{"id":500347,"date":"2017-04-19T09:29:01","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T09:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/?p=500347"},"modified":"2020-03-27T12:25:07","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T12:25:07","slug":"investment-u-s-companies-doing-their-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/thought-leaders-interviews\/investment-u-s-companies-doing-their-part.html","title":{"rendered":"Investment: U.S. companies doing their part"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"taipei\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u00abDonald Trump\u2019s infrastructure program is sweeping, well-articulated and based on the objective necessity of modernising the United States,\u00bb opined Robert Shiller \u2014 Yale economist<\/strong>, born in 1946, Nobel Prize winner in 2013 \u2014 on the the U.S. president\u2019s proposals<\/strong> during a recent visit to Italy.
\u00abThe biggest mistake is to make fun of him or even worse to consider him an adventurer. Putting aside military considerations, his well-articulated economic programme should be analysed carefully. A program, which, let\u2019s not forget, has been received with great hope and consensus not just among blue-collar workers in the Midwest who are deluded and scared by globalization, but above all by the business community. You can\u2019t just consider people who live on the coasts\u2014Los Angeles and Boston\u2014who are traditionally considered liberal, but also the vast \u2018fly-over\u2019 country in between, as Americans call it, that are often distressed rural and industrial areas where the opinions of intellectual talking heads on TV are meaningless.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why did so many votes come from financial circles?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u00abBecause they are eagerly awaiting the cuts in taxes that he promised – for companies and for individuals – and, most of all, the deregulation that he himself announced. Banks and companies insist they are too restricted in their operations by rules introduced after the financial crisis, like the Dodd-Frank Act, and they also disliked Obama\u2019s healthcare reform, [an initial attempt to reform Obamacare was rejected by Congress.] Deregulation will be welcome.<\/strong>\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the infrastructure project?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u00abThe president has put out the figure of one trillion dollars in investment, a number that could grow with public-private partnerships that anticipate participation of major groups from around the world. To finance it, the administration will <\/strong>obviously issue government bonds but will also turn to innovations like a tax on the repatriation of capital. <\/strong>This was actually first proposed by the Democrats with the call renewed by Hillary Clinton during the electoral campaign and addresses the massive reserves that big U.S. companies, as well as some individuals, keep abroad. Trump is counting on hitting 200 billion through this process. That would certainly be significant financing. The president has given it eight years and it\u2019s not impossible. Actually, at a certain point in the electoral campaign, Trump even said that, over these eight years, which would correspond to a second mandate, he is planning to erase the federal deficit. That went too far. And, in fact, he never repeated that.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cargo
Cargo train<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s another notable aspect of Trump\u2019s economic programme\u2014protectionism. How far can he push?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u00abWell, at a meeting in early April, with the Chinese president, both sides agreed to a moratorium of 100 days in the trade controversy with China. There\u2019s also a change that things could ease up with Europe as well. <\/strong>Let\u2019s not forget that the latter controversy is based on the old question of beef exports from the U.S. to Europe. Europe has requested that the meat be hormone-free. America has created entire mini-industry to produce meat without additives and the WTO said it could be freely exported to the continent. To break the impasse, Brussels just needs to open the \u201cspigot\u201d of America exports and reset import quotas.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are particularly attentive to technology. You recently made a splash with your position in favor of Bill Gates\u2019 proposal of taxing robots. Could you discuss that?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u00abTo be precise, the idea of a tax on robots was first raised in May of last year in a draft law of a report to the European Parliament prepared by Parliamentarian Mady Delvaux for the Legal Affairs Commission. Emphasizing how robots can accentuate inequalities in the world, the report said it could be useful for companies, in their annual financial statements, to introduce a summary of the contribution that robots and artificial intelligence provides to corporate results in order to anticipate appropriate taxation and social contributions.<\/strong> The reaction to the Delvaux proposal was very negative, with the remarkable exception of Bill Gates, who is always very aware of the social impact of the technological revolution. He supported it. And I also believe it\u2019s something we should consider. The last 12 months alone have seen a proliferation of devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo Dot \u201cAlexa\u201d that perform many household activities. We\u2019ve see two taxi services Singapore, Delphi and nuTonomy, introduce driverless cars that are starting to replace taxi drivers. In America, we discovered that Doordash is using miniature remote controlled cars with \u201cspatial\u201d technology from
Starship Technologies to substitute the young people who deliver food to homes; like the special robots that deliver Domino\u2019s pizza in New Zealand using two compartments, one that keeps the pizza hot and another that keeps the drinks cold. And this list could continue.\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, would you disagree that robots are part of the path to modern technology that can\u2019t be stopped, and that robots provide a major contribution to productivity, even though it can be difficult to identify which machines should be called \u201crobots\u201d?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u00abNone of that changes the fact that there must be studies to revise the regime. I am talking about for companies, and to figure out how to intervene. I don\u2019t want to reach the excessive level prophesied by Frank Ramsey in long-ago 1927 where all human activities are taxed. But it\u2019s also unwise to create vast areas of exemption. I\u2019ll go further: a modest tax, even temporary, would perhaps be useful to slow down the destruction of jobs brought on by robotization.<\/strong> One could also think of a task-based tax: the proceeds could finance, nation by nation, retraining programs for those who lose jobs\u2014jobs for which, in many cases, an individual has trained for a long time and that represent his or her life. Do you see what I mean when I say that the contribution of robots to the growth of inequality should be slowed?\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00abDonald Trump\u2019s infrastructure program is sweeping, well-articulated and based on the objective necessity of modernising the United States,\u00bb opined Robert Shiller \u2014 Yale economist, born in 1946, Nobel Prize winner in 2013 \u2014 on the the U.S. president\u2019s proposals during a recent visit to Italy.\u00abThe biggest mistake is to make fun of him or even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":517636,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[860,16314,16324,16312,14305,811,16326,16323,16325,16321,16311,16328,16322,11316,16310,16327,5129,13090,655,16329],"class_list":["post-500347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thought-leaders-interviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500347"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536401,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500347\/revisions\/536401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500347"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webuildvalue.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=500347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}