Greece Back in Recession as Bailout Impasse Drains Economy

Greece’s economy fell back into recession in the first quarter, raising pressure on the government to reach an agreement with creditors over the next bailout payment.

Gross domestic product contracted 0.2 percent in the three months through March after shrinking 0.4 percent in the previous period, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said Wednesday. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey was for a 0.5 percent drop.

“Greek GDP numbers are not disastrous, but the more timely indicators deteriorated much more rapidly since March,” said Michael Michaelides, a fixed-income strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “So we would expect the full costs of the impasse to be reflected in the second-quarter numbers.”

The contracting economy increases the measures Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras needs to take to meet conditions set by euro-region governments and the International Monetary Fund. Greece’s government will have to raise at least 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) to meet the minimum budget targets acceptable by creditors, an official with knowledge of the discussions said.

Greece has enough cash to make it through “a couple of weeks,” Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said after a meeting of euro-area finance ministers this week. The nation paid back about 750 million euros to the IMF by drawing on a holding account at the fund, a Greek official said. The government has also raided municipal coffers to pay salaries and pensions.

‘Huge Cost’

Greece is asking for an additional Eurogroup meeting by the end of May to disburse funds because of the cash crunch, a government official said.

Reaching an accord will take time because of the need to find a balance with the Greek government’s plans, European Central Bank Executive Board Member Benoit Coeure said in response to questions in the French parliament on Wednesday. The ECB’s exposure to Greece through liquidity support to the country’s banks now stands at about 115 billion euros, he said.

“I’m sorry to say that this huge cost for the economy is the basic negotiating weapon of the other side,” Administrative Reform Minister George Katrougalos said in an interview. “They bring time limits to reach a deal to a brink, as a negotiating tactic. This is not proper behavior among partners.”

Far Apart

Greek stocks and bonds rose, extending gains after the ECB decided yesterday to maintain its assistance to Greek banks. The benchmark Athens Stock Exchange gaining 1.3 percent at 2:20 p.m. local time. Yields on 10-year notes fell 25 basis points to 10.65 percent.

The fiscal measures needed to generate 3 billion euros would bring the primary budget surplus in 2015 to just over 1 percent of GDP, a target Greek Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis said is acceptable.

Budget cuts aren’t the only thorny issue in the negotiations over the disbursement of the next emergency loans tranche for the cash-strapped economy. Differences of opinion remain on several major reforms that are really needed to get Greece back on track, Eurogroup Chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said in an interview with Dutch TV broadcaster NOS.

The retirement age, pension cuts, privatizations and the government’s intention to reinstate collective bargaining restrictions in the labor market are all areas where Greece and and its creditors remain far apart, the official said.

Greece’s economy expanded 0.8 percent in 2014 after six years of contraction wiped out about a quarter of the nation’s output. The European Commission last week cut its forecast for Greek GDP growth this year to 0.5 percent from a previous forecast of 2.5 percent.

Microsoft: Windows 10 will be on 1 billion devices in two to three years

Summary:Microsoft execs claim Windows 10 will be installed on 1 billion devices within two to three years time, meaning by late summer 2018.

Microsoft execs have drawn a line in the sand, predicting that Windows 10 will be installed on 1 billion devices within two to three years.

Terry Myerson, the head of Microsoft's Operating Systems Group, went public with that ambitious claim during the first day of the company's Build 2015 developer conference in San Francisco.

The 1 billion figure encompasses all kinds of devices that will be able to run the OS in some flavor, including desktops, PCs, laptops, tablets, Windows Phones, Xbox One gaming consoles, Surface Hub conferencing systems, HoloLens augmented reality glasses and various Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Microsoft is developing Windows 10 so that it has a common core, a single store and a more unified set of development tools and programming interfaces, enabling the guts of the operating system to run on all these different form factors.

Microsoft is doing a lot to try to convince Windows users that it will benefit them to upgrade early and quickly to Windows 10. Microsoft execs have said they'll make Windows 10 free to Windows 7 and Windows 8 consumers(and some small business customers) the first year that the OS is commercially available. Microsoft also has made Windows 10 available for "zero dollars" and/or for a substantially reduced rate to its PC and phone partners in order to get more of them to bundle the OS with their hardware.

Making Windows 10 more appealing to business users who skipped Windows 8 because its UI and touch-first focus made it less appealing to customers relying on keyboards and mice -- and who didn't want to incur hefty retraining costs -- is a big priority at Microsoft. It should be, given Windows 7, and even the no-longer-supported Windows XP both have more market share than Windows 8.

There are currently an estimated 1.5 billion or so PCs running some version of Windows worldwide.

Updated: As a few readers have noted, this 1 billion by summer 2018 means we won't see a Windows 11, 12 or whatever, coming out any time in the next couple years. Yes, that shouldn't be surprising to folks who understand what "Windows as a Service" means. Microsoft plans to continue to push updates -- some minor and some major -- to Windows 10 for the foreseeable future.

Work tools: How have changed in 5 years

The State of Our Planet Is Better Than Ever

Stephen Moore April 22, 2015       

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is a distinguished visiting fellow for the Project for Economic Growth at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research.

Today is Earth Day and to hear the experts like Usher and Al Gore tell the story, the planet is in a miserable state. We’re running out of our natural resources, we’re overpopulating the globe and running out of room, the air that we breathe is becoming toxic, the oceans are rising and soon major coastal cities will be underwater, and the Earth is, of course, heating up, except when it is cooling down.

This is perhaps the single greatest misinformation campaign in world history. Virtually none of these claims are even close to the truth—except for the fact that our climate is always changing as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.

Since the first Earth Day back in the 1970s, the environmentalists—those who worship the creation rather than the Creator—have issued one false prediction of Armageddon after another. Yet despite a batting average approaching zero, the media and our schools keep parroting their declinism as if they were oracles rather than proven shysters.

Here are the factual realities that we should be celebrating on Earth Day.

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1) Natural resources are more abundant and affordable today than ever before in history. Short-term (sometimes decades-long) volatility aside, the price of most natural resources—from cocoa to cotton to coal—is cheaper today in real terms than 50, 100, or 500 years ago. This has happened even as the world’s population has nearly tripled. Technology has far outpaced depletion of the Earth’s resources.

2) Energy—the master resource—is super abundant. Remember when people like Paul Ehrlich nearly 50 years ago and Barack Obama just three years ago—warned the we were running out of oil and gas. Today, thanks to the new age of oil and gas thanks to fracking, the United States has hundreds of years of petroleum and an estimated 290 years of coal. Keep in mind, this may be a low-ball estimate; since 2000, the Energy Information Administration’s estimates of recoverable reserves have actually increased by more than 7 percent.

We’re not running out of energy, we are running into it.

3) Air and water. Since the late 1970s, pollutants in the air have plunged. Lead pollution plunged by more than 90 percent, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide by more than 50 percent, with ozone and nitrogen dioxide declining as well. This means that emissions per capita have declined even as the economy in terms of real GDP nearly tripled. By nearly every standard measure it is much, much, much cleaner today in the United States than 50 and 100 years ago. The air is so clean now that the EPA worries about carbon dioxide which isn’t even a pollutant. (And, by the way, carbon emissions are falling too, thanks to fracking). One hundred years ago, about one in four deaths in the U.S. was due to contaminants in drinking water. But from 1971-2002, fewer than three people per year in the U.S. were documented to have died from water contamination.

4) There is no Malthusian nightmare of overpopulation. Birth rates have fallen by about one-half around the world over the last 50 years. Developed countries are having too few kids, not too many. Even with a population of 7.3 billion people, average incomes, especially in poor countries, have surged over the last 40 years. The number of people in abject poverty fell by 1 billion from 1981 to 2011, even as global population increased by more than 1.5 billion.

5) Global per capita food production is 40 percent higher today than as recently as 1950. In most nations the nutrition problem today is obesity—too many calories consumed—not hunger. The number of famines and related deaths over the last 100 years has fallen in half. More than 12 million lives on average were lost each decade from the 1920s-1960s to famine. Since then, fewer than 4 million lives on average per decade were lost. Tragically, these famines are often caused by political corruption—not nature. Furthermore, the price of food has fallen steadily in the U.S.—and most other nations steadily for 200 years.

6) The rate of death and physical destruction from natural disasters or severe weather changes has plummeted over the last 50 to 100 years. Loss of life from hurricanes, floods, heat, droughts, and so on is at or near record lows. This is because we have much better advance warning systems, our infrastructure is much more durable, and we have things like air conditioning, to adapt to weather changes. ?We are constantly discovering new ways to harness and even tame nature.

Earth Day should be a day of joy and celebration that life on this bountiful planet is better than anytime in human history. The state of the planet has never been in such fine shape by almost every objective measure. The Chicken Littles are as wrong today as they were 50 years ago. This is very good news for those who believe that one of our primary missions as human beings is to make life better over time and to leave our planet better off for future generations.

Happy Earth Day.

Tesla Wants to Power Wal-Mart (BusinessWeek)

Last month, Elon Musk tweeted that a “major new Tesla product line -- not a car -- will be unveiled” on April 30. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

Tesla Motors Inc. is signing up big customers like Wal-Mart and Cargill, accelerating efforts to become a leader in energy storage -- a new market that’s poised to boost sales and profit at the electric vehicle pioneer.

Next week, Tesla will make a deeper push beyond the car business when it unveils batteries for homes and utilities.

A review of California’s Self Generation Incentive Program, or SGIP, shows Tesla has ambitions to sell batteries for a range of commercial uses, from powering its factories to reducing electric bills at schools and wineries. Tesla is on track to reap as much as $65 million in SGIP rebates, which are designed to encourage investment in alternative energy.

“Tesla has been able to install more than 100 projects, really without anyone noticing,” said Andrea James, an analyst with Dougherty & Co. She said Tesla’s energy storage business could be worth as much as $70 to Tesla’s stock. The shares rose 4.8 percent Wednesday to close at $219.44, the biggest daily gain in more than two weeks.

As a builder of electric cars, the company has a vested interest in making the electric grid as clean as possible. Customers typically buy the batteries to store energy from solar panels, using them when electricity from the grid is most expensive or the sun isn’t shining. With Tesla’s gigafactory for battery production under construction in Nevada, storage products could serve as a secondary revenue stream for the company, which is looking to diversify its product lineup.

As part of a pilot program with sister company SolarCity, Tesla has installed batteries at about 300 California homes equipped with solar panels. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has a relationship with SolarCity, has Tesla batteries installed at 11 California stores; Cargill Inc. plans a one-megawatt system for its animal-processing plant in Fresno.

Home Battery

The SGIP database provides a snapshot of Tesla’s activities in its home state and is by no means a complete picture of the company’s storage ambitions.

But Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has been dropping hints for weeks, and yesterday the company told investors and analysts in an e-mail that Tesla will announce the home battery and a “very large” utility-scale battery on April 30. In the e-mail, Jeffrey Evanson, Tesla’s chief of investor relations, said the company “will explain the advantages of our solutions and why past battery options were not compelling.”

Tesla spokeswoman Khobi Brooklyn said the company would share more information next week.

Thanks to state incentives and advances in battery chemistry, storage is a hot industry. By 2019, total U.S. sales will reach $1.5 billion, about 11 times as much as in 2014, according to a March report from GTM Research.

Renewable Grid

“Energy storage on the grid will grow rapidly in combination with renewables,” Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel said last month at the Vail Global Energy Forum. “Eventually you’re going to have a 100 percent battery electric vehicle fleet, working in tandem with an almost 100 percent renewable electric utility grid full of solar and wind.”

For companies looking to break into California’s storage market, the first stop is SGIP. Founded during an energy crisis in 2001 and funded by ratepayers, the program has a budget of $83 million and covers as much as 60 percent of a project’s costs. All proposals go through a technical review and are supposed to be connected to the grid within two years. Applicants collect rebates once projects are completed.

Wine Battery

While companies like Coda Energy, Green Charge Networks and Stem have also applied for SGIP funds, Tesla accounts for almost half of all storage applications,Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in an April 2 report published for clients. BNEF also said Tesla accounts for about 70 percent of SGIP storage projects connected to California’s grid.

Jackson Family Wines, based in Santa Rosa, has a new partnership with Tesla involving battery storage and several vehicle charging stations, according to the February issue of Wine Business Monthly. The winery declined to comment.

Mack Wycoff, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for renewable energy and emissions, said the company is intrigued by energy storage. “Instead of pulling electricity from the grid, you discharge it from the battery,” he said. “Ideally you know when your period of peak demand is, and you discharge it then.”

Mike Martin, Cargill’s director of communications, declined to provide details about how the company plans to use Tesla batteries at the Fresno plant. The 200,000-square-foot facility, one of the largest of its type in California, produces nearly 400 million pounds of beef each year.

Janet Dixon is director of facilities at the Temecula Valley Unified School District in southern California, which plans to install solar panels at 20 of its 28 schools this summer. Dixon said that SolarCity is the solar provider, and five of the facilities will have Tesla batteries.

“We spend roughly $3 million a year on electricity, and most of that is lighting and air conditioning,” said Dixon. “We are going solar to reduce our overall costs and the battery storage should help us manage our peak demand.”

Toroidion Reveals 1340HP, Quad-Motor EV Hypercar Prototype in Monaco

In Jungle Long Known for Cocaine, a Rare Nut Is Now All the Rage (BusinessWeek)

Harvested cacay nuts.

For decades, if not centuries, the Amazon dwellers of southern Colombia didn’t make too much of the cacay nut. They fed it to their livestock, used it to treat wounds and chopped down its trees for firewood.

But then, a few years ago, the global jet-setting crowd found out what the yellow-ish oil from the protein-rich nut could do for their skin. And suddenly, the cacay (pronounced kahk-ai) has become a red-hot commodity, providing the key ingredient to anti-aging facial creams that can fetch $200 an ounce in beauty shops in Los Angeles and London.

While most of the nuts come from wild trees in remote areas, new plantations are popping up in impoverished parts of Colombia that were better known for cocaine and anti-government rebel groups. Vitaliano Ordonez, a farmer who used to give the nuts to his cows, sold eight of the animals to buy 120 saplings. Because only a few are mature enough to produce this year, he’s scavenging every kernel from two old trees on his small dairy farm in Puerto Rico, Colombia, 300 kilometers (190 miles) southeast of Bogota.

‘No Waste’

“I won’t let even one nut go to waste,” said Ordonez, 70. Each apple-sized nut pod contains three seeds, each bigger than an almond. He expects to collect about 60 kilograms (133 pounds) of cacay kernels this year. That may generate as much as 300,000 pesos ($198), or the equivalent of almost half the country’s minimum monthly wage.

The boom is in part the work of Alberto Jaramillo. While scientists have highlighted the nut’s virtues for more than a decade, it was Jaramillo, the head of Bogota-based Kahai SAS, who found a market for the oil after attending trade shows and hiring a trial study of the oil’s use in skincare. Kahai, which buys nuts from growers and scavengers, including Ordonez, expects to double sales this year.

Motorcycle Scavengers

Jaramillo’s Kahai sends workers through the countryside on motorcycles and trucks, sometimes driving more than 250 kilometers to hunt for trees and pick up nuts. During the harvest season from February to April, one mature tree can yield 400 kilos of nuts. Kahai pays 1,000 pesos a kilo for whole nuts, so about 400,000 pesos per tree. He’s also encouraging farmers like Ordonez to plant more trees.

Native to parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, the cacay nut was long used by indigenous people to treat wounds and light lamps. As those uses faded, trees that reached 40 meters (130 feet) high became appealing targets for loggers. That’s begun to change with the renewed appeal of natural oils as beauty treatments.

Sales of face oils are rising, sparking new products from cosmetics-maker L’Oreal SA and Procter & Gamble Co.’s Olay brand made of everything from grape and apricot seeds to lavender and marjoram. Beauty-oil sales at retailer Sephora SA tripled in three years.

Face-Oil Boom

In the U.S., where high-end facial skincare sales have largely been flat over the past year, face-oil sales surged 24 percent to $42 million, data from NPD Group show. They’ve more than doubled over the past two years.

The small but growing appeal of cacay in the $465 billion personal-care market has been fueled by the increased popularity of Morocco’s argan oil, which got picked up by hair-care makers such as L’Oréal and Unilever NV, and is now included in 14 percent of new hair treatments, according to market research from Mintel. Cacay contains key ingredients in anti-aging products, including antioxidants and retinoids, according to Kahai.

‘New Wave’

“It’s going to be the new little wave,” said Jamie Sherrill, who uses cacay in some of theNurse Jamie skincare products she sells at her Santa Monica spa. “I was always a fan of retinol and argan oil, and we were initially searching for ways to improve on these two ingredients.”

Sherrill, who appeared with socialite Paris Hilton on the reality show “The Simple Life,” offers 1-ounce “facial elixir” with cacay for $198 and a men’s shaving oil version. A three-item set of anti-aging products with cacay retails for 1,060 pounds ($1,555) at Harrods department store in London.

The venture isn’t without risk for Kahai and small growers. While plant oils are hot now, cosmetics fads often change, and there is lots of competition from other plant oils.

“It’s more expensive than a lot of your regular oils,” said Judi Beerling, a research manager at the London-based consulting firm Organic Monitor. “As more becomes available, obviously the prices will become less of an issue.’

Jaramillo said some companies are holding off on using cacay because there isn’t enough stable supply. It could take another three years, he said.

Sales Double

‘‘Our plan is to have enough volume for the boom that’s going to come from the cosmetic market, and anything leftover we can sell just as the edible nut,” Jaramillo said.

Kahai forecasts oil sales of 1.2 metric tons from this year’s harvest, double last year, and output will expand as the 100 hectares (247 acres) already planted with cacay trees start producing. It takes 2 kilos of kernels to make 1 liter of oil. The nut is about 53 percent oil, and Jaramillo says his next plan is to target the protein-rich flour thats leftover as a nutritional supplement.

New Hope

The cacay revival also has given hope to environmental groups seeking to slow deforestation. Luis Eugenio Cifuentes, a Colombia adviser for the Arlington, Virginia-based Amazon Conservation Team, has been promoting cacay as a profitable alternative to logging. He talks to farmers in remote areas and is organizing a plan to buy trees that will connect isolated patches of rainforest.

For farmer Ordonez, cacay offers the chance of supplementing the income he earns from milk and cattle sales.

“That’s how I live, with little money,” he said. “Cacay is something I think a lot about because I have a lot of faith that it will work out for me.”