As part of an effort to assuage governors and manufacturers who say that Chinese imports are undermining American business and costing jobs, the administration is pressing China to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value against the dollar.
Reprints Related items Protest in China: Post-Olympic stress disorderSep 11th 2008The taxi strikes share a common theme: what drivers say are excessive fees demanded from them by their companies, as well as the failure of local governments to stop unlicensed cabs, which are undermining their business.
Companies such as istockphoto.com in the US and the much smaller fotolibra.com in the UK (not to mention Flickr) are undermining the business models of companies such as Getty Images and Corbis by offering high-quality images on practically any subject at a tiny fraction of the price charged by the big boys.
This trend and the rising use of mobile phones to access news are undermining traditional business models.
This has pissed off a lot of cabbies in cities pretty much everywhere, who argue that Uber and Lyft are undermining their business by driving down prices and offering services that regular cabs cannot.
"Rising health care costs are undermining our businesses, exploding our deficits and costing our nation more jobs with each passing month," he said.
"They are undermining the core business model for an industry that makes most of its money from services that are high priced and low bandwidth, like texting".
But it isn't the whole story: the manufacturing slump, falling stock prices and a general climate of nervousness are undermining both consumer and business confidence.
Stirring rhetoric about creating a "march of the makers", and unleashing a "devolution revolution", is all but meaningless if niggardly Treasury spending cuts are undermining the conditions for businesses to flourish.
Subscription and pay-as-you go businesses are undermining an idea that has been entrenched in our collective psyche since the foundation of capitalism: that you have to own something to use it and enjoy it.
