Competitive Trade

One sided trade agreements by any name are designed to help developing nations develop by encouraging business to make difficult decisions and become more efficient. Decisions on supply of raw materials, effectiveness of plant and machinery, availability of skills and technical procedures and the type of marketing needed. The only solution is to employ efficient strategies that make the business model competitive in targeted markets, noting that even long-term free trade agreements will not support inefficiencies.


Business associations should be totally honest with their members, even to the point of losing them. Many developing nations have traditionally supported an inefficient “so called” manufacturing sector which could not be sustained while getting full access to foreign markets as this would retard that foreign market’s manufacturing sector. So called because a true manufacturer does not have to import more than 50% of its raw (naturally occurring) materials - manufacturing is the process of combining raw materials (farmed or mined locally) into finished usable products.

More Financial job cuts

The financial sector worldwide is taking the sub-prime crisis as an opportunity to become more efficient, having already invested heavily in technology and communication systems, strengthened their security systems online and trained staff to monitor their online transactions, they are now closing branches and directing their customers online.

Crime a Moral Issue

Crime and criminals has and will always exist; slowing the paste of development by impeding foreign and even local investment, reducing productivity and causing the best people to flee the territory. Deferring crime from one community to another seems to be the preferred approach of many charged with dealing with this issue.

Vote for the Lobbyist

Politics is about winning control of a public budget, ranging from small town or municipal to regional or national, provided by the taxation and revenue collection as outlined by the governing laws or constitution. To win, the political grouping must state convincingly and for all to understand, how it plans to use these funds to improve the quality of life for all the constituencies it represents. Having won control, the task is to set priories of budgeted line items as communicated to the voters.

Financial Literacy

The present global financial crisis has been proven to have been caused by overzealous financial organizations and their sales staff to close deals. Whether selling below the prime interest rate mortgages to first time home owners, who could not clearly comprehend the inevitable jump in monthly payments and how to plan for it, or selling bundled investment instruments to other financial institutions worldwide as highly rated mortgage backed securities. These financial organizations along with the rating agencies and the financial regulators have successfully exposed that no one is there to protect the (non-financially educated) buyer.

The Will to Change

Today the world is a smaller place. Technology to access the internet has become more available in terms of cost of equipment and the price of service. Hence, making information stored online, e-mailing and chatting with other people, buying and selling online and even banking accessible to most of the people in the world. This is a model of thought that must be followed to equalize life styles and opportunities in every part of the world. The internet may have been started by the few, but quickly expanded on the basis that the more people that are online is the more information available. Billions of people now get news and research online, but more importantly, Millions of people add to the world’s knowledge base daily.

Value for Money?

Protesting higher prices by obstructing productivity will only send up prices. Understanding the circle of economics; costing & pricing, all inputs are outputs, profits finance development and people are both producers and consumers, will help generate the best solutions to get value for money.

Costing can be as simple as adding the values of all the inputs used to produce a product inclusive of direct and indirect human and time inputs. Pricing, which must be greater than the cost, can be much more complex; market driven like an auction, demand driven where it is a necessary input or supply driven where there are too many in stock.

Controlling Cost Of Living

Cost of living is an economic term that relates to particular goods and services consumed to maintain a minimum basic life style and differ worldwide. This translates to the cost of running your household. Tracking your finances alone, may be fine to budget for fixed cost items but associating the money with other relevant records, such as usage and time, may be the only way to deal with constantly raising prices.


Starting with the Basic Household expenses; Groceries (food & other household supplies), Health & Life Insurance, Education & Entertainment, Communication & Transport, Home Maintenance, Utilities. Most of which have recently changed from fixed price expenses to variable price expenses, because of volatilities in the pricing of essential inputs (all petroleum based products ) being no longer in a manageable range as to allow them to be absorbed into the consumers’ price. Hence, these bills are being calculated on a basic consumption unit with variable additional charges being passed directly to the final consumer. In such cases, the only budgetary control available to the consumer is to monitor the related consumption records.

Policy from Research not News

We are constantly bombarded by traditional and lesser established news gathering media with stories presented under the guise of expert research which turns out to be less than creditable. Whether it is in haste to break the story or to meet some arbitrary quota the technically acceptable process of collecting data, arranging it into information and questioning it into intelligence is suffering. When exactly does data become information or information become intelligence? The answer is in the definition; for if data is simply a collection of facts, information is the results of organizing those facts into understandable and acceptable formats, when information is tested and proven then and only then can it be considered intelligence.

Knowing your Investments

You have set goals, you have physically and mentally worked, you have been paid, you have saved and you must now invest. Numerous errors await, a devoted union worker is accustomed to seeing business as the enemy, hence questions where to invest. Fair Business is the only investment tool to beat inflation. As prices (Cost of Living) rise the returns on investment must also increase for you to pay your bills. Selling for a profit, or by any other name you feel comfortable with, is the system that is used to generate those returns on investment. Your pension plan, your bank savings and your (Professionally Managed) investments all grow because of business activities.