The situation has tipped global equities markets into a relative free fall, with anything remotely connected to nuclear energy taking a bigger hit.
Domestic production must rise relative to domestic absorption of goods and services, or absorption must fall relative to domestic production.
Were benefits going to rise under personal accounts, or fall relative to income under price indexing?
FORBES: How George W. Bush Lost Personal Accounts For Social Security
So, in the current crisis, labour rates in Ireland and Greece need to fall relative to those in Germany.
And, just to stave off boredom, and to attract some practical (paying ) participation, I suspect, one of the organizations he works with runs the Financial Centre Futures which tracks the relative rise and fall of financial centers around the world, which I wrote about a few months ago at Forbes.com.
Those queries are hard to answer but pondering them is far more useful than asking whether taxes will rise or fall relative to a baseline, or whether it will take more or less income out of the pockets of those in a particular income group than it did at some time in the past.
FORBES: Scoring Tax Reform: Budget Baselines Don't Really Matter
Here's the economics bit: if those periphery countries are going to become more competitive, without a currency depreciation, it follows that their domestic prices and wages need to fall, relative to German ones, and their domestic consumption needs to grow more slowly than their net exports.
So strong is this indirect effect, on his calculations, that the gradual fall in the relative value of America's minimum wage over the past 20 years is capable of explaining 1.5 percentage points of the fall in the country's equilibrium rate of unemployment over the same period.
The increase in the demand for paper currency and gold not only had a quantity effect on the money supply but it also put upward pressure on the price of gold, which meant that dollar prices of all goods and services had to fall for the relative price of gold to rise.
WSJ: Arthur B. Laffer: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles
At the same time, the value of small coins relative to big coins would often fall.
ECONOMIST: The lessons of sound money from 1,000 years' experience
Yuan appreciation not only bolsters the buying power of Chinese consumers, but it makes Chinese-based producers and assemblers more competitive because the relative prices of their imported inputs fall, reducing their costs of production.
FORBES: Economists Ignore the Facts in Supporting Chinese Currency Legislation
Stocks could rise or fall, depending on the relative growth rate of profits compared to the increase in interest rates.
FORBES: A Record Stock Market with Record Federal Debt: Does This Make Sense?
Schools for the rich, traditionally oases of relative excellence, will likely see standards fall as an influx of underprepared students are rammed into classrooms by fiat.
The former close adviser to Saddam had been holed up in a relative's home near Baghdad since the fall of the Iraqi regime.
The weekly relative performance broke its downtrend, line f, last fall and has accelerated to the upside.
Thus REIT share prices may still have room to fall, even if REIT shares represent a better relative investment opportunity than private real estate at the moment.
Since the new Europe-wide rule to strengthen banks is that they must - by the middle of 2012 - have a minimum of 9% capital on a Basel 2.5 basis relative to their risk-weighted assets, after allowing for the fall in the price of their holdings of the debts of over-indebted eurozone countries, by definition it is the banks in those over-indebted eurozone countries that emerge as weakest.
"Relative poverty counts - without these targets the poorest families and children will fall further and further behind, " said Rhian Beynon, head of policy and campaigns at Family Action.
BBC: Iain Duncan Smith: Child poverty approach 'set to fail'
Had it done so, the stimulus would have been a fall in the prices of goods traded between euro-zone members relative to those traded with countries outside the currency union.
ECONOMIST: The supposed benefits of monetary union are cut down to size
We might assume a rise in one and a fall in the other: although that does of course depend upon what people think about the relative importance of smartphone operating systems to the two companies.
FORBES: Nokia Rises, Samsung Falls, On News Of Apple Verdict
应用推荐