By William Q. Harmon -March 6, 20202971

(L-r) Atty. Molewuleh B. Gray, Chairman of the National Investment Commission (NIC); Gesler E. Murry, Minister of Mines and Energy; Rohan Patnaik, CEO of Al Khaldiya Mining Private Ltd. at the MOU signing

The government of Liberia on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a Singaporean company, Al Khaldiya Mining Private Ltd., for the transshipment of iron ore from neighboring Guinea.

The deal is expected to see Liberia generate millions of United States dollars annually.

As per the MOU, the company will transship some 789 million tons of iron ore from its Diecké project in Guinea, which is just 2 kilometers north of Ganta, Nimba County, through the Yekepa-Buchanan rail line.

Germany is on the brink of recession as its auto industry slumps. Tesla and the rise of electric cars are putting pressure on VW and BMW //

The sweeping electric car pivot that's being led by Tesla is starting to have an impact on Europe's biggest economy - Germany, by striking at its backbone, the automobile manufacturing industry. | //

• Germany is on the brink of recession after growth slowed to zero in the last quarter.
• The economy is being dragged down by a seismic slump in car manufacturing.
• The Tesla effect – and the shift to electric vehicles – is leaving Germany in dire straits.

Delta Airlines employees received an amazing Valentine's Day gift. With an enormous red "Thank You" painted on one of its jets, the airline announced it is g...

Here's what it means for competitors like Delta, United, and American--plus the lesson for your business. //

Southwest Airlines announced Thursday that it's sharing a total of $667 million with Southwest employees as part of its profit sharing plan for 2019.

That works out to a 12.2 percent bonus and "more than six weeks' pay for every eligible employee," according to the airline's statement. //

Southwest made its announcement just weeks after one its big competitors, Delta Air Lines, which has about 20,000 more employees than Southwest, announced its own profit-sharing numbers: $1.6 billion.

The two other big U.S. carriers, United and American, announced profit-sharing numbers at $419 million and $213 million, respectively.

Delta, Southwest, United, and American
Now, it's hard not to notice the order in which the size of the airlines' profit-sharing programs are ranked: First Delta's, then Southwest's, then United's, and then American's.

That also happens to be the order in which theses airlines are listed in the recent Wall Street Journal ranking of the best and worst U.S. airlines.

Delta came in first, Southwest tied with its smaller competitor Alaska at second, United was eighth, and American was ninth. //

Correlation? Causation? As scientists might say, it warrants further study.

And speaking as an observer, I'd say it suggests it's better to find ways to compensate employees that give them a direct stake in your company's overall success.

Monrovia - At a Senate Public Hearing Thursday, February 6, Mr. Bill Twehway, Managing Director of the National Port Authority (NPA), told Senators that since October 2019, bigger vessels stopped berthing at the Freeport of Monrovia because of high d

The U.K. has officially left the E.U. and is not looking back. //

Stronger trade with our cousins across the Atlantic will only make those bonds stronger between our two nations for years to come.

Hopefully, though we don’t have any disagreements about tea, that ended badly for the redcoats last time.

President Weah described the new cement production plant as an extension of a state-of-art investment in the country which has introduced a technology to the cement industry and brings about inefficiency to the Liberian cement production firmMonrovia

For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better---and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

In his bold and bracing exploration into how human culture evolves positively through exchange and specialization, bestselling author Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. An astute, refreshing, and revelatory work that covers the entire sweep of human history -- from the Stone Age to the Internet -- The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.

Inefficiencies within the auditing process raise questions about whether we are misusing taxpayer dollars in the name of accountability and transparency. //

Hugh Howard
4 days ago
This is the first time I've seen a reference to zero-based budgeting in any discussion of federal agencies. Zero-based budgeting is the norm everywhere BUT the federal government. Ask yourself why this is true. It is past time for a change.

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RTUT Hugh Howard
4 days ago
Good comment... Your comment got me hunting up an old article, Hugh:

Baseline budgeting is the product of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. That’s when this process commenced that has now, in our opinion, gone so terribly wrong. The Act, innocently enough, directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to project Federal spending for the, then, upcoming fiscal year, assuming that the, then, current level of government services would continue. It is that assumption that has now morphed into the annual practice of casting in concrete whatever the government is spending in any given year adjusted by whatever else the government decides it will do, along with the added cost of inflation. We are, thus, each year compounding the cost of operating the government. What the government tells us are spending cuts are really no more than reductions in the rate of increase. For the first few years there really was no formal definition of what baseline budgeting was other than a continuation of services as provided in the prior year. But then, in 1987 Congress added annual inflationary adjustments to the definition of baseline budgeting and we’ve been stuck with compounding budgets ever since.

There have been serious efforts to reform the process such as the Gramm, Rudman Hollings Act, and the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, which provided rational multi-year targets, but the Senate and House members who wield budget-writing influence invariably protect their respective turfs by weakening all reform proposals. The budget process itself is not fatally flawed. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the men and women we elect and send to Washington are. The US Senate has refused to pass or even consider a budget, even the President’s own proposed budget, for the entirety of his Administration. Budget rhetoric is often so misleading as to be all but meaningless.

Let’s say a government agency is spending$250 billion and, using baseline budgeting, is slated to have its budget increased to $275 billion. The Administration (or Congress) may, instead, call for an overall increase to $262 billion, or, an increase of $12 billion for the next fiscal year, and then promote the new budget as a $13 billion dollar cut in spending ($275bln – $262bln = -$13bln). This is like an obese individual who is expected to gain 100 pounds gaining only 75 pounds and then claiming he or she lost 25 pounds. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Yet, that’s precisely how our government justifies its profligacy.

Given that repeated attempts to reform baseline budgeting, including budget caps and pay-as-you-go rules that would require that all new spending be compensated for by either increased revenue or reductions elsewhere invariably fail for the reasons cited above, we think its time to reconsider a modified type of zero-based budgeting, which is commonly used in business.

Realistically, pure zero-based budgeting would not be practical for the operation of the federal government. The very process of requiring every agency to re-justify every item of expense each year would become costly and wasteful. Building each agency’s budget from the ground up each and every year would take an entire green-eye-shade bureaucracy in and by itself.

We think a workable compromise between baseline budgeting and pure zero-based budgeting could involve a combination of so-called sunset budgeting for all new programs coupled with an alternate budgeting requirement for all continuing programs every year. It might work like this: All new spending programs would have a mandated sunset provision, meaning the program would expire on a date certain, unless reauthorized by a super majority in Congress for an additional life, not greater than its original mandate. Budgeting for all continuing or permanent programs (both discretionary and non-discretionary) would require the annual submission of alternate budgets at, say, 90%, 95% and 98% of the prior year’s expenditure for that budgeted activity. This would require that every agency or department head go through the process of determining whether there is a more efficient or less expensive way to provide the particular government service for which he or she is responsible.

We believe the cycle of compounding expense must be broken before the government itself goes broke. Anyone who believes the country can’t go broke because it can always raise taxes or print the money it needs is simply wrong. At some point squeezing taxpayers, regardless of from whom we squeeze, or running the presses to fund our profligacy will enfeeble the entire nation. Growth will diminish, and our currency will no longer be the prized coin in the realm of a free market. Time is growing short. The clock is ticking.

Francis Fukuyama got quite a bit wrong in his 1992 essay “The End of History,” but he also got a lot right, especially in regard to the roughly 25-year period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Donald Trump. A neoliberal world order led by the United States did emerge in the 1990s to become, if not a hegemonic power, at the least the dominant one. Capitalism was not only on the rise but promised to liberalize nations like Russian, and especially China.

With the election of Trump and the success of socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the future of the American-led, bipartisan, neoliberal world order is in considerable doubt. In fact, breaking with this world order was central to Trump’s appeal and victory. On trade, military actions, and foreign aid, Trump challenged basic assumptions held by the leaderships of both parties for decades.

Not everyone was on board back in the early 1990s. Ross Perot’s historic performance as the Reform Party candidate in the 1992 general election was rooted almost exclusively in the fact that he was the candidate who opposed the globalism and trade deals that both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton tacitly supported. That voting base never really went away, and a quarter-century later it did the heavy lifting in putting Trump in the White House.

The central theme of Trump’s ideology towards the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world is that we are being taken advantage of. In the post-Cold War era the United States took on an enormous burden in exchange for dominant influence. It was the patriarchal nation not just of the free world, but of almost the entire world. It was a generous parent, often providing extravagant allowances to its client states.

In some ways, this paradigm was wildly successful. Poverty rates globally declined dramatically. Here in the United States commercial goods became remarkably cheap, giving the middle class, and even the poor in some cases, access to material wealth that would have seemed extravagant in the Cold War period, like flat-screen TVs and cell phones. And for a time, it did appear that a relaxed approach to nations like Russia and China would inevitably lead to their liberalization.

PRELUDE TO PRINTING NEW MONEY: FrontPageAfrica has reliably learned that representatives from the Swedish money maker, Crane Currency are currently in Monrovia meeting with officials of government including the Central Bank of Liberia and members of

In 1981 American Airlines realised that those metal birds that they make their revenue from required some basic inputs such as fuel and well, staff. Unfortunately for American Airlines, they had run out of cash. Scraping for nickels to keep their fleet flying, American’s former President Robert Crandall wanted to cut costs dramatically and rebuild the airline from the ground up. With high interest rates at the time, the airline came up with an alternative way to try and raise quick cash—by offering unlimited First Class tickets for life, for $250,000 each.

Inflation-adjusted, these first-class tickets—also known as the AAirpass—would cost $570,000 in 2019, although American discontinued selling them in 1994 after getting 28 customers to buy them.

The issue that American quickly found out was that although consumers may not abuse an “Unlimited” option in many other arenas—such as unlimited soda at a restaurant, or even an all-inclusive holiday, where the majority of people will still have physical (and dietary) limits of how much food and beverages they will consume—when it came to first-class tickets, the customers who bought the unlimited passes were more than willing to go the extra mile, literally and metaphorically.

As many as 37% of Liberians go without food because of the lack of money and unemployment, according to a new Afrobarometer survey in Monrovia.

Across 34 surveyed countries, the Afrobarometer has shown that unemployment dominates its popular survey which stands at 40%, followed by health, 27%; infrastructure, 24%; and water and sanitation, 24%.

Education, poor management of the economy and poverty/destitution are at 21% respectively and food shortage/famine is at 18%.

According to the survey, unemployment tops as the most important problem that Africans want their governments to address, followed by health, infrastructure/roads, water/sanitation, education, poverty, and management of the economy. //

This policy paper relies primarily on data from 45,823 interviews completed in 34 countries between September 2016 and September 2018.

Afrobarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues across more than 30 countries in Africa. Six rounds of surveys were conducted between 1999 and 2015, and this is the finding from Round 7 surveys (2016-2018).

Iowa’s junior senator says she is working to spread the word on legislation to reduce wasteful government spending and rein in agencies’ last-minute spending practices.

“We saw this in our own county departments where at the end of the year, that last couple months of the year, they will spend everything they’ve got remaining in their budget whether they need things or not,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told reporters gathered in her office Wednesday, speaking of her time as Montgomery County auditor. “They just are afraid if we don’t use it [we’ll] lose it.” //

One bill would curb how much an agency could spend in the last two months of the fiscal year to no more than what the agency usually spends each month on average during the rest of the year.

Agencies tend to go on spending sprees at the close of the fiscal year, spending any remaining money in what is known as “use it or lose it.”

Wealthier people are more able to cope with climate change and are overall less likely to die from all-natural causes than the very poor. Whatever the ill effects of climate change, the funds needed to keep people safe will be far more abundant in the future than they are now. //

Each of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, that guide our understanding of climate change, account for large leaps in worldwide wealth between 2000 and 2100. Even the poorest in the world—sometimes called “the Bottom Billion”—will be four to eighteen times as wealthy as they are today, according to the IPCC.

Wealthier people are more able to cope with climate change and are overall less likely to die from all-natural causes than the very poor. Whatever the ill effects of climate change, the funds needed to keep people safe will be far more abundant in the future than they are now. In the short term, the resources AOC claims must be used to fight distant climate change have more pressing alternative uses because people are poorer now than anyone will be then, even by IPCC’s somewhat dire predictions.

To demand sacrifice from the residents of developing countries—like paying higher prices for scarce food so some of it can be burned as biofuel—will do far more damage than a potential flood in 50 years, when the risk of starvation will be small. //

Even in the IPCC’s worst-case scenarios, those facing the harms of climate change in 100 years will be many, many times more prepared to deal with those harms than we are currently equipped to sacrifice in hopes of preventing them.

Andrew Yang and Bill de Blasio are very concerned about robots taking people's jobs. Machines will replace humans. Artificial intelligence will outpace people. But is there any validity to it? 
Not really.

Her vision of ‘accountable capitalism’ would destroy savings built over a lifetime—and sink the economy. //

Who owns the vast wealth of America? Old folks. According to the Federal Reserve, households headed by people over the age of 55 own 73% of the value of domestically owned stocks, and the same share of America’s total wealth. Households of ages 65 to 74 have an average of $1,066,000 in net worth, while those between ages 35 and 44 have less than a third as much on average, at $288,700.

A socialist might see injustice in that inequality. But seniors know this wealth gap is the difference between the start and the finish of...

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Unintended consequences happen so often that economists call them “Cobra Problems,” after a famous historic example. In colonial India, Delhi suffered a proliferation of cobras. To cut the number of cobras, the local government placed a bounty on them. Can you guess what happened?

Monrovia - The Liberia Telecommunications Authority says it remains committed to protecting the greater interests of the consumers of telecommunications products. It further states that it will do all it can to continuously serve the public interest //

It is expected that the LTA’s intervention as a regulatory measure shall stabilize the telecommunications market. In their strategy, the immediate benefits to stabilize the market are to prevent mobile networks operators (MNO) from decommissioning communication towers in rural communities and to ensure that people remain connected while the long time benefit is to improve quality of service, expand network coverage, infrastructure and restore sector viability.

New floor pricing set by the Liberian government is going to change the way Liberians have been communicating via mobile phone for the last five years, bringing a halt to the most-appreciated ‘three days free calls’ promotion on the two GSM companies operating in the country.