charging for “news” and information on the web are long over.

- Bilal Asgher

Steve Jobs; CEO of the Decade

In my top story of the day we take a look at, some say, the most powerful man in “technological trend setting.”  Steve Jobs is no stranger to prestigious titles or awards. At the young age of 30, he won the First National Medal of Technology.  Hes been named most admired entrepeneur among teenagers and is respected around the world as a leader in his industry. After reviving Apple from near bankruptcy in 1997 to becoming the leader and benchmark that most companies try to aspire to, its no wonder that Fortune Magazine has named him CEO of the decade.  Click below to read the article and leave any comments you may have. Do you agree? Is there someone else you feel deserves this accolade more than the “king” of Mac?

- Bilal Asgher

FTA: Jobs became a wildly successful businessman in his late 20s and early 30s as Apple rose to prominence as an early leader in home computing. However, there are numerous anecdotes of his petulant behavior that ultimately resulted in his ouster from the company he helped found in 1985.

When Jobs returned in 1997, he not only steered Apple away from possible self-destruction, he helped chart a course that led Apple to become a powerhouse in three separate industries: music, movies, and mobile phones. Arguably, the company’s iconic status in personal computing has only grown—while Apple doesn’t garner a large share of the market by unit sales, it still often sets the bar for ease of use and high style. And while Jobs’s legendary tolerance for nothing less than perfection remains, his quick temper has tempered with age.

Fortune doesn’t mention it, but I think it’s worth pointing out that Jobs was involved in another industry-changing company: Pixar. He bought the company from George Lucas in 1986, turned it in to the top 3D computer animation studio, and later sold it to Disney. Movies like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life changed animated movies forever, and four of its last six films—Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E—all received Oscars for Best Animated Feature.

Not a bad list of accomplishments for a man that, despite a bout with cancer and a recent liver transplant, is still a decade away from retirement age.

In the last ten years, Steve Jobs has helped make Apple flush with cash, with the company reporting record earnings and profits. Apple has become a tough act to follow in retail, and is a leader in portable music devices, digital music sales, smartphones, mobile app sales, and movie downloads. With such momentum behind him, Jobs may yet be the CEO of the next decade as well. As longtime friend and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison put it, “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide—with Steve that’s not always good enough.”

Source