Hey all,

This week I take another brief departure from writing about energy to fulfill some grad school requirements.  Enjoy.

The Ted Baker Store on the corner of Mercer and Grand Streets in SoHo

There is not one SoHo, but many Sohos. In recent years the area has become a hub for shopping and restaurants, particularly those that cater to high-end fashion shoppers.  You can find everything from Ted Baker, Ralph Lauren, and Prada to Nike and Hollister.  The area is a place where well-heeled New Yorkers walk alongside tourists from all over the world.  What you are buying depends largely on where you are from.

The pricing of American brands and the overall selection of goods available in New York are very attractive to tourists hailing from other countries.

“The Italian brands are more expensive here than they are in Europe, so we are more interested in the American brands”, said Sasha Zidansek, a Slovenian woman who came to New York on business. Zidansek, who works for IBM.  “I mean, Nike in Slovenia? Come on.”

Danny Mieles, a sales associate at 3X1 Denim on Mercer Street, said they draw customers from all countries and all professions for their ready-to-wear, custom made, and bespoke raw denim jeans.

“We get a lot of people from Australia, and Brazil,” Mieles said.  “We get professional athletes, wealthy businessmen.”

3X1 gets little press in American media, but was featured on a Brazilian travel show called “Manhattan Spotlight”.   The exposure gave them an increase in Brazilian customers.

Rudy Young, who works for a small high-end French brand called Surface to Air, said their block of Mercer Street (a few doors down from 3X1) was not even considered part of SoHo a few years ago.  The label has only three stores in the world—in Paris, Brazil, and New York—so their customers likewise come from all over the world.

Young agrees that there are different SoHo’s.  The store offers its guests a map of stores and restaurants they advise their customers to visit.

“These are places we think are aligned with our aesthetic,” Young told me as he pointed to the map.

Some people are not necessarily here for shopping.  Pelin Ozer, a businesswoman from Turkey, was not in SoHo to buy anything, but said friends told her to visit the area.

Wearing an “I (heart) NY” hooded sweatshirt, Ozer stopped to ask me for directions to SoHo.  She had several printed pages of advice from friends in Istanbul on places to visit while in New York.

She saw Prada and a few stores, but they have many of those in Istanbul, she said.  Besides she was not in New York to shop.

“I am here to see the sights,” she said.

Frick_NYHerald

On July 22, 1892 a young man named walked into the offices of the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, eager to execute a plan he had devised with his girlfriend.  He was a “dark-complexioned young man with a Jewish cast of countenance, of medium height and fairly well-dressed”, wrote the Grand Forks Herald.  He had been in the building several times in the previous few days, so when he asked to be let off the elevator at the second floor and directed toward the chairman’s office, the elevator operator “thought nothing of the request” and showed him the way.

The young man was there to find an industrialist named Henry Clay Frick and to put an end to “a great struggle going on between capital and labor in this city”.

He had at his disposal a revolver and something the Grand Forks Herald called a “dagger”.

About two minutes later, three rapid gunshots startled people in and around the building, the paper reported.

“Intuitively the victim was divined and ‘Frick was shot’ were the words soon passing from mouth to mouth on the street”, the newspaper read.

Mr. Frick, an infamous industrialist who was the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company (yes, that Carnegie) had survived an attempt on his life by a young Russian idealist named Alexander Berkman, who had planned the steel-boss’s murder with Emma Goldman, a woman who had been a prominent figure in anarchist circles, women’s movements, and draft resistance.

The particular grievance against Frick was an intractable and hostile dispute between the Carnegie Steel Company and a labor union at a facility in Homestead, Pennsylvannia.

The first shell did not explode.  The second lodged itself in Frick’s neck.

Frick then “made an exclamation” and vainly tried to climb out of a window.  Berkman walked to the desk, and fired into Frick’s neck again.  The bullet “entered the muscle on the back of the neck and passed around to the lodgment under the right ear…” said the story.

The paper mentions the heroic efforts of John Leishman, another executive at the Carnegie Steel Company, though the writer of the piece manages to misspell Leishman’s name five times, and in two different ways—3 for Leshman and two for Lesham.  I would not have known to check if there had not been the discrepancy.

In any event, Leishman pounced on the assailant and wrestled him to the ground.  They fought for the revolver, which then fired again into the ceiling.

Frick, with two bullets in him, saw Berkman draw a knife in the tussle with Leishman.   As Frick tried to jump between them, Berkman stabbed Frick three times, though we are told, “he was merely scratched at these last attempts to kill him”.

A man identified as Sheriff May had, by this time, entered Frick’s office and was about to shoot Berkman when Frick shouted “Don’t kill him.  We have got him all right.  Leave him to the law.”

A few minutes later, several doctors were present.  Both the Grand Forks Herald and the New York Herald reported that Frick was soon the calmest man in the room.  He eventually made a full recovery.

From time to time I watch a crime show on television and muse at the ridiculous plots that seem both far-fetched and dog lame.  Often someone will remind me that TV writers—perhaps because they are TV writers—poach material for their plots from news stories.  Often they even have to tone down some elements of the true stories they borrow to make them believable.

I don’t know if I believe this news story as it is told here.  I would like to read more accounts of it and identify incidents of variance among them.

But I chose this story because it popped into my head when trying to find something to write about for a graduate school assignment on historical news research. Henry Clay Frick, and the attempt on his life by a member of the anarchist movement of the late 19^th Century are fascinating for the story they tell and for what they represent.

This was a remarkably fertile time for the American economy.  The Civil War had just ended, industrialism was on the rise, there were some of the first true tycoons of the country—people like Vanderbilt, Carnegie and Frick.  These men were merciless businessmen who later bequeathed large portions of their wealth to education and culture.  Frick would later donate his entire Manhattan estate and all of the art in it to the City of New York—what we now know as the Frick Collection on the Upper East Side.

On the other hand, he is often reviled as a brutal businessman, who became obsessed with breaking the strike at Homestead.

Then, there are people like Berkman and Goldman: both fanatical, idealistic, immigrants who occupy strange places in history, not terribly unlike those of John Brown and Che Guevara.  We do not really know what to make of them. Should we like or admire them at all?  Berkman and Goldman were trying to stand up for the rights of workers and had been involved in progressive causes.  But the assassination attempt seemed actually to turn public opinion against the strike.  In another article in the New York Herald, another story about the assassination read,

“In the business community of Pittsburgh, there is the deepest indignation and a feeling of revolt against the tyranny of unionism, which has so long, with threats and strikes and boycotts, absolutely dominated the community, and now, in the excited minds of men of substance, has indirectly resorted to assassination to carry out its purposes.”

When he was finally arrested, as this story from the Grand Forks Herald says, Berkman had very little on him: a few thirty-eight caliber bullets, some pieces of candy and a nickel-plated watch.  When officer finally sat Berkman down in a chair, Police Surgeon O’Meara noticed that the young man was moving his jaw oddly.  The police officer then choked the man until he was “nearly black in the face”, whereupon Berkman spit out a small shell of dynamite “of the same kind used by Lingg, the Chicago anarchist, to blow himself up.”

This is the second post I have written so far on the recently launched probe by the European Union into whether Chinese solar panel producers have been “dumping” panels onto the European market.  

Joshua Chaffin wrote today in the FT’s online Brussels Blog that China faces an “uphill battle” in the fight against the probe, and against the anti-dumping tariffs that are likely to result from the investigation.

First, European officials say that more than half of the probes of this sort undertaken by the European Commission result in tariffs.  

But Chaffin also noted two interesting issues in the EU’s trade relationship with China. 

One deals with a reform resulting from the Lisbon reform treaty that requires a much higher majority of EU member states to reject a commission recommendation—in this case the imposition of tariffs.  Previously, it was a bit easier to obtain enough support to kill an undesirable recommendation.  Later this year, it will be a bit tougher. Chaffin suggested that foreign governments (Beijng and Washington, by name) had an easier time knocking down unfriendly tariffs by appealing to enough EU member states.

But in some ways the more intriguing point lies in the fact that the European Commission, the executive branch of EU government, has long-designated China as a “non-market economy”.

I have to write more on how the EU actually arrived at this designation, but basically it is defined by the World Trade Organization (WTO) (see this article).

Some online resources on dumping from the WTO refer to non-market economies as

“economies where the government has a complete or substantially complete monopoly of its trade and where all domestic prices are fixed by the State.”

What this means for the current solar panel dispute, said Chaffin, is that the European Commission will designate a third country as a kind of reference point in determining the fair price of solar products in the EU.

Guess whom they have chosen?  The United States of America. 

This, of course would be horrible for China’s case, since manufacturing costs in the U.S. are often much higher and would further lend the appearance that Chinese products, by comparison, are sold at far too low a price point to be legitimate.  Labor costs are still vastly different in these two countries. 

This may also come as a bit of shock to many Americans, as it is precisely competition from low-cost Chinese manufacturing that is often blamed for the loss of American jobs.  This is especially apparent during election seasons.

For a country such as China that pegs its currency, tightly controls foreign investment, and is populated with large, state-owned corporations, perhaps such a reference point is appropriate.  But can the US really be a reliable reference point against Chinese solar panel prices if the American government had to take the same action the EU is currently considering? 

Chaffin pointed out that when the EU imposed tariffs in Chinese shoe manufacturers, they used Brazil as a reference point. The Chinese government would have preferred than a country like Indonesia, which, they argued, had more comparable labor costs. 

It is important to remember that the real charge European companies have made in this complaint is not simply that Chinese solar panel producers are under-pricing European manufacturers.  They are alleging that Chinese producers are selling products at prices below their own manufacturing costs. 

The European Union launched an investigation into Chinese manufacturers of solar panels on Thursday, arguing that the companies are selling the panels at prices far lower than they should be, according to recent coverage in the Financial Times by Leslie Hook in Beijing and Joshua Chaffin in Brussels. 

The European Union is the world’s largest market for solar panels, and Chinese companies control about 80 percent of it, according to the article. 

This “underselling” of product, also called “dumping” poses a problem for European companies, who jostle for space in the remaining 20% of solar panel market-share in the EU.

According to a European Commission website on trade, 

“A company is dumping if it is exporting a product to the EU at prices lower than the normal value of the product (the domestic prices of the product or the cost of production) on its own domestic market.”

In other words, merely under-pricing other companies is not dumping.  In this case, as has been reported in the Financial Times and in Bloomberg, among other sources, generous subsidies and lines of credit given by the Chinese government have allowed Chinese companies to slash prices while posting losses. 

Under EU trade guidelines, these could constitute unfair subsidization by the Chinese government.

An article on Bloomberg.com, published last July, said SolarWorld AG, a German Solar materials manufacturer, is leading a coalition of 25 European companies collectively called the EU ProSun Group. It also reported that the American division of SolarWorld AG had already successfully filed a complaint in the US against Chinese companies and tariffs were later introduced. 

The International Trade Administration, the division of the US Department of Commerce which oversees such activity has these guidelines on its website for dumping and anti-dumping measures. 

Stefan Nicola and Marc Roca, wrote on Bloomberg.com, that China

“has supported companies with credit lines from state-owned China Development Bank Corp., helping Suntech and peers Yingli Green Energy Holdings Co., Trina Solar Ltd. (TSL) and LDK Solar Co. ramp up production even as panel prices fell.”

Also as reported in the aforementioned Financial Times and Bloomberg pieces, the Chinese government is denying any wrongdoing and is arguing that the possible tariffs would damage the trade relationship between the EU and China.  

In a final twist, an analyst from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Jenny Chase, said that the tariffs imposed on Chinese solar panels in the US merely resulted in higher demand for panels from Taiwanese makers, and had not really affected solar panel prices.  She predicted that the primary beneficiaries of EU tariffs would be Taiwanese, Korean and Southeast Asian companies. 

This is a new blog I am starting as part of a graduate program in journalism for NYU.  The focus will be on new energy technologies, with an emphasis on “greentech” or renewable energy sources.  More posts to come soon.  Enjoy!