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I.M.F. Forecast: Global Economic Growth Modest at Best

Label: Business

WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday that it continued to expect a modest upturn in global growth in 2013, with fewer risks of major policy mistakes and lower levels of financial stress.

The fund cautioned, however, that growth is hardly expected to snap back to pre-crisis levels in the coming years. Over all, the fund sees global growth of 3.5 percent in 2013 and 4.1 percent in 2014, up from 3.2 percent in 2012. In the years just before the global downturn, annual economic growth ranged between 4.5 and 5.5 percent.

“If crisis risks do not materialize and financial conditions continue to improve, global growth could be stronger than projected,” the Washington-based fund said in its economic report. “However, downside risks remain significant, including renewed setbacks in the euro area and risks of excessive near-term fiscal consolidation in the United States. Policy action must urgently address these risks.”

The fund issued a routine update to the projections it makes in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook report. This time, it whittled down many of the forecasts for 2013 that it had made in October, knocking 0.1 percentage point from its United States growth forecast, 0.3 percentage point from the euro area and 0.4 percentage point from the newly industrialized Asian economies, like Singapore and South Korea.

Still, it noted that financial stresses and the risk of a major policy shock in Europe and the United States have decreased. “Optimism is in the air,” said Olivier Blanchard, the fund’s chief economist, at a press conference on Wednesday. “Some cautious optimism may indeed be justified,” he added. “We may have avoided the cliffs, but we still face high mountains.”

The fund said it downgraded its estimate of European growth from October despite “progress in national adjustment and a strengthened European Union-wide policy response to the euro area crisis.” It said that there might be “delays” as lower sovereign-bond yields and reduced financial stress eventually translate into improved private-sector borrowing conditions. It added that uncertainty about the ultimate resolution of the long-simmering European debt crisis remains high.

Mr. Blanchard said that policy challenges “clearly” remain highest in certain European countries struggling with large debt burdens and slow-growing economies. He said business competitiveness and exports had improved recently, but high interest rates, pressure for budget cuts and uncertainty continued to depress growth.

Slow growth in advanced economies, including the United States, Germany and Japan, will continue to weigh on growth in emerging economies, the fund said.

Mr. Blanchard noted that financial markets have become considerably more sanguine over the past year, with the European Central Bank starting a major new bond-buying program and the United States avoiding the worst of the so-called fiscal cliff package of tax increases and budget cuts. He said that could be a sign that the financial markets are experiencing some kind of “bubble” but also said that investors could be “seeing things which are truly good.” Ultimately, with less financial stress, the real economy should pick up, thus explaining the market optimism, he said.

In terms of policy advice, Mr. Blanchard said that his “main message” would be that “financial market optimism should not lead to policy complacency.”

For Washington, the “priority is to avoid excessive fiscal consolidation in the short term, promptly raise the debt ceiling and agree on a credible medium-term consolidation plan,” the fund’s economists said. Christine Lagarde, managing director, and other fund officials have repeatedly warned politicians in Washington not to embark on too stringent an austerity program, for the good of the world economy as well as the United States.

At the news conference, Thomas Helbling of the I.M.F.’s research division said that the United States faced a “long-term” fiscal problem, with much of the policy challenge resting in bringing down health care spending over time. He said that the challenge seemed “doable,” and stressed that other countries faced far more wrenching adjustments.

This month, its sister institution, the World Bank, released a rosier economic analysis. It foresees global growth of just 2.4 percent in 2013. But it said that emerging economies could worry less about downside risks from advanced economies and start focusing on domestic economic issues, like labor-market or regulatory reforms.

Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

Label: Health

The Well section of The New York Times is starting a new online featured called Ask Well. If you have a question about fitness, nutrition, illness or family health, the staff of The New York Times Health section is ready to help you find the answer.

How do you solve the problem of back pain caused by sitting in an office chair all day? Do you still need the flu shot even if you’ve had the flu? What’s the best way to heal tennis elbow? Those are some of the questions we’ve already answered in Ask Well.

Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

All questions submitted to Ask Well will be reviewed by the health staff. We’ll post selected questions and let readers vote on those they would most like to see answered. You can ask a question, vote for your favorites and read answered questions on the Ask Well Questions Page.

While Ask Well is not a source for personal medical advice (only your doctor can give you that), we can offer readers health information from the experts and guide you to various resources to help you make informed decisions. So let’s get started. Tell us what’s on your mind, and Ask Well will provide the answers.

Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

Label: Lifestyle

Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

DealBook: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout

Label: Technology

The effort to take Dell private has gained a prominent, if unusual, backer: Microsoft.

The software giant is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell that would exceed $20 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars.

An investment by Microsoft — if it comes to pass — could be enough to push a leveraged buyout of the struggling computer maker over the goal line. Silver Lake, the private equity firm spearheading the takeover talks, has been seeking a deep-pocketed investor to join the effort. And Microsoft, which has not yet made a commitment, has more than $66 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft and Silver Lake, a prominent investor in technology companies, are no strangers. The private equity firm was part of a consortium that sold Skype, the online video-chatting pioneer, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago. And the two companies had discussed teaming up to make an investment in Yahoo in late 2011, before Yahoo decided against selling a minority stake in itself.

A vibrant Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans to make Windows more relevant for the tablet era, when more and more devices come with touch screens. Dell has been one of the most visible supporters of Windows 8 in its products.

That has been crucial at a time when Microsoft’s relationships with many PC makers have grown strained because of the company’s move into making computer hardware with its Surface family of tablets.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

If completed, a buyout of Dell would be the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis, reaching levels unseen since the takeovers of Hilton Hotels and the Texas energy giant TXU. Such a deal is taking advantage of Dell’s still-low stock price and the abundance of investors willing to buy up the debt issued as part of a transaction to take the company private. And Silver Lake has been working with Dell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, who is expected to contribute his nearly 16 percent stake in the company to a takeover bid.

Yet while many aspects of the potential deal have fallen into place, including a potential price of up to around $14 a share, talks between Dell and its potential buyers may still fall apart.

Shares of Dell closed up 2.2 percent on Tuesday, at $13.12. They began rising after CNBC reported Microsoft’s potential involvement in a leveraged buyout. Microsoft shares slipped 0.4 percent, to $27.15.

Microsoft’s lending a hand to Dell could make sense at a time when the PC industry is facing some of the biggest challenges in its history. Dell is one of Microsoft’s most significant, longest-lasting partners in the PC business and among the most committed to creating machines that run Windows, the operating system that is the foundation of much of Microsoft’s profits.

But PC sales were in a slump for most of last year, as consumers diverted their spending to other types of devices like tablets and smartphones. Dell, the third-biggest maker of PCs in the world, recorded a 21 percent decline in shipments of PCs during the fourth quarter of last year from the same period in 2011, according to IDC.

In a joint interview in November, Mr. Dell and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, exchanged friendly banter, as one would expect of two men who have been in business together for decades.

Mr. Dell said Mr. Ballmer had gone out of his way to reassure him that Microsoft’s Surface computers would not hurt Dell sales.

“We’ve never sold all the PCs in the world,” said Mr. Dell, sitting in a New York hotel room brimming with new Windows 8 computers made by his company. “As I’ve understood Steve’s plans here, if Surface helps Windows 8 succeed, that’s going to be good for Windows, good for Dell and good for our customers. We’re just fine with all that.”

Microsoft has been willing to open its purse strings in the past to help close partners. Last April, Microsoft committed to invest more than $600 million in Barnes & Noble’s electronic books subsidiary, in a deal that ensures a source of electronic books for Windows devices. Microsoft also agreed in 2011 to provide the Finnish cellphone maker Nokia billions of dollars’ worth of various forms of support, including marketing and research and development assistance, in exchange for Nokia’s adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/23/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout.

Economist Urges Elimination of Cats From New Zealand

Label: World

HONG KONG — A prominent New Zealand economist has set off a firestorm by suggesting that cats should eventually be eliminated from his country, claiming they are posing a dire threat to native bird species.

Gareth Morgan, an economist and environmentalist, says that the cat is actually a “friendly neighborhood serial killer” when it comes to birds, and his Web site suggests that New Zealanders should gradually reduce the local feline population by having all cats neutered, and that when cats do die, their owners should not replace them.

This problem, he says in his anti-cat site “Cats to Go,” is that cats are gradually endangering New Zealand’s rich avian diversity, having helped kill off nine native species while endangering another 33.

New Zealanders, it turns out, have an affinity for what Mr. Morgan calls “that little ball of fluff” that he maintains “is actually a natural-born killer.” The New Zealand Pet Food Manufacturers Association, which of course has a stake in such statistics, reports that 48 percent of New Zealand’s households have cats, “making it the highest cat ownership rate in the world.”

The issue of the feline threat to birds has been documented before. A study on the deaths of baby gray catbirds in the Washington suburbs found that 80 percent of the birds were killed by predators, and cats were responsible for 47 percent of those deaths. One issue is that with their domestication, cats have few natural predators.

Still, Mr. Morgan’s campaign calling for the eventual elimination of cats has drawn an angry response from cat lovers and animal groups. “A cat-free anywhere is not a good area,” said Bob Kerridge, executive director of the Auckland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who added that we should “leave it to nature to take care of things.”

DealBook: At Davos, Crisis Is the New Normal

Label: Business

DAVOS, Switzerland — In certain ways, the very setting of the World Economic Forum reflects the restless, challenged state of human affairs. Our footing is uncertain, as on this ski resort’s slithery streets, and we have steep slopes to climb, as the Magic Mountain will remind the global elite this week.

Barely into 2013, Mali and Algeria are new sites of hot war and chilling fear. Where the tumult that began in the Arab Spring will end is still as unclear as when it erupted — far from Davos — two years ago.

The challenge posed by the free flow of information in China went to the New Year streets in Guangzhou. Washington’s feuding politicians walked up to the brink before resolving not to jump off the so-called fiscal cliff. Europe seems to have averted a collapse of the euro, but even in Germany, growth is anemic.

Crisis, in short, is the new normal.

And while the business community determinedly seeks opportunity in troubled times, even many an entrepreneur views the years since the financial crisis of 2008 as what Rich Lesser, the new chief executive of the Boston Consulting Group, called “a higher period of turbulence and uncertainty in the global economy than we have experienced in a very long time.”

The days in which “quants” and algorithms reigned supreme are gone, their increasingly untrackable results having helped the financial system spin out of control in 2008 and 2009. The heady triumph of capitalism after 1989 is also a distant memory, although its chief effect — that capital went global — remains a driving force of our age.

But global capital does not solve big world issues: debt and financial crisis, political paralysis or gridlock, the transformative effects of the digital revolution, climate change, resource shortages, shifting demographics.

For those tasks, we must rely either on the nation state — an aging collective unit that does not readily serve transnational action — or on international institutions whose effectiveness is regularly questioned by the Davos crowd.

“The global economy has integrated, but global society is as fragmented as ever,” said Dennis J. Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

In that fragmentation, there is an increasing lack of consensus about the global way forward. A few years ago, the inexorable rise of China led to talk of a new Beijing consensus, replacing the Washington consensus that epitomized the confident domination of the United States.

But China, while still growing, is growing less fast. It remains a one-party state, and its advance has arguably resulted more from enormous investment than creative increases in productivity. The challenges to its new leadership are clear: the need for financial reform; the perils of shadow banking and corruption; thick urban pollution; and, above all, the free flow of information, as seen in the standoff this month between a state censor in Guangzhou and journalists at the Southern Weekend and their supporters.

Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group political consulting firm, who in general sees a big return of politics in business calculations as the world becomes permanently restless, likened China to a large car that is racing toward a brick wall, “and we don’t know if they have steering” to skirt the obstacle, or whether they will hit it.

“As China grows wealthier,” he said in an interview, “entrenched Chinese will see the benefit of the rule of law” — a key element of the Washington consensus. But “the new leadership is not anywhere near there.”

For Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the saving grace of the incoming president, Xi Jinping, and his colleagues is that they are pragmatists. Pragmatism, he argued in an interview by phone, “means that you weigh the costs and benefits of certain actions.” It “checks the ideology.”

Yet even as China helps to sustain international growth — where would Europe’s purveyors of luxury be without the eager Chinese consumer? — it remains, like other emerging countries, self-absorbed.

“Look at the big debates of the last five years,” said Minxin Pei, like Mr. Huang a Chinese-born academic, who teaches at Claremont McKenna College in California. “It’s very hard to find one that originated in Beijing. People talk about China outside China, but still the country is very inward-looking.” This also feeds rising nationalism seen most markedly in the escalating dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea.

As with China, so with Russia, India and Brazil, or indeed South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia and other favorites of those who seek bright spots on a gloomy globe. In Brazil, “everything is focused on being Brazilian, how great it is,” noted Misha Glenny, a British analyst who has written on global mafias, cybercrime and is now working on a book about Brazil.

In these countries, absorbed in their own material advances and increasingly wary of a Washington-made prescription for their future, the “fiscal cliff” and debate about the limit on the United States deficit serve as proof that they are on the right path, though critics might dispute it.

“On the whole, we made a recovery from the crisis even faster than other countries,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told a news conference last month. “Just look at the recession in Europe, while Russia has posted growth, albeit a modest one, but we still have a much better situation than in the once-prosperous euro zone, or even in the United States.”

In the United States, recent books have argued that the country’s status as a debtor nation is curbing its global reach. After the last-minute fiscal deal this month, a commentary of the kind believed to reflect high government thinking on the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua noted tartly: “The American people were once better known for their ability to make tough choices on difficult issues.” It went on, “The Americans may be proud of their mature democracy, but the political gridlock in Washington really looks ugly from an outsider’s view.”

One example of how nations in transition are going their own way is Egypt, where President Mohamed Morsi seems to seek a geopolitical mix: a dose of Turkey, an Islamist-leaning democracy, with much-needed financial aid from China, and relations with Washington warm enough to garner more aid and collaborate on diplomacy like mediating the Israeli-Palestinian fighting over the Gaza Strip last November.

The fluid nature of this world is enhanced by digital communication. With the collapse in newspaper readership and the spread of social media, “everyone gets little snippets of information, and never fully understands the implications,” Mr. Glenny noted. “Very few people do deeper reading and thinking.”

This, he argued, increases people’s sense that “everything has just become too big to grasp and understand.”

A crucial topic for the dozen or so analysts interviewed for this article, and central also to discussions of increasingly important trends like the global rise of women, is education. Instead of machines being in charge, a nimble human mind, connecting individuals with collective wisdom, is seen as the antidote to cacophony, poverty and chaos.

In this view, more and better schooling will help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, make it easier for populations to cope with change and stimulate the kind of innovation that Mr. Lesser sees already in technology, medicine and health care.

What kind of education is a topic that will be much debated at Davos, to judge from several scheduled sessions on disruptive universities and the like.

“We need government to recognize the need to build the next-gen work force,” Mr. Lesser said. This is “fundamental to staying competitive in the future,” he said. “The challenge goes beyond education. It’s also about good immigration policies.” In this way, he argued, a country facing demographic challenges — Germans, according to a government survey released last week, are the most childless adults in Europe — may preserve wealth and adapt to the future.

Whether by increasing online courses, interacting with students or raising the relatively dismal level of numeracy and literacy among American high school graduates, improving education “is one of the few things I can be unguardedly optimistic about,” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard University historian. “The solutions are relatively cheap, simple and to hand.”

Well: The Appetite Workout

Label: Health

Every January, many people start working out, hoping to lose weight. But as studies attest, exercise often produces little or no weight loss — and even weight gain — and resolutions are soon abandoned. But new science suggests that if you stick with the right kind of exercise, you may change how your body interacts with food. It’s more than a matter of burning calories; exercise also affects hormones.

A 2012 study from the University of Wyoming looked at a group of women who either ran or walked and, on alternate days, sat quietly for an hour. After the running, walking or sitting, researchers drew blood to test for the levels of certain hormones and then directed the women to a room with a buffet. Human appetite is complicated, driven by signals from the brain, gut, fat cells, glands, genes and psyche. But certain appetite-related hormones, in particular ghrelin, which stimulates hunger, are known to be instrumental in determining how much we consume.

Studies have shown that exercise typically increases the production of ghrelin. Workouts make you hungry. In the Wyoming study, when the women ran, their ghrelin levels spiked, which should have meant they would attack the buffet with gusto. But they didn’t. In fact, after running they consumed several hundred fewer calories than they burned.

Their restraint, the researchers said, was due to a concomitant increase in other hormones that initiate satiety. These hormones, only recently discovered and still not well understood, tell the body that it has taken in enough fuel; it can stop eating. The augmented levels of the satiety hormones, the authors write, “muted” the message from ghrelin. Sitting and, notably, walking did not change the blood levels of the women’s satiety hormones, and the walkers overate, consuming more calories at the buffet than they had burned.

A related study published in December looked at the effects of moderate exercise, the equivalent of brisk jogging. It found that after 12 weeks, formerly sedentary, overweight men and women began recognizing, without consciously knowing it, that they should not overeat.

Researchers gave volunteers doctored milkshakes. Some contained maltodextrin, a flavorless sweetener that packed 600 calories into the drinks. The others, without maltodextrin, had 246 calories. Before beginning the exercise program, the volunteers ate more at a buffet lunch and throughout the rest of the day after drinking the high-calorie shake than when they were given the lower-calorie version. Their appetite regulation was out of whack.

But after three months of exercise, the volunteers consumed fewer calories throughout the day when they had the high-calorie shake than the lower-calorie one. Exercise “improves the body’s ability to judge the amount of calories consumed and to adjust for that afterward,” says Catia Martins, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who led the study.

But not all exercise. Running, it would seem, better hones the body’s satiety mechanisms than walking. And longevity counts. You need to stick with the program for several months, Martins says, to truly fine-tune appetite control.

Well: The Appetite Workout

Label: Lifestyle

Disruptions: Immediacy of Digital Media Helps Drive Spending

Label: Technology

I was tallying my spending of the last year, and much to my surprise, I spent $2,403 in one category. No, that wasn’t on clothes. It wasn’t on my most recent vacation, either. And it wasn’t the total of all my parking tickets (though that did feel as if it came close).

The $2,403 is what I spent on digital media.

But wait, people are spending money online? On media? Didn’t music industry executives declare, “People won’t pay for things online!”? Yes, as did movie industry executives. TV, radio, book, newspaper and magazine bigwigs, too, have all made similar claims over the last decade.

Well, those apocalyptic predictions turn out to be wrong.

I am spending more on digital media than I used to spend on the physical stuff. (The federal government says the average American family spent $2,572 on all entertainment, not just digital, in 2011.) And I know why I am spending more on digital media.

Digital media, unlike its slow cousin, is immediate. In the past, if friends mentioned a good book they had just finished, people made a note (mental or on a scrap of paper) to pick it up during their next visit to the bookstore or library. The same went for other items like CDs, DVDs or magazines.

Now, when someone does that at dinner — “Oh, I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest book, you’d love it!” — we pull out our smartphones, hop into a wormhole to Amazon or iTunes and buy it on the spot. No notes; no forgetting the book’s name; no driving to a store. The book or song is just transported to our pockets.

With one-click shopping and smartphones, buying media online becomes an impulse purchase, like the candy or gum by the cash register.

And it all adds up, quickly. Last year, I bought 47 e-books. That’s $475 on digital books alone. In the past, I probably bought 20 physical books a year, at most, and given that half of those were from used bookstores, my annual literary budget rarely passed $200.

I’m paying less but buying more.

I also spent $359 on music subscription services last year, including Rdio and Spotify. Then I frittered away $318 on other music downloads. I paid $95 for a Netflix subscription ($8 a month adds up); $25 for Flickr; $396 on apps and games; $60 on an Xbox Live subscription; $316 on movies and TV shows; $239 for subscription or one-offs of several digital magazines, including The New Yorker, Wired, The Economist and Popular Photography. (As an employee of The New York Times, I have free access to its digital offerings, otherwise I’d gladly pay for that, too.)

I’ve had to pay $120 a year for online storage to back up all my media purchases. And these numbers don’t include the money I spent on the Internet — almost $100 a month for my iPhone, iPad and home connection — or the purchases of Kindles, iPads and headphones. Granted, $2,403 might seem high for a bunch of zeros and ones. That could be, in part, because I live in Silicon Valley, where people slurp up digital content with the same frequency that rock stars would inhale drugs in the ’80s. Out here, we all tend to live a few years in the future. If it’s happening here now, it will usually happen elsewhere several years later.

“This is the same thing we saw with e-commerce five years ago, where people said it was just going to be across a small segment of the Valley,” said D. J. Patil, a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, a prominent venture capital company based in Menlo Park, Calif. “Now we are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in online transactions.”

So where am I spending less? On traditional media. I rarely go to the movies anymore, where I have to sign over the mortgage for my home for a bottle of water and bag of popcorn. I don’t pay for cable TV either.

Like the media moguls who once predicted that digital media would be the demise of their industries, I’m willing to make a forecast: that digital spending number will continue to grow, and it’s all thanks to the ease of digital media.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2013

An earlier version of this blog post misstated the amount spent on the Internet. It is $100 a month, not $100 a year.

India Ink: Supreme Court to Consider Moving Delhi Gang Rape Trial on Wednesday

Label: World

The Supreme Court has delayed until Wednesday a hearing on a petition to move the gang rape trial from New Delhi.

The petition by Manohar Lal Sharma, who represents one of the defendants, Mukesh Singh, was scheduled to be heard Tuesday but was deferred to Wednesday because the court did not have sufficient time to take it up.

Mr. Sharma said in an interview that he was convinced his client would not get a fair trial in Delhi, given the “unprecedented” public pressure and media scrutiny surrounding the case.

“Let us not forget that the accused also have rights in this country,” said Mr. Sharma. “How can they get a fair trial when every single person wants to see them hanged?”

Over a month after a 23-year-old woman was gang raped in a moving bus in Delhi, outrage over the crime and demands for justice for the victim have continued unabated.

Pressure from protesters and unrelenting attention by the media have resulted in quick police and legal action: five men and one juvenile were arrested in a week; a detailed charge sheet, including DNA results and matches, was filed in 18 days, and a fast track court was established to hear the case.

The defendants’ lawyers say the atmosphere in the capital is too emotionally charged to give their defendants a fair trial. Mr. Sharma said the trial should be moved far away from Delhi, suggesting southern Indian cities like Coimbatore and Madurai.

The court is scheduled Thursday to hear arguments on the charges against the five men, which include gang rape, murder, robbery and destruction of evidence, after which hearings will take place daily.

Fresh confusion emerged in the Supreme Court on Tuesday after V.K. Anand, the lawyer for Ram Singh, another defendant, claimed he had been appointed by Mukesh Singh to replace Mr. Sharma as his lawyer.

Mr. Sharma said he continues to be Mukesh Singh’s lawyer and accused Mr. Anand of seeking publicity.

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I.M.F. Forecast: Global Economic Growth Modest at Best

Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

DealBook: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/23/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout.

Economist Urges Elimination of Cats From New Zealand

DealBook: At Davos, Crisis Is the New Normal

Well: The Appetite Workout

Well: The Appetite Workout

Disruptions: Immediacy of Digital Media Helps Drive Spending

India Ink: Supreme Court to Consider Moving Delhi Gang Rape Trial on Wednesday

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