Daily Archives: September 29, 2004


A Benefit of the Deficit?

In 2003 US business invested $153 billion in foreign countries. This is about 27% of the world wide total foreign direct (FDI) investment of $560 billion and the second largest total on record. Sounds pretty positive.
Until you look at the other side of the picture. Historically FDI in the US has been about 20% of the world wide total and was $314 billion just four years ago. In 2003 FDI in the US was $29.8 billion, 5.3% of the total. Why has then been such dramatic slippage:

One explanation looks to the re-emergence of large budget deficits after the tax bills of 2001 and 2003. These can diminish confidence in America’s longer-term growth prospects, and simultaneously give foreign investors the choice to put money into government securities with a guaranteed return, as opposed to tangible businesses whose future can never be entirely certain. Security concerns and intensive media coverage of recent business scandals may also affect perceptions.
But the US doesn’t really need the jobs that this investment might have created, right?
Read the rest of the story.


It’s Gone and Nothin’s Gonna to Bring it Back

Well, maybe there is a way to get back that old file that you can’t find. Especially if it was ever on the WWW. Kim’s story (shortened a bit):

I have a client with a site that’s been in operation since early 2000, and we recently discovered that a couple of archived issues of her newsletter from that time were missing. We’ve ported the site over to several new designs over the years, ….
I was convinced they were simply gone for good, but then I had a last ditch idea: the Wayback Machine. I went and put in her site, checked back to one of the 2000 versions, and sure enough, there were the missing archives. I recreated the pages on her site, and now I’m a hero.
The Wayback Machine definitely has practical applications.
Yep, another great use of an already indispensible resource. I use the audio section of Archive.org to listen to and download great music on a regular basis. And there is much more.