Global Economic Pulse

Indian Central Bank Buys IMF Gold

2009-12-29T23:48:00.001-08:00

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has increased the quantity of its gold holdings. With a recent purchase of 200 tonnes of gold from the International Monetary Fund, the Indian Central Bank is now the ninth or tenth largest holder of gold globally.

Executed as a part of its foreign exchange reserves management, the RBI recently purchased $6.7 billion USD worth of the IMF's gold, from Oct. 19 to Oct. 30th 2009. Although the RBI does not officially discuss its diversification strategy, speculation is rampant that the purchase may be part of India's push for greater influence within the IMF itself.

India, along with other emerging BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) is jockeying for greater bearing on the global economic stage, and this recent move may be a tactic of this strategy. The Indian economy has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now in aggregate, a $1.2 trillion USD economy.

According to the latest data, of India’s total foreign reserves of $285.5 billion on Oct. 23, 2009, slightly more than $10 billion worth was in gold. The recent purchase has increased India’s percentage of gold holdings in its portfolio, from approximately 4 percent to approximately 6 percent. The purchase was one of the largest single purchases of gold by a Central Bank, in memory.

Portfolio-wise, Indian gold holdings are on average much less than most Central Banks of the developed world, but interestingly, Indian gold holdings are approximately four times the size of China's share. With this recent move, perhaps New Delhi may be trying to assert its strength in world economic affairs, relative to the other BRIC nations.

For gold markets in general, the picture is less clear. What does the RBI’s decision signal for the global gold market? Does India’s recent move potentially signify the beginning of a new bull market for bullion? Only time will tell.

Posted via web from Global Business News

US and Asian GDP Return to Growth

2009-11-21T22:58:00.001-08:00

American GDP is growing again.

After four consecutive quarters of GDP decline, the US Economy grew in the third quarter by 3.5%. This ends the longest contraction in the US economy since the Great Depression. The 3.5 per cent growth figures were stronger than expected by some analysts, including Goldman Sachs, who had forecast only 2.7 per cent growth.

Simultaneously, the IMF has doubled its forecast for Asian economic growth in 2010.

The region’s prospects have improved dramatically over the past 6 months due to the concerted efforts of Asian Governments to nurse their economies back to health. China, South Korea, India, and Japan have taken the lead in this regard. The International Monetary Fund has forecast GDP growth of 2.8 per cent for 2009, and 5.8 per cent in 2010 for the region.

The “Great Recession”, as it has come to be known, may be technically over according to the Economists, but it's been replaced by fears that this may only be a statistical recovery. The manifest growth in the US is literally underwritten by billions of dollars in US Federal government spending. Some economists posit that all of the government money in the US system will lead to an artificial and jobless recovery in America. Last month's US jobless rate was 9.8 per cent, its highest rate in 26 years.

Nonetheless, third quarter figures indicate that 2010 will be a year of growth in the American economy, which is certainly reassuring news for the Global economy, as the US Economy is currently underperforming globally.

Posted via web from Global Business News

Taiwan lab develops panda robot

2009-10-12T11:57:00.001-07:00

The world's first panda robot is taking shape at a cutting-edge lab in Taiwan where an ambitious group of scientists hope to add new dimensions to the island's reputation as a high-tech power. The Centre for Intelligent Robots Research aims to develop pandas that are friendlier and more artistically endowed than their endangered real-life counterparts.

"The panda robot will be very cute and more attracted to humans. Maybe the panda robot can be made to sing a panda song," said Jerry Lin, the centre's 52-year-old director. Day by day, the panda evolves on the centre's computer screens and, if funding permits, the robot will take its first steps by the end of the year.

"It's the first time we try to construct a quadrupedal robot. We need to consider the balance problem," said 28-year-old Jo Po-chia, a doctoral student who is in charge of the robot's design. The robo-panda is just one of many projects on the drawing board at the centre, which is attached to the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the island's version of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Taipei-based centre also aims to build robots that look like popular singers, so exact replicas of world stars can perform in the comfort of their fans' homes. "It could be a Madonna robot. It will be a completely different experience from just listening to audio," said Lin.

Commercial value is what counts for Lin, who hopes to contribute to the Taiwan economy at a time when it has matured and no longer exhibits the stellar growth of the earlier take-off phase. "If I write 25 academic papers, I won't contribute anything. But if I create something people need, I will contribute to the Taiwan economy," he said. Lin and his team are also working on educational robots that can act as private tutors for children, teaching them vocabulary or telling them stories in foreign languages.

There is an obvious target market: China, with its tens of millions of middle-class parents doting on the one child they are allowed under strict population policies. "Asian parents are prepared to spend a lot of money to teach their children languages," said Lin.

Robots running amok are a fixture of popular literature but parents do not have to worry about leaving their children home alone with their artificial teachers, he said. "A robot may hit you like a car or a motorbike might hit you. But it won't suddenly lose control and get violent. Humans lose control, not robots. It's not like that."

Lin's long-term dream is to create a fully-functioning Robot Theatre of Taiwan, with an ensemble of life-like robots able to sing, dance and entertain. Two robotic pioneers, Thomas and Janet, appeared before an audience in Taiwan in December, performing scenes from the Phantom of the Opera, but that was just the beginning, Lin said.

"You can imagine a robot shooting down balloons, like in the wild west, using two revolvers, or three, but much faster than a person. Some things robots can do better than humans with the aid of technologies," Lin said.

His vision is to turn the show into an otherworldly experience where robots and humans mix seamlessly on stage, leaving the audience in doubt which is which. But the bottomline is the bottomline. Lin wants commercial viability, in the interest of his home island.

"I want to be able to go to an amusement park in the US and see a building where on top it says, 'Robot Theatre from Taiwan'. That's my lifetime goal," he said.

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/robot-takes-over-tokyo-classroom.html

Source:

http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/technology/6077266/taiwan-lab-develops-panda-robot/

Tags:

China, Taipei, Robot panda, Robot Theatre of Taiwan, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Global IT News, The Centre for Intelligent Robots Research,

Posted via email from Global Business News

World's Largest Yacht is Paparazzi Proof

2009-09-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

Roman Abramovich's latest extravagance, Eclipse, probably so-called because it's almost big enough to block out the sun, is the world's largest mega-yacht. Measuring 557ft long, it boasts two swimming pools, two helipads and an onboard missile defence system. And, just in case any missiles do get through, it comes complete with an escape pod: its own submarine. Its most curious feature, however, defends it against an altogether more insidious weapon: the prying eyes of the paparazzi.

The boat's anti-paparazzi system, described in several reports as a "laser shield", is a little less science fiction than it sounds. The lasers – beams of infrared light – are used to detect the electronic light sensors that digital cameras use instead of film. The camera is then targeted with a focused beam of bright light that disrupts the potential photo, making any shots unusable. It's not so much a space-age Star Wars laser shield, then, as a big budget version of shining a torch in someone's face.

A similar technology is already available to all in the form of an anti-paparazzi purse, devised by New York University student Adam Harvey, which detects the flash of a camera and responds with a bright flash of its own, cloaking the intended target in a blob of white light. Nigel Atherton, editor of What Digital Camera, explains, "You couldn't stop them taking a picture but you could ruin the picture." Eclipse's anti-paparazzi defence grid, he suspects, "is essentially a large-scale version of that."

What makes Eclipse's system special is that it can detect any digital camera, whether it's using a flash or not, and before the first shot. But Abramovich's shield still has a serious weakness: it can't possibly detect the presence of an old-fashioned analogue or mechanical camera.

So for £724m, he's got himself a boat that digital-camera-wielding paparazzi can't photograph, say, falling over outside a nightclub at 3am. It's a shame really. That's exactly the sort of memory you'd want to capture.

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/mitsubishi-rolls-out-zero-emission.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/world-most-expensive-car.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/teslas-founder-sues-teslas-ceo.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/world-undiscovered-gas-and-oil-is.html

Source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/22/roman-abramovich-yacht-paparazzi

Tags:

Roman Abramovich, Eclipse Yacht, Anti-Papparazzi system, lasers, New York University, Laser shield, escape pod, missile defense systems, Global Blog Network, Billionaire, paparazzi protection, flash photography,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Delivering Data At Light Speed

2009-09-10T12:41:00.001-07:00

You may not have heard of nanophotonics, but it may be the technology that puts Intel and Broadcom chips to shame.

Greg Young serves as president and CEO of Luxtera [full disclosure: My venture firm, Lux Capital, is an equity investor]. Prior to Luxtera, he was vice president and general manager of the High Speed Ethernet Controller and High Definition Media PC Video business units at Broadcom. While there, Greg led the growth of the Ethernet Controller business unit from concept to hundreds of millions in revenue and the No. 1 market share position. Prior to joining Broadcom, Greg was with Intel, where he held several engineering marketing and leadership positions.

Josh Wolfe: What career path led you to Luxtera?

Greg Young: After trying some startups out of school I joined Intel ( INTC - news -people ) in the mid-90s, beginning as an engineer and then transitioning over to marketing and running product lines. I worked at Intel until 1999, when I joined Broadcom ( BRCM - news - people ). I spent eight years at Broadcom helping to pioneer the company's participation in the Ethernet market for the network interface controller business. Ultimately, I helped grow that business to about $350 million dollars a year in semiconductor revenue. Most of my career has been spent building businesses off of advanced transceiver technology (devices that both transmit and receive information), so when I recognized the opportunity within Luxtera, it was easy for me to see how the technology could be built into a large-scale enterprise.

What excited you about the company?

First, some market backdrop here: It's getting harder and harder to send fast signals over copper wires. The world of optics has been sitting out there for a long time as the performance leader, but it has been a very expensive way to get the performance that you need for the same kind of input/output speeds. When I recognized that Luxtera had the ability to create a complete optical transceiver in CMOS technology to take performance to 10 gigabits and well beyond 10 gigabits at a cost point that was previously unachievable, I saw the same kind of opportunity I was given at both Intel and Broadcom.

Put it in perspective--how fast is 10 gigabits?

If you use a cable modem at home, that's about a 1 megabit connection--a million bits per second. We're talking about ultimately transitioning people to the point where they can readily transmit 10 billion bits a second. That's the equivalent of downloading more than 300 songs every second.

Why do photons trump electrons when it comes to broadcasting bits?

When you send an electronic signal over copper wires, there is a relationship between speed, distance, and signal integrity. As you get faster and faster over the same distance of wire, your signal integrity gets worse, and you see distortion in the signal that starts to dominate the signal quality at higher speeds. Because of that relationship, there is a natural limit for how fast and far you can push a signal over a copper wire.

At 10 gigabit speeds, electrical interconnects over copper wires really start to break down--it's hard to transmit the signal even 10 meters. Alternatively, you can send a burst of photonic energy down a low-cost fiber optic waveguide, and you can easily send a 10 gigabit signal over 10 kilometers. You can do it with less power, less complexity, and with Luxtera's technology--lower cost.

Why is transceiver technology important in this industry?

While at Intel and Broadcom, I saw two things: first, mixed signal circuitry (combined analog and digital circuitry) would enhance the communications signals between systems, and second, I realized that the rate at which you come out with new transceiver technology is really what controlled the cadence of the innovation in the industry. I first saw this at Intel.

The company was able to utilize its own technology to build transceivers for 100 megabit Ethernet. At the time, 3Com ( COMS - news - people) was the dominant player, but by leveraging the cost and performance benefits of having an integrated transceiver technology in CMOS, we were able to transition the market from 10 megabit to 100 megabit Ethernet and move Intel's position from a minority player to the market leader within the network interface controller business. That was a really interesting learning experience for me.

When I joined Broadcom in 1999, the company was the leader in mixed signal in CMOS and was just entering the Ethernet space, building up their business as an Ethernet transceiver vendor. What I was handed when I came into the company was a complete, single-chip gigabit Ethernet transceiver. At the time, no other company in the world knew how to build a single-chip transceiver for 1 gigabit data rates, and by having that technology I was able to facilitate a very similar transition to what I had been involved with at Intel--driving the market from 100 megabit Ethernet to 1 gigabit Ethernet.

Today, you can barely buy a computer that doesn't have a gigabit Ethernet network controller in it, and it was that transceiver advantage that Broadcom had that allowed them to subsequently grab the No. 1 market position from Intel.

CMOS, photonics, optical transceivers--sounds complex! In the simplest of terms, what is it that Luxtera's technology does?

Our technology takes a high-speed signal and gets it from point A to point B. A transceiver sends out a signal at point A and receives the same signal at point B. We send that signal over a fiber optic cable, giving us performance and signal quality advantages. Our system is less expensive than other optical approaches because of nanophotonics--we've shrunk the optical elements down to the same scale as the transistors that sit inside your PC's CPU.

By being down at that scale, we've enabled the manufacturing of our systems with the same processes that makes computer chips, meaning we can precisely stamp them out in large quantities, without needing complex assembly. We've been able to move the world of photonic interconnects from an era equivalent to that of the vacuum tubes, to one of the modern integrated circuit.

Who's competing with Luxtera in this market?

If you look at the area of silicon CMOS photonics, Intel, IBM ( IBM -news - people ), Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ - news - people ) and many other big names within the industry are all doing research. But Luxtera is the leader in development in this space. The original foundation for the company came out of advanced research at Caltech, which stimulated the very early years of development.

We have pioneered a brand new space, moving nanophotonic structures into a CMOS-compatible silicon process. By doing that, we've figured out how to increase performance while reducing cost. We've blazed a new trail, and in doing so we've established the methods and techniques needed to bring this technology into production. Based upon research papers written by other companies exploring this area, we estimate that we're at least five years ahead of the nearest competitor.

What do you see as the current market opportunity for this technology?

There is a huge short-term opportunity for Luxtera within the high-performance computing segment. High-performance computing refers to supercomputers and computer clusters like data centers that are trying to achieve maximum performance to solve complex computations or process large amounts of data. They are all on the cutting-edge of technology, and typically that technology very quickly waterfalls down into the mainstream PC market.

High-performance computing centers are typically the starting point for many innovations in the industry. In each of these centers, there are many, many processors that are trying to communicate with one another at mind-boggling speed, and it's becoming nearly impossible to make that communication work with copper wires.

While there has always been a broad opportunity for photonics, the photonic approaches thus far have always been too expensive to implement. Our technology allows us to take the performance of optics and reduce the cost so that we're able to interconnect these high-performance computing centers economically.

When will we see this type of technology in our home computers?

Over time, optics will transition into every market as speeds get faster and faster. The move from copper to fiber optics is a very natural transition forecasted by just about every industry pundit. You can find this technology today within the high-performance computing space, where we have products that send signals over fiber optics used to connect high-performance computing data centers.

Some of the world's fastest computer systems use photonic interconnects, and over time you're going see that transition down into consumer electronics: Home PCs, DVD players and TVs will all ultimately pick up optics for communications between subcomponents. What's notable is that optics has already moved into the home. The transition from magnetic media--like VHS and cassette tapes--to digital optical data storage on CDs and DVDs is a great precedent where storage requirements exceeded the limits of magnetic, copper-type systems and transitioned over to optics. Communication interconnects are moving down that same path.

Is Luxtera still focused on research or is the company shipping products today?

We are in production with products today. While we continue to do research to move the edge of technology forward (with 23 PhDs on staff), we are a product company with development engineering and manufacturing operations. In fact, we recently announced that through a partnership with Freescale Semiconductor ( FSL - news - people), we've reached full-scale production status for CMOS photonics technology.

What does this collaboration with Freescale mean for the company?

It means we can now design and produce chips that use our structures on a very large scale. Freescale already has a process that they use to build transistors at very large scale, and they produce lots of chips for things like network processors and automotive sensors. We've been able to integrate our novel nanophotonic device structures into Freescale's process, so now their factories can produce CMOS photonic transceivers.

As anyone in the semiconductor industry knows, it takes about five years to develop a new CMOS process, and once you have that process in production, you build products in it for a number of years. By taking our process to maturity through our relationship with Freescale, we can now design a whole host of products and bring them very quickly from design into volume manufacturing.

How do you think big players like Intel and Broadcom perceive your company in the market today?

I think that Intel in particular, and others that work in silicon photonics, see silicon CMOS photonics as being part of their future roadmap. Having a company like Luxtera out there that's in production with CMOS photonics, on the cutting edge of technology, I think one, it comforts them that the roadmap in front of them is truly viable, and two, if I were in their shoes, I would be a little threatened by it. Our technology can be applied to anyone in the industry. Any company that wants to be able to adopt

CMOS photonics to gain performance benefits in a very large market can leverage our technology platform and get to market very quickly. On the other hand, I think a lot of companies view us as an opportunity to get their hands on a technology that could move them ahead on their own roadmap faster.

The ease by which we transport massive waves of data may leave many unaware of the physical systems that enable our virtual world. How do you give people a sense of appreciation for the importance of this technology?

Here's an analogy that may give people some sense of scale: Many people have gone through the transition from a 56k modem to a cable modem or DSL service. What photonics represents to high-performance computing is akin to the transition from dial-up to broadband.

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Source:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/24/intel-broadcom-luxtera-personal-finance-guru-insight-nanophotonic-gigabit.html

Tags:

Josh Wolfe, Forbes, CMOS, photonics, Luxtera, Freescale, Greg Young, Lux Capital, Broadcom, electrons, optical transceivers, Freescale Semiconductor, nanophotonic structures, CMOS-compatible silicon process,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Tech Mogul Injured By Elephant

2009-09-08T11:03:00.001-07:00

Today he's home in Woodside, recuperating from serious injuries. A little more than a month ago, Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Siebel was in the Serengeti, where a charging elephant attacked him and a guide.

"It was all happening so fast. There was no place to hide, no place to run," the 56-year-old Siebel, founder of the Siebel Systems software company, told the Mercury News in an exclusive interview Wednesday.

The elephant plowed into the guide and then turned on Siebel, breaking several ribs, goring him in the left leg and crushing the right. Siebel said they were able to radio for help only after the animal lost interest and wandered away, but it was three hours before he received any medical treatment.

Siebel sold his business to Oracle four years ago and now divides his time between his Woodside home, an office in Palo Alto and a ranch in Montana, where he raises cattle and competes in team roping events. He said he was on a photo safari in Tanzania last month when the elephant attacked without warning.

Early on the morning of Aug. 1, Siebel said, he and a guide went to a watering hole, where they hoped to observe a variety of game that were known to gather in the quiet early morning hours. They were watching a group of elephants from 200 yards away — "keeping a respectful distance," Siebel said — when one turned and without warning began to charge.

"There was no apparent reason, nothing that should have made it feel threatened," Siebel said. "It was quiet, and then the quiet stopped," when the elephant began thundering toward the two men. As the massive animal closed the distance, Siebel said the guide fired a gun but missed. Siebel said he was trampled and gored in the leg, until he just "curled into as tight a ball as I could." The guide suffered broken ribs and other injuries.

After the animal left and the men called for help, rescuers came and eventually airlifted Siebel to Nairobi, where he received emergency care before flying back to California for more treatment. All told, he said, he spent 18 days in four hospitals before he was allowed to go home. Siebel has been using a wheelchair but has told friends he expects to make a full recovery, after reconstructive surgery and physical therapy. "I was very fortunate to have survived something you might not think was survivable," he said cheerfully Wednesday. "But I am home now, and with my family. It makes you glad to be home."

Siebel has not discussed the incident publicly before now. He said Wednesday that he was not eager for publicity about the experience but agreed to describe what happened after the Mercury News contacted him to confirm an account that was circulating in the community. A veteran software executive, Siebel has kept a relatively low profile in the business world while investing his assets through a holding company called First Virtual Group. He has made a bigger splash with his nonprofit, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, and by helping to fund alternative energy research and an anti-methamphetamine campaign that has been adopted by several rural states. BusinessWeek magazine included him in a 2008 ranking of the 50 most generous philanthropists in the country.

Siebel said Wednesday that he doesn't know what became of the elephant that attacked him. He said authorities in Tanzania searched for it, but as far as he knows it was never found. While he's doing some work from home, he said, he's focused on his recovery. "My job is to get healthy and get over it," he said, "and I'm going to do my job."

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http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/teslas-founder-sues-teslas-ceo.html

Source:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13256318?nclick_check=1

Tags:

Silicon Valley billionaire, Tom Siebel, Serengeti, charging elephant attack, founder Siebel Systems software company, Mercury News, Oracle, Nairobi, Tanzania, First Virtual Group, Tom and Stacey Siebel Foundation, fund alternative energy research, anti-methamphetamine campaign, BusinessWeek magazine, 50 most generous philanthropists in USA,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Who's To Blame For The Mortgage Crisis?

2009-09-04T10:46:00.001-07:00

If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.

As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.

Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.

We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.

One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.

But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."

"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.

Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.

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http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenspan-fears-inflation.html

Source:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/09/02/casino/index.html?source=rss&aim=/ent/movies/btm/feature

Tags:

Salon, American Casino, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, documentary, bankers, brokers, subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene, redlined, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Global Economic News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Workers Adjust To The New F-word: Furloughs

2009-09-02T10:56:00.001-07:00

"Furlough Fridays" for John Krumm may as well be called "Food Bank Fridays."

Along with 210,000 fellow state government workers, the driver and safety clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles is helping California balance its battered budget by taking an unpaid day off from work three Fridays each month. But he's not going to Project Open Hand's kitchen to volunteer. "I go to save money and get food for my table," says Krumm, describing a still-life tableau of his furlough handout:

"Couple pieces of chicken. Some fruits and vegetables. Beans, milk and cheese. I'm losing $450 each month from my paycheck, so I'm watching every penny," he says. "And if they make us take off any more days, I won't be able to afford my rent."

As private and public employers seek to whittle overhead while skirting the heavier costs of laying off and rehiring staff, millions of workers are being poked and prodded with America's hottest management tool.

"Furloughs make sense because if you have a good employee, you want to do whatever you can to keep them," says labor lawyer Michael S. Bernick, former head of California's Employment Development Department under Gov. Gray Davis. "But while they may help reduce layoffs, they have their other side — for most workers, taking a 10 to 20 percent pay cut is a big hit."

Furloughs can also create huge workload backups as well as raise sticky legal questions for employers who try to force exempt workers into unpaid leaves. And critics like San Francisco State University professor John Sullivan say the management tool could actually end up causing more workplace problems than they solve. "If you cut everyone's pay," he says, "you'll drive away your top performers and end up with mediocre people."

Cost-cutting tool

As the new F-word makes the rounds of the water-cooler and cocktail-party circuit, it seems everyone from autoworkers to bridge inspectors to newspaper reporters is being forced to take unpaid leave as companies try to stay afloat and governments slash budgets. Firm numbers are hard to come by, according to economist Stephen Levy, who says that in the private sector, at least, "as long as sales start to pick up slightly, we're probably at the peak of layoffs and furloughs right now."

But in an economy where 6.7 million jobs have disappeared since the recession began in December 2007, and as private wages and salaries continue to fall each month, no one's betting against the prospect of more furloughs. In fact, 6 percent of employers surveyed by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide say they will force mandatory furloughs within the next 12 months, while nearly one in 10 of those asked say they expect to implement a shortened workweek over the same time frame.

And while nearly half the state governments have instituted or proposed furloughs, it may have been California's historic embrace that moved them onto the front page. In addition to planned layoffs, California hopes to save $3 billion over 17 months by sending home state employees the first three Fridays of each month. With the Department of Personnel Administration using the tool for the first time to bridge its gaping deficit, spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley says furloughs were the best fix for a dire situation.

"With the state in a precarious position, we needed to conserve cash immediately," she says. "The layoff process can be quite lengthy, but with furloughs we can achieve savings immediately. We were desperate."

State governments seem to be taking a page from industries like heavy manufacturing and airlines, which historically have furloughed employees when business slowed. In Silicon Valley, temporary shutdowns have been a common practice, often a year-end tradition at many high-tech firms.

Mark Perry, a computer programmer with 30 years' experience in the valley, says state workers are now "getting a taste of real life that we've known for years in tech. They've been sort of sheltered. "I was with Intel, Fairchild, 23 different companies, and I was furloughed at about half of them until business turned around," says Perry, laid off in 2003 from Applied Materials. "The first time it's a bit of a shock, because you depend on a certain amount of income. But gradually you learn to treat it like you're on a pretend vacation. You kind of expect it and build it into the salary you think you're making. "Furloughs," Perry says, "train you not to live paycheck to paycheck."

Beats a layoff, but "...

A lot of affected employees are conflicted: Having a job is great — but taking a pay cut to keep that job stinks. First-timers like John Krumm are struggling with furlough shock. "I think it's a shame," says Krumm, who works at a San Francisco branch of the DMV. "You've already cut our pay by 14 percent, and if you add another day, you're up to 18 percent. People working here will now be making less than they made when they started 10 years ago."

For a couple employed by the state, the furloughs can be devastating. Krumm says "a lot of my colleagues at the DMV are filing for bankruptcy. A lot of them have a partner or husband who works for the state," which is a double whammy for the family budget.

While most experts stress the positive impacts of furloughs over layoffs, no one says they're a panacea. They punish lower-paid workers disproportionately; they can torpedo workplace morale; and workers whose pay has been cut make for lousy consumers, saving more and spending less, hampering a quick economic recovery.

Forced to downsize by his boss to a three-day workweek, San Jose real estate professional William Huey says his furlough threw him off kilter, "because I'd had this structured routine and suddenly everything changed. On my days off, I had to think, 'What am I supposed to be doing today?' "

Even though his three days eventually turned into a layoff, Huey does see some benefits to mandatory time off. "In retrospect,'' says Huey, who used his forced leave to help his wife start a private Chinese-language school, "it was as if I'd been allowed to leave my job gradually, because having that time off gives you the chance to explore other ideas you may want to try. The furlough,'' he says, "was like the severance package I never got in the end."

Hard choices

Yet for Rick Binger, furloughs became a powerful if painful management tool to save his San Francisco catalog marketing firm and, he hopes, will ensure that his six staffers all have jobs when the recession recedes. In February, faced with a virtual collapse of his business, Binger had his employees take a month off without pay. When new business didn't materialize, the furlough grew even longer until work picked up and employees started coming back to their jobs in July.

"I told everyone I was really sorry, but I just didn't have any work so there was no income coming in," he says. "My hands were tied. Everyone sacrificed, and I think they knew that as hard as this was, it was better than being laid off."

The use of furloughs, says Binger, "enabled me to survive over those four months." Others, though, say furloughs create more problems than they fix. Sullivan, of San Francisco State University, is not only a passionate critic of the practice, but he's now being forced to take a furlough himself as part of the college system's efforts to cut costs.

"I ask employers, 'Why are you doing furloughs?' and they say, 'Because the other guy is,' " he says. "But they're a fad and they don't really save money. It's the poorly managed companies that use them, not places like Microsoft or Google."

Sullivan says the smarter route would be better planning, a greater push for productivity gains — and the corner-office fortitude to let heads roll. "Managers are chicken to make the tough decision and let you go. But that's what a great manager does."

"When you cut time and not workload," he says, "you've really compounded the problem you had to begin with." Just ask Krumm. DMV offices on Monday mornings after a Friday furlough have been described on online forums as a circuslike crush of humanity, with drivers lined up out the door to reach clerks whose workloads have been stacking up since Thursday. "After a while,'' Krumm says, "they have to stop people from coming in the door because otherwise we'd be in violation of the fire code."

FURLOUGH FACTS

Although the actual number of furloughs is hard to come by, one national survey of employers found some interesting statistics:

» 17 percent of employers surveyed in April said they had initiated mandatory furloughs, up from 11 percent the previous month.

» Nearly one in 10 employers expect to implement a shortened workweek within the next 12 months.

» Another 6 percent will force mandatory furloughs.

» 9 percent say they"ll have voluntary furloughs.

» 7 percent have cut workers" salaries.

Source: Watson Wyatt Worldwide

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/california-ills-give-us-headache.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/california-paying-bills-with-ious.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-hot-pursuit-of-fusion-or-folly.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-links-311-call-center-to.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microlending-taking-off-in-us.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-economy-change-buying-habits.html

Source:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13053940?nclick_check=1

Tags:

California state government workers, Department of Motor Vehicles, unpaid day off, Project Open Hand's, furlough, Michael S. Bernick, California's Employment Development Department, Gov. Gray Davis, San Francisco State University, John Sullivan,

Posted via email from Global Business News

High Frequency Trading: The Rise of the Machines

2009-08-29T13:54:00.001-07:00

As a professional trader, you are confronted daily with all kinds of dynamics and situations that require a flexible and adaptive mind. You are faced with multiple variables constantly interacting with each other and your task is to process ever-changing information quickly and profitably. Valuations arbitrage, reflexive supply-and-demand dynamics, and structural changes are recurrent landmines in the typical day of traders and money managers.

We accept this “dangerous” line of work for only two reasons: monetary compensation and pride in being part of capital markets, that transmission mechanism without which innovation and creativity would be prisoners of their own ethereal state.

As a society, we are ready to strike compromises in return for a system that will allow the ethereal state of our creativity to turn into reality. We allow market insiders like market makers, broker-dealers, and others to have small advantages over us mortal investors in order to have them create the positive externalities that help us build a more sophisticated economic system. We give market makers and specialists a privileged look at the order flow (the supply and demand of stocks) in exchange for their commitment to maintaining orderly markets whenever an imbalance occurs.

We give systemic firms like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs privileged access to liquidity via the Federal Reserve so that the banking system and capital markets can continue to serve us in our quest to invent, produce, and distribute new products. But sometimes things turn out more like a bad inland casino rather than a better market… We may still be reeling from the systemic economic collapse of last year, but new structural changes with potential negative externalities are already at our door.

For months I have witnessed strange dynamics in the way markets behaved: liquidity issues, intra-day volatility, and a constant disconnection between technical, sentiment and fundamental inputs. Markets often go through periods of irrationality, but this time it felt different.

As a professional trader and an educator on markets, my sensitivity level is higher than normal and I immediately began conducting research to make sense of my discomfort. This process pointed consistently to one element: high frequency trading or as I like to call it “the rise of the machines.”

What is High Frequency Trading?

High frequency trading (HFT) was, until recently, a topic confined to Wall Street insiders. Only in the last few weeks has it become a mainstream subject of debate via articles on theNew York Times, the Washington Post, and interviews on CNBC (yes even CNBC’s clueless anchors can now spell HFT).

The reason for this foray into the mainstream media is the potential negative ramifications HFT can have for all of us: investors, entrepreneurs, and just plain hopeful citizens.

But first, let’s define HFT as it is a very technical classification that, nonetheless, encompasses many different things. Generally speaking, HFT is high velocity trading based on mathematical algorithms that create huge daily volume on different electronic exchanges and platforms. It is machine against machine—endless trading in order to capture fractions of pennies in profits. But, so far so good: the machines provide liquidity to all of us. The owners of the machines (financial institutions) make an all-American profit and the liquidity aggregators (electronic exchanges) provide competition to other exchanges in the most capitalistic way.

But what happens if we scratch the surface? Like Michel de Montaigne, the famed Renaissance scholar, once said: “There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law would not deserve hanging ten times over.”

High frequency algorithmic trading is ridden with issues:

Volume. Machine-driven trading is over 60% of trading volume on a daily basis and in some confined cases it can be as high as 90%.

Adaptability. Machines are unthinking units that do not adapt to human reactions. HFT algorithms are based on correlations and historical relationships, which are great guidelines for trading and investing but by no means they can be used blindly (see: 1987 portfolio insurance, long-term capital management 1998, credit default swaps 2008, mortgage-backed securities 2008…the list of quant-related disasters is a sad one).

Exclusivity. HFT can only work by using incredibly fast and powerful computers that also must be placed in the exchanges as proximity helps the speed. Few people can afford the computers and/or the co-location fees charged by the electronic exchanges.

Flash quotes. Some brokers have access to quotes of orders before anyone else. By exploiting the speed of their machines, they can either arbitrage price differentials or potentially front-run clients. Another abuse of flash quotes (called flash because they last one–to-three milliseconds) is that they can be used as teaser quotes to gauge supply and demand without the risk of being hit due to their quickness.

Rebates. Many high frequency traders trade not for profit but for rebates paid by the electronic platforms to attract liquidity. This escamotage incentivizes useless and toxic volume.

While these are only the most immediate concerns about HFT, they have a potentially disproportionate influence on the cost of running our capital markets. The HFT lobby pushes the argument that they create positive externalities by exploiting improving technology—but there is a difference between volume and liquidity.

If over 60% of trading is toxic, it will go away in a nanosecond and most likely it will dissipate right when investors and money managers need it the most. This could cause a huge liquidity vacuum and a 1987-type of event. Liquidity is created by market players with a stake in the game, not by casino-like machines. Flash quotes and “predatory algorithms” also raise the cost of execution for the necessarily slower institutions like pension funds and mutual funds. Additionally, the surreal tempo of machine trading makes trading for all more expensive as we now have to prepare for the irrational moves and volatility of markets when executing our trades.

I love this business and I love technology, but checks and balances are needed to preserve our capital markets. Little adjustments can be made to reduce systemic risk, like re-instating circuit breakers that cut off program trading when price changes accelerate beyond certain parameters, like investigation or stopping flash quotes that drive front running, like making good on teaser quotes for longer than just three milliseconds, and so on. In the end, we need to understand that capital markets are here not to destabilize our economy, but to serve us as a society and help us make better lives.

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/thriving-norway-offers-lesson-in.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-america-is-bank-owned-state.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-deficit-scare-returns.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/buy-china-policy-set-to-raise-tensions.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/world-bank-cuts-2009-global-growth.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/uk-economy-shrinks-most-in-50-years.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenspan-fears-inflation.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/good-news-in-music-business-no-really.html

Source:

http://gbr.pepperdine.edu/blog/index.php/2009/08/10/1341/

The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank

2009-08-18T08:29:00.001-07:00

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Solution 101: Rank by Friends and People You Follow

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

This is not possible on Twitter today, but it already works great on FriendFeed. There, results are filtered or ranked based your social graph. This is not difficult for FriendFeed to do because, on the one hand, it knows who you care about and, on the other, it applies its advanced feed search technology to your social graph:

This sounds awesome, but there is a problem. "Wilco" works well as a query because the band has just released a new album, but many other queries would return no results. Simply put, your friends on Facebook and people you follow on Twitter can't possibly have an opinion on every topic you may be interested in. This is a problem of sparse data: trusted opinions are scarce.

Small Worlds and Taste Neighbors

To solve the problem of sparse data, we need more data... obviously. One possible solution is to incorporate other sources that you trust (i.e. broaden your social graph). As a next step, search results could rank people you may not be directly following but who are being followed by people you follow. Or in Facebook-speak, friends of friends. You could argue that you are not familiar with their opinions and so cannot yet trust them, but given the small world phenomenon, their contributions are often just as valuable.

Another step could be to include people with similar tastes, so-called taste neighbors. This approach is common among vertical social networks such as Last.fm, Flixster, and Goodreads. These networks have ideas about which people, other than your friends, are like you. However, this is a costly calculation and takes time. In order for Twitter to do something like this, it would have to compare people based on links or perform semantic analyses of tweets over time. Yet even though this is a difficult problem, it will be solved in time.

The Influencers and the Crowd

Aside from using the "second degree" of your social graph or taste neighbors, a Social Relevancy Rank could front-load influencers. In the absence of any other metric, someone who is followed by hundreds of thousands of users is likely more relevant to you than someone you don't know at all. Using number of followers as a weight might be a good way to order the rest of the activity stream.

In general, combing through countless tweets from strangers is not terribly useful anyway. Just as people have stopped looking at anything beyond the first page of results on Google, sifting through pages of tweets in chronological order gets tedious quickly. What needs to be incorporated into the Social Relevancy Rank is the aggregate sentiment of the crowd: a score that tells you yay or nay and gives you an opportunity to drill into more results if you choose.

The Quest for the Perfect Filter

There is no such thing as a perfect formula. Even Page Rank isn't perfect. Yet we all use it and find it useful. Much as Page Rank has been adapted and tuned to search the web, Social Relevancy Rank will evolve over time to help us make sense of endless streams of activity. This ranking will have a profound impact on how we tap into our friends' opinions.

It will change the face of general Web searches in time, too. Today, results are automatically ranked by relevancy and freshness. Once Social Relevancy Rank is factored in, search results will be re-ordered based on social relevancy.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/yahoo-upgrades-search-engine.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/search-sucks-and-microsoft-is-almost.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/searching-for-meaning-of-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/microsoft-must-buy-twitter-msft.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/ballmer-on-bing-economy-and-more.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-they-might-be-little-evil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/wolfram-alpha-has-google-attention.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_search_social_relevancy_rank.php

Tags:

FriendFeed search feature, Facebook search, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter, Twitter search, PageRank, Microsoft, trusted contacts as filters, social search, Global IT News, Social Relevancy Rank, metrics,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Russian, Ukrainian Tug of War Over History

2009-08-17T08:48:00.001-07:00

Russian historians widely recognize June 27, 1709 as the date their country became a great power. Russia that day defeated an invading Swedish army at Poltava in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces allied with Sweden were also vanquished. The Battle of Poltava is not just history, but another source of ongoing friction between Moscow and Kyiv.

Poltava is recognized as the pivotal battle in the Great Northern War, a 21-year struggle, in which Russia replaced Sweden as the great power of Northern Europe in the early 18th century. Poltava also ended Ukrainian aspirations for independence from Russia.

"Traitor Mazepa"

The leader of the Ukrainian forces, Ivan Mazepa, remains a source of controversy between Moscow and Kyiv. Mazepa was Ukraine's so-called Hetman, or leader of its Cossack military forces.

In Russia he is considered a traitor who betrayed an oath of allegiance to Czar Peter the Great, the victorious commander at Poltava. The term "traitor Mazepa" remains a common Russian term. He was cast as a villain in works by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and composer Peter Tchaikovsky, and also excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. That decision is still in effect, despite recent high level requests from Ukrainian political and church leaders to rescind the move.

But Ukrainians say the Hetman was forced to side with Sweden, because Russian ruler Peter the Great failed to honor a 1654 treaty to protect their land against Polish attacks. But until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia considered the same treaty to have been an agreement by Ukraine for an everlasting union with its northern neighbor.

Ukrainians also consider Mazepa to have been a great reformer, who built schools and publishing houses, expanded higher learning, and supported the arts, including a distinctly Ukrainian style of church architecture that dominates the modern skyline of Kyiv.

Mazepa's portrait appears on Ukraine's 10-hryvna currency note, and the country will soon unveil a monument to him in Poltava. Last month, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning the statue as divisive. At a recent Poltava conference in Moscow, Vladimir Artamonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences told fellow historians the battle liberated Ukraine from Swedish invaders.

Artamanov says Poltava was not a tragedy for Ukraine, but rather a tragedy for Mazepa and his followers who sought to subordinate "Little Russia" to Poland. Russians often use the term "Little Russia" as a synonym for Ukraine. Many Ukrainians resent it as demeaning.

Genocide issues

Speaking at the same Moscow conference, Ukrainian historian Serhiy Poltavets said it is important to consider why Mazepa allied himself with Sweden. Poltavets says documentary evidence indicates that Mazepa's goal was to create an independent Ukraine; that his goal contradicted the political and geopolitical aims of the Russian state is something, which cannot be denied.

Moscow and Kyiv are also at odds over historic assessments of an artificial famine during the period of Soviet land collectivization in the early 1930's that claimed the lives of millions, particularly in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. Ukrainians consider it an act of genocide. The Kremlin says food was intentionally withheld from peasants as a class, but not any ethnic group, and therefore cannot be considered a violation of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which does not mention class.

Another point of contention is Ukraine's World War II guerillas, who fought Soviets and Nazis after mistakenly welcoming Germans as liberators. They are seen as freedom fighters by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and as fascist collaborators by his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev.

Last month, Mr. Medvedev announced creation of a government commission to help prevent what he said was falsification of history that harms the interests of Russia. Mr. Medvedev says Russians are increasingly being confronted with what is known as historic falsification, and perhaps many have noticed that these attempts are becoming increasingly harsh, mean, and aggressive.

In Ukraine, President Viktor Yushchenko condemned foreign and domestic attempts to brand Ivan Mazepa as a traitor. Mr. Yushchenko says enough to looking at history through foreign eyes. He calls on Ukrainians to look at Mazepa with their own eyes, with Ukrainian eyes.

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-great-game-iran-and-russia.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/russia-considers-bail-out-for-banks.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/putin-urges-innovation-to-revive-russia.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-eu-summit-ends-with-differences.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-stockpiles-diamonds.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-parades-new-missile-defense.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/kremlin-crisis.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/admiral-mullen-calls-for-new-us-russian.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russian-economy-declines-faster-than.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/world-undiscovered-gas-and-oil-is.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebooks-new-russian-shareholder.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/chinas-empire-must-end-reliance-on-one.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/pervasive-nature-of-corruption.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

Source:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-25-voa33.cfm

Tags:

Viktor Yushchenko, Dmitri Medvedev, Russian history, Ukrainian history, Ivan Mazepa, Serhiy poltavets, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Genocide, World War II, United Nations Genocide Convention, Kyiv, Moscow, Kremlin, Global Development News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Tuition Soars in India

2009-08-16T10:33:00.001-07:00

Once a fortnight, Bharati Prayag, a driver in New Delhi, used to treat himself to a chicken curry and a quarter bottle of rum. Earning a salary of 7,000 rupees ($144) a month and living in a hovel far from his wife and three children back in Shivan, a village in the state of Bihar, the curry and rum served to lift his spirits momentarily. But a year ago, his wife complained that the village school teacher was frequently absent leaving the pupils with no proper instruction.

Knowing his children would have no future without an education, 45-year-old Prayag, now sends home 800 rupees ($16) every month to pay for private tuition in maths and English for two of his children. "I don't mind forgoing my little treat. Their future is more important," he said. Like millions of poor Indians, Prayag has to send his children to a state school because it is free. But he knows the education they are getting there is mediocre and must be supplemented by a private tutor. Some Indians, both in villages and in urban slums, are so dismayed at teacher absenteeism in state schools that they make huge sacrifices to enrol their children in private schools.

A study conducted by Pratham, a non-governmental organisation providing education to under-privileged children, found that 65 per cent of slum schoolchildren in Hyderabad, south India, were registered at private schools. Mohammed Ansari, a farmer in Haryana, near New Delhi, says the teacher at his son's school is sometimes absent for weeks on end. "My son started school at [the age of] six. After three years, he still couldn't write a sentence or do simple addition," said Ansari.

Education system criticised

The malaise runs deep and wide; while the poor are unhappy with state schools and hire tutors for a basic education, the middle class is unsatisfied with the education provided at the top private schools. The middle class hires private tutors to compensate for declining teaching standards in private schools so that their children perform well in exams and secure a place at a good university.

"The mismatch between demand and supply is crazy. The shortage means that students have to score 95 per cent or more in their exams to get admission in the university of their choice," said New Delhi parent Anisa Tiwari. Tiwari's son, Nishant, 20, secured a place last year at St Stephen's College - an elite institution in New Delhi - largely because he scored 97 per cent in his final maths exam. "In India, if you don't get into a top university, you're wasting your time. So you have to make that superhuman effort to score top marks," Nishant said. Despite being exceptionally bright, he had tutors throughout secondary school to help him with maths, physics and chemistry.

A recent survey by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) shows that middle class families spend one-third of their income every month on private tuition. The survey revealed that the use of private tutors has increased by between 40 and 45 per cent in the last few years.

Maths and sciences

Assocham's interviews with 5,000 students and parents across 11 cities in India indicated that maths, physics and chemistry were the main subjects for which tutors were needed. "Many schools conveniently push the ball back to parents, to tell them to engage private tutors for their kids. This is a serious failure in the education system," says D S Rawat, Assocham's secretary-general.

The result is a parallel education system in India. More than 80 per cent of tutors in the survey said that parents hired them to compensate for the deficiencies of school education. But Anuradha Awasti, a former maths teacher at Springdales School in New Delhi, says that tutoring weakens the students' independence and self-direct learning capabilities. She believes private tutorship hinders a child's reasoning and analytical abilities, and places too much emphasis on exams as opposed to genuine learning.

"With a tutor around, children are being spoon-fed instead of learning themselves and relying on their own resources and figuring things out for themselves. Tutors are a crutch," Awasti told Al Jazeera. Mohini Verma, an English teacher at Step-by-Step School just outside Delhi, says a child's extra-curricular activities should include time to play, daydream and relax."It saddens me that they have no space to breathe with all that pressure from so early on," she said.

Tuition traffic

Just as Prayag's sons trudge 3km to their tutor's house in another village, Akash Gupta, 12, is picked up each evening by the family driver and taken across New Delhi in rush hour traffic to his maths teacher's home in Saket. He changes out of his uniform in the car and has a snack on the way. "It's one of the best private schools in Delhi but the teaching is pathetic. His teachers give him homework on subjects they haven't covered properly in class so he can't do it alone," says Akash's mother Neha, a graphic designer.

"I'm a working mother with little time, so I had to get a tutor." Throughout urban India, on weekday evenings, a frenzied two-way traffic takes place. Tutors on their humble scooters rush across town to the homes of affluent children. If they cannot go to the children, the children are ferried to their homes or to coaching centres. Centres with names such as The Cambridge School in New Delhi and The Harvard Centre in Faridabad, just outside the capital, have sprung up all over India. Every evening, hundreds of children troop through the gates of these plush new buildings with air-conditioned rooms and manicured lawns.

Education has always been highly prized by Indians, not so much for its intrinsic worth but as the key to a better life. However, just 20 years ago, engaging a tutor for your child was an abnormality. Now, not having a tutor is a sign of parental dereliction. "You have the brightest students getting tutors to score good grades. It's become a ubiquitous crutch. Parents feel secure and the children also feel they have a safety net under them," child psychiatrist Megna Kapoor tells me.

Race to university

July is a stressful month for students who have applied to university. Jawaharlal Nehru University in the capital, for example, receives around 100,000 applications but accepts only 1,500. At the hugely respected Indian Institute of Management, 70,000 students fight every year for 200 places. At St Stephen's College 12,000 applicants compete for 450 places.

Despite the fact that half of India's population is below the age of 25, the Indian government has not built a new university for 50 years. India has 338 government universities. A government commission looking into the state of higher education said last month that it needed 1,500 universities. Kapil Sibal, India's education minister, has promised long overdue root-and-branch reform of the educational system, saying it had to be 'de-traumatised' for the sake of pupils and parents. He also plans to encourage foreign universities to open shop in India to alleviate the shortage of places. He also wants the Grade 10 exam for 15-year-olds to emphasise grading a pupil's work throughout the year so that the focus switches from marks-based to knowledge-based learning.

Blaming absenteeism, laziness

But critics of the private tutor culture say lazy teachers and mediocre teaching - even in some of the country's top private schools - is to blame. In state-owned rural schools, absentee teachers are virtually the norm. In Bihar, where Prayag comes from, 40 per cent of all schoolteachers are absent at any given time.

Instead of being in the classroom, they give private tuition to bump up their government salaries. Experts always point out that enrolling poor Indian children in school is easy. Their parents prize education above all else. It is keeping them in school that is difficult because of what they say is mind-numbingly boring teaching. "After a year or two, they drop out because it doesn't seem worthwhile. If they aren't going to school, then their parents send them out to earn to supplement the family income," says Mohini Kapoor, an education consultant.

When Prayag's sons talked about dropping out of school in Shivan a few years ago, he would have none of it and threatened to beat them. "This is about their future," he said. "Without maths and English they will never escape poverty."

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-draws-line-with-china-on-climate.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-reaches-seminal-climate-change.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/singularity-university-launches.html

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/07/2009797207338966.html

Tags:

Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India Assocham, Global Best Practice, India has 338 government universities, Springdales School in New Delhi, Indian Education system, India Education, Indian Teachers, Kapil Sibal, India's education minister,

Posted via email from Global Business News

A Reclusive Billionaire Gives Away His Fortune

2009-08-13T06:18:00.001-07:00

One by one, speakers rose to toast the elderly gent with baggy pants and a shy, gaptoothed smile.

"Of course, he didn't wear a tie tonight," teased one. Another called attention to the honoree's cheap watch and the plastic bag that serves as his briefcase. The joshing at a Manhattan gathering would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that the man pulling a worn blue blazer over his head in mock modesty was none other than the onetime billionaire, Chuck Feeney.

Never heard of him? No surprise there.

Over the years, the frugal 76-year-old has made a fetish out of anonymity. He declined to name his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, after himself, registering the $8-billion behemoth in Bermuda to avoid U.S. disclosure laws. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on universities and hospitals but won't allow even a small plaque identifying him as a donor.

"We just didn't want to be blowing our horn," he explains in a rare interview at his daughter's Upper East Side apartment. The party was to celebrate a biography of the elusive tycoon by Irish journalist Conor O'Clery, titled "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune," published last fall.

Feeney said he cooperated with the book and submitted to an interview because he is driven by a new public mission: nudging hedge fund heavies and silicon scions into "giving while living." It is the latest trend in philanthropy and one that he, more than anyone, jump-started several years before billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett followed suit.

Feeney, a founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, said he wants to "set an example" to address "that layer up there of people," the ones, as he puts it, who have "a jillion dollars. . . . I mean, honestly, if you ask them, 'Tell me what you're doing with your money this week?' they couldn't spend a fraction of what they're accruing." Most foundations, set up after the donor's death, dribble out barely more than 5% of their assets each year, the legal minimum.

But Feeney, raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, quietly transferred the bulk of his fortune to his foundation when he was 53. Then, eight years ago, he instructed his board to pay out every last dollar by 2016. So far: $4 billion down, $4 billion to go. Atlantic Philanthropies is spreading its wealth at the rate of more than $400 million a year, more than any U.S.-based family foundation apart from Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford.

As Feeney sees it, there is too much misery in the world to justify delay. "I'm not going to die until I can spend it," he vows with a merry chuckle. Feeney's biggest beneficiary has been Cornell University, which he attended on the GI Bill, earning spending money by selling sandwiches to fraternities. Over four decades, he has donated an astonishing $588 million to the Ithaca, N.Y., campus, almost all of it anonymously.

Many of Feeney's grants are still directed to traditional bricks and mortar -- $60 million for a Stanford biomedical center and $125 million for a UC San Francisco cardiovascular complex. But others are iconoclastic: Fighting homophobia among South African Muslims. Lobbying against the death penalty in New Jersey. Buying medical supplies for Cuban-trained doctors. Funding a Washington office for Sinn Fein during the Irish peace negotiations.

Feeney built his global enterprise through cutthroat competition and uncanny business intuition. He speaks fluent French and Japanese. And he still hop-scotches from Dublin to Da Nang seeding new projects.

But his demeanor is affable and unprepossessing and his conversational style is hesitant. He is allergic to introspection. Direct questions send him into vague digressions leavened with humorous asides. In the tiny world of stratospheric wealth, Feeney is a man of yin and yang: extravagant charity coupled with personal penny-pinching. "It's the intelligent thing to be frugal," says the erstwhile billionaire, who jokingly refers to himself as "the shabby philanthropist."

He once owned six luxurious homes from the French Riviera to Mayfair to Park Avenue. These days, he owns none, instead hunkering down in a cramped one-bedroom rental in San Francisco with his second wife, Helga, his former secretary. He raked in billions selling duty-free cognac, perfume and designer labels. But you won't catch Feeney in a Hermes tie or Gucci loafers. He once met the prime minister of Ireland with his drugstore glasses held together by a paper clip.

Feeney doesn't own a car and prefers buses to taxis. Until he turned 75, he flew coach. Now, making excuses for wobbly knees, he upgrades with frequent flier miles. Fine dining? "There are restaurants you can go in and pay $100 a person for a meal," he muses. "I get as much satisfaction out of paying $25. I happen to enjoy grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches."

Niall O'Dowd, a friend of Feeney and editor of Irish-America magazine, reflects: "The way he copes with his wealth is to never remove himself from his working-class persona. He keeps grounded by acting like it hasn't happened to him -- like basically he is still the same guy." At the book party, most of the guests were bused in from the Garden State: former classmates from St. Mary's of the Assumption High School and an extended clan of Feeney-Fitzpatricks, including two of his five children.

Feeney joked about his "rent-a-crowd" but, amid the toasts and roasts, seemed moved: "Who was it who said, 'My cup runneth over?' " He planted a kiss on the head of his 21-year old great-nephew, Dennis Fitzpatrick, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He autographed copies of the book while seated at a small table with Dennis by his side.

"He'd send my parents $50,000 for our college educations," nephew Daniel Fitzpatrick, 50, recalled. "But if you went out to have a beer with him, he'd check the bar bill. . . . If I left the light on in a bedroom, he'd say, 'By the way, you left a light on.' And I knew I'd better go up and turn it off."

O'Clery, former international business editor of the Irish Times, spent two years traveling with Feeney and investigating a financial empire that had been sheathed for decades in obsessive secrecy. He unfolds a story of ferocious entrepreneurship that operated, he concluded, "on the edge of legality but was never corrupt." Shortly after graduating from college, Feeney, who had served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan during the Korean War, moved to Europe. With a partner he knew from Cornell, Robert Miller, he began peddling duty-free liquor to sailors.

The two went on to sell cars to American soldiers based in Europe and Asia. Eventually, profiting from a postwar boom in tourism, they built Duty Free Shoppers into the biggest retailer of liquor and cigarettes in the world and a global purveyor of luxury goods. Their ingenious schemes stretched the limits of the duty-free concept. As O'Clery explains, Duty Free Shoppers allowed a tourist in Mexico, for instance, to peruse a catalog and choose a cashmere sweater to be shipped from Amsterdam to his home in the U.S. Leaving Mexico, he could declare the faraway sweater as "unaccompanied baggage" and avoid paying duty. Feeney and Miller operated with Swiss bank accounts and offshore headquarters in Lichtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands Antilles. They registered assets in the names of Danielle, Feeney's French wife, and Miller's Ecuadorean wife, Chantal, as a precaution against the long arm of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Today, Feeney makes no apologies. "Most large companies structure their affairs so that they minimize their tax payments," he says, rocking back on an armchair in his daughter's apartment. "As long as you do it within the law, it's OK." For Duty Free Shoppers, publicity was to be avoided at all cost, to ward off not just tax collectors but also competitors. "If you had a machine to make money, you wouldn't blow your horn and say copy me, copy me," says Feeney, whose annual share of dividends from the business reached $155 million in 1988, making him richer at the time than Rupert Murdoch, David Rockefeller or Donald Trump.

Why did he decide to give it away, leaving himself with a net worth then that dipped below $1 million? "I'm an easygoing guy," he shrugs. "I like to eat my grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches quietly. I don't like people to say, 'Look over there; he's eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich.' " In 1990, Feeney had separated from Danielle. And, in the divorce, she retained their mansions and luxury apartments, along with $100 million. "The wealth got to him," recalls his nephew, Fitzpatrick. "He got disgusted by it, in my opinion. He said, 'This expensive heavy-duty lifestyle doesn't fit me.' "

Feeney gave his children, friends and colleagues copies of Andrew Carnegie's 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth," in which the robber baron-turned-philanthropist admonishes rich men to use their fortunes to help others and "to set an example of modest unostentatious living, shunning display." In the realm of modesty, Feeney tended to extremes. For years, Atlantic Philanthropies staff couldn't tell their families where they worked. Beneficiaries, few of whom knew the origin of their grants, signed agreements acknowledging that the funding would halt if its source were revealed.

It was only in 1997 that the existence of Atlantic Philanthropies became public during the sale of Duty Free Shoppers to French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault. Court papers revealed that Feeney's share of the company had been transferred to a foundation. The news that a huge donor had surfaced -- bigger than renowned charitable institutions founded by the Pew, Lilly, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Mellon families -- rocked the philanthropic world, although many had long suspected something was afoot.

Today, though Atlantic Philanthropies lists its grants on its website, it still won't issue news releases touting accomplishments. Black tie thank-you dinners, along with plaques, remain verboten. Feeney's practical reason for not plastering his moniker on buildings is to attract matching donors who would want naming rights -- as was the case at Stanford with high-tech tycoon Jim Clark and at a UC San Francisco cancer facility with venture capitalist Arthur Rock.

Does Feeney have no ego, then? "It doesn't matter who put the building up," he says. "The important thing is that it happens." In Vietnam, he recounts with a chuckle, "the people at the Da Nang General Hospital felt so bad that we wouldn't put our name on the hospital that they painted it green" -- shamrock green. He pauses, adding, "Which used up a lot of paint."

Although his parents were American-born, Feeney's attachment to the land of his ancestors runs deep. The Republic of Ireland in the 1980s was plagued by high unemployment, a brain drain and the festering guerrilla war to the north. Anonymously, Feeney began pouring money into renovating Ireland's seven universities, along with two in Northern Ireland.

He offered $125 million for postgraduate research if the Irish government would match the amount, nearly 20 times what the Republic was spending a year. Soon, Ireland's best and brightest flocked to the new research institutes. In all, Atlantic Philanthropies has spent more than $1 billion in Ireland.

In 1993, O'Dowd, who had worked with Feeney to promote U.S. naturalization for Irish immigrants, asked him to join in what would become the Connolly House Group, named after the Belfast headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. The small, secret group of Irish Americans offered the newly elected Clinton administration a back-channel to negotiate a cease fire between Britain and the Irish Republican Army.

"At the time, it was risky business to be seen 'talking to terrorists'--that was the label," said former Rep. Bruce Morrison, one of the group. Feeney was intensely involved in the negotiations that led Clinton to grant a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and he funded a Washington office for Sinn Fein to the tune of $750,000.

"It was New Jersey working class meets Belfast working class," O'Dowd recalled of a secret meeting between Feeney and Adams in a Dublin safe house. "These two guys understood each other right away." The peace process was ultimately successful, and Feeney has since funneled millions into reconciliation programs in Northern Ireland. "The only way you're going to solve things with your friends or enemies is to sit down and talk to them," he says today. "It didn't seem right to me that Irish people were killing Irish people."

On the coffee table in his daughter's living room, Feeney opens Bill Clinton's recent bestseller "Giving." He turns to the chapter "How Much Should You Give and Why?" and reads from statistics derived from U.S. income tax data showing that if the top 14,400 taxpayers gave a third of their income, the total would be about $61 billion.

Feeney shakes his head. "People who wouldn't miss it," he muses. "Sixty-one billion in one year!" And why isn't it happening? "People traditionally collect money. I guess there is an attraction to be known as a wealthy person," he says. "It's not my role in life to tell them what they should be doing. . . . I'm just convinced if people gave money to things they've identified as being in the public interest, they'd get great satisfaction out of it."

Feeney mentions one of his favorite charities, Operation Smile, which sponsors surgeons to operate on children with cleft palates in developing countries. He tells of watching a little girl in a waiting room sitting with her hands covering her mouth. "I kept an eye on her," he recalls. "After she had the operation and she was smiling [like], 'It's not the ugly me you knew before. It's the new me.' "

On another occasion, he says, a man in a restaurant called him over and said, "Do you realize you educated me in this business? I had one of your scholarships . . . and here I am now, the general manager of this chain. " O'Clery, who hung out with Feeney for several years at P.J. Clarke's, the Manhattan pub, before broaching the topic of a book, attributes Feeney's generosity to growing up with charitable parents and in a neighborhood where people helped one another.

He calls his subject an "enigma. . . . He likes to make money, but he doesn't like to have it. He travels all over the world, but in a way, he's never left Elizabeth, N.J." Feeney suggests with a cryptic smile, "There's a thin line between sanity and the other side. Some people might even say the idea of giving money away is crazy."

For those folks, Feeney has a Gaelic proverb: "There are no pockets in a shroud."

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/richard-branson-kiteboarding-with-naked.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bill-clinton-debuts-as-new-un-special.html

Source:

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/08/local/me-feeney8

Tags:

LA Times, Atlantic Philanthropies, Duty Free Shoppers, Chuck Feeney, Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett, founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, Irish Catholic, Cornell University, Bernard Arnault, IRA, Sinn Fein, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Global Best Practice,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Five More Search Tools You Should Know

2009-08-11T07:23:00.001-07:00

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else?

Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/technorati-to-launch-twittorati.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-unveils-new-search-features.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-search-to-index-pages-and.html

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http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/26-people-who-mislead-you-on-twitter.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/rate-of-tweets-per-second-doubles.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-unveils-sms-service-for-africa.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispute-finder-intel-program-finds.html

Source:

http://searchengineland.com/five-more-search-tools-july09-22766

Tags:

TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, Twicsy, real time image search engines, Spezify, SearchMuffin, Glearch, Joobili, Roooby, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter search, PageRank, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Qik.com, TwitVid.io,

Posted via email from Global Business News

What Can Replace Efficient Markets Theory?

2009-08-10T07:18:00.001-07:00

The most interesting thing about the efficient markets hypothesis is not whether it is valid or not – clearly it is not – but how it has managed to remain so influential for so long. At a recent conference in London on the subject, organised by the CFA Institute, Professor Andrew Lo of Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered the audience a simple explanation: “physics envy”.

This was a reference back to the early inspiration of the Nobel economics laureate Paul Samuelson, who set out to find for economics a set of fundamental laws that would do for the dismal science what Newton’s laws of thermodynamics had done for physics, and from which a rigorous general theory with practical uses could subsequently be developed.

Using such building blocks as utility theory, equilibrium and the principle of no arbitrage (“no free lunches”), this led Mr Samuelson and his many successors to develop what we have come to know as the discipline of microeconomics that is universally taught to every finance and economics student at university and business school. The efficient markets hypothesis and the notion that stock prices follow a random walk are offshoots of this approach.

The attempt to bring order and an overarching theoretical framework into analysis of the seemingly unruly behaviour of financial markets was a temptation that has for years proved too great for academics (and many market participants) to resist, but it has turned out to be a long and largely fruitless journey. The problem of course, as Prof Lo has helped to demonstrate with his empirical studies of the random walk, is that the financial markets simply don’t lend themselves to deductive theory as well as the physical world.

If a theoretical approach is not firmly grounded, it is not surprising that the predicted consequences that flow from it should fail to show up consistently in the way that investors and markets actually behave. Behavioural finance has grown to become a popular alternative approach precisely because it does appear to explain more clearly how investors, individually and collectively, appear to act. In Prof Lo’s words: “Economic systems involve human interactions, which almost by definition are more complex than interactions of inanimate objects governed by fixed and known laws of motion.”

The real beauty of the efficient markets hypothesis, and the explanation for its longevity in the face of consistent empirical evidence that it is invalid, surely lies in its beguiling simplicity. As the future is uncertain and many of the key variables that concern investors cannot be predicted with confidence, a theoretical structure that appears to offer a way to live with uncomfortable reality has obvious attractions.

Prof Lo’s own response has been to develop what he calls the adaptive market hypothesis, which seeks to draw on the insights of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. The hypothesis aims to create a framework that seeks to relate the behaviour of financial markets to a number of different factors, including the emotional condition of market participants at different points in time and the current balance of advantage between competing groups of market participants.

“Market efficiency,” he says “cannot be evaluated in a vacuum, but is highly context-dependent and dynamic, just as insect populations advance and decline as a function of the seasons, the number of predators and prey they face, and their abilities to adapt to an ever-changing environment.”

What is at work in financial markets, he believes, is a Darwinian process of “survival of the richest”. The implications of this approach are interesting. One is that the relationship between risk and return will not be stable over time, which seems right both intuitively and empirically. Another is that, rather than markets becoming steadily more efficient over time, as early proponents of the EMH proclaimed, this world is one in which new profit opportunities will continue to emerge at a constant rate.

This is the engine that provides the continuing incentive for active managers to remain in the market. But they will need to be innovative and adaptive to changing market conditions if they are to remain successful, Prof Lo argues. One-trick ponies risk going out of business before their kind of market next comes around. Most important of all, investors cannot rely on the comforting message of the efficient market hypothesis that all you need to do to obtain an expected return is to take the appropriate level of risk.

The biggest problem with this new approach, as with all alternatives to EMH, including behavioural finance, is that it doesn’t give investors a simple metric for understanding what to do. Its great merit, however, is that it appears to relate to the complex and uncertain world that we all actually inhabit, something the efficient markets hypothesis has never done.

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/thriving-norway-offers-lesson-in.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/why-america-is-bank-owned-state.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-deficit-scare-returns.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/buy-china-policy-set-to-raise-tensions.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/world-bank-cuts-2009-global-growth.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/uk-economy-shrinks-most-in-50-years.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenspan-fears-inflation.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/good-news-in-music-business-no-really.html

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf6d096a-6d7a-11de-8b19-00144feabdc0.html

Tags:

CFA Institute, Professor Andrew Lo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, “physics envy”, behavioural finance, Global Economic News, Darwinian process, “survival of the richest”, “Market efficiency”, financial markets,

Posted via email from Global Business News

The New Great Game: Iran, China and the New Silk Road

2009-08-08T10:43:00.001-07:00

Does it make sense to talk about a Beijing-Tehran axis? Apparently no, when one learns that Iran's application to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was flatly denied at the 2008 summit in Tajikistan.

Apparently yes, when one sees how the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran and the collective leadership in Beijing have dealt with their recent turmoil - the "green revolution" in Tehran and the Uighur riots in Urumqi - reawakening in the West the ghostly mythology of "Asian despotism".

The Iran-China relationship is like a game of Chinese boxes. Amid the turbulence, glorious or terrifying, of their equally millenarian histories, when one sees an Islamic Republic that now reveals itself as a militarized theocracy and a Popular Republic that is in fact a capitalist oligarchy, things are not what they seem to be.

No matter what recently happened in Iran, consolidating the power the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad-IRGC axis, the relationship will continue to develop within the framework of a clash between US hyperpower - declining as it may be - and the aspiring Chinese big power, allied with the re-emergent Russian big power.

On the road
Iran and China are all about the New Silk Road - or routes - in Eurasia. Both are among the most venerable and ancient of (on the road) partners. The first encounter between the Parthian empire and the Han dynasty was in 140 BC, when Zhang Qian was sent to Bactria (in today's Afghanistan) to strike deals with nomad populations. This eventually led to Chinese expansion in Central Asia and interchange with India.

Trading exploded via the fabled Silk Road - silk, porcelain, horses, amber, ivory, incense. As a serial traveler across the Silk Road over the years, I ended up learning on the spot how the Persians controlled the Silk Road by mastering the art of making oases, thus becoming in the process the middlemen between China, India and the West.

Parallel to the land route there was also a naval route - from the Persian Gulf to Canton (today's Guangzhou). And there was of course a religious route - with Persians translating Buddhist texts and with Persian villages in the desert serving as springboards to Chinese pilgrims visiting India.

Zoroastrianism - the official religion of the Sassanid empire - was imported to China by Persians at the end of the 6th century, and Manichaeism during the 7th. Diplomacy followed: the son of the last Sassanid emperor - fleeing the Arabs in 670 AD - found refuge in the Tang court. During the Mongol period, Islam spread into China.

Iran has never been colonized. But it was a privileged theater of the original Great Game between the British Empire and Russia in the 19th century and then during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union in the 20th. The Islamic Revolution may at first imply Khomeini's official policy of "neither East nor West". In fact, Iran dreams of bridging both.

That brings us to Iran's key, inescapable geopolitical role at the epicenter of Eurasia. The New Silk Road translates into an energy corridor - the Asian Energy Security Grid - in which the Caspian Sea is an essential node, linked to the Persian Gulf, from where oil is to be transported to Asia. And as far as gas is concerned, the name of the game is Pipelineistan - as in the recently agreed Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline and the interconnection between Iran and Turkmenistan, whose end result is a direct link between Iran and China.

Then there's the hyper-ambitious, so-called "North-South corridor" - a projected road and rail link between Europe and India, through Russia, Central Asia, Iran and the Persian Gulf. And the ultimate New Silk Road dream - an actual land route between China and the Persian Gulf via Central Asia (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan).

The width of the circle

As the bastion of Shi'ite faith, encircled by Sunnis, Iran under what is now a de facto theocratic dictatorship still desperately needs to break out from its isolation. Talk about a turbulent environment: Iraq still under US occupation to the west, the ultra-unstable Caucasus in the northwest, fragile Central Asian "stans" in the northeast, basket cases Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, not to mention the nuclear neighborhood -Israel, Russia, China, Pakistan and India.

Technological advancement for Iran means fully mastering a civilian nuclear program - which contains the added benefit of turning it into a sanctuary via the possibility of building a nuclear device. Officially, Tehran has declared ad infinitum it has no intention of possessing an "un-Islamic" bomb. Beijing understands Tehran's delicate position and supports its right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Beijing would have loved to see Tehran adopt the plan proposed by Russia, the US, Western Europe and, of course, China. Carefully evaluating its vital energy and national security interests, the last thing Beijing wants is for Washington to clench its fist again.

What happened to the George W Bush-declared, post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT), now remixed by Obama as "overseas contingency operations" (OCO)? GWOT's key, shadowy aim was for Washington to firmly plant the flag in Central Asia. For those sorry neo-cons, China was the ultimate geopolitical enemy, so nothing was more enticing than to try to sway a batch of Asian countries against China. Easier dreamed of than done.

China's counter-power was to turn the whole game around in Central Asia, with Iran as its key peon. Beijing was quick to grasp that Iran is a matter of national security, in terms of assuring its vast energy needs.

Of course China also needs Russia - for energy and technology. This is arguably more of an alliance of circumstance - for all the ambitious targets embodied by the SCO - than a long-term strategic partnership. Russia, invoking a series of geopolitical reasons, considers its relationship with Iran as exclusive. China says slow down, we're also in the picture. And as Iran remains under pressure at different levels from both the US and Russia, what better "savior" than China?

Enter Pipelineistan. At first sight, Iranian energy and Chinese technology is a match made in heaven. But it's more complicated than that.

Still the victim of US sanctions, Iran has turned to China to modernize itself. Once again, the Bush/Dick Cheney years and the invasion of Iraq sent an unmistakable message to the collective leadership in Beijing. A push to control Iraq oil plus troops in Afghanistan, a stone's throw from the Caspian, added to the Pentagon's self-defined "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia - this was more than enough to imprint the message: the less dependent China is on US-subjugated Arab Middle East energy, the better.

The Arab Middle East used to account for 50% of China's oil imports. Soon China became the second-largest oil importer from Iran, after Japan. And since fateful 2003, China also has mastered the full cycle of prospection/exploitation/refining - thus Chinese companies are investing heavily in Iran's oil sector, whose refining capacity, for instance, is risible. Without urgent investment, some projections point to Iran possibly cutting off oil exports by 2020. Iran also needs everything else China can provide in areas like transportation systems, telecom, electricity and naval construction.

Iran needs China to develop its gas production in the gigantic north Pars and south Pars fields - which it shares with Qatar - in the Persian Gulf. So no wonder a "stable" Iran had to become a matter of Chinese national security.

Multipolar we go
So why the stalemate at the SCO? As China is always meticulously seeking to improve its global credibility, it had to be considering the pros and cons of admitting Iran, for which the SCO and its slogan of mutual cooperation for the stability of Central Asia, as well as economic and security benefits, are priceless. The SCO fights against Islamic terrorism and "separatism" in general - but now has also developed as an economic body, with a development fund and a multilateral economic council. The whole idea of it is to curb American influence in Central Asia.

Iran has been an observer since 2005. Next year may be crucial. The race is on to beat the clock, before a desperate Israeli strike, and have Iran accepted by the SCO while negotiating some sort of stability pact with the Barack Obama administration. For all this to happen relatively smoothly, Iran needs China - that is, to sell as much oil and gas as China needs below market prices, while accepting Chinese - and Russian - investment in the exploration and production of Caspian oil.

All this while Iran also courts India. Both Iran and India are focused on Central Asia. In Afghanistan, India is financing the construction of a US$250 million road between Zaranj, at the Iranian border, and Delaram - which is in the Afghan ring road linking Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. New Delhi sees in Iran a very important market. India is actively involved in the construction of a deep water port in Chabahar - that would be a twin for the Gwadar port built in southern Balochistan by China, and would be very helpful to landlocked Afghanistan (freeing it from Pakistani interference).

Iran also needs its doors to the north - the Caucasus and Turkey - to channel its energy production towards Europe. It's an uphill struggle. Iran has to fight fierce regional competition in the Caucasus; the US-Turkey alliance framed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the perpetual US-Russian Cold War in the region; and last but not least Russia's own energy policy, which simply does not contemplate sharing the European energy market with Iran.

But energy agreements with Turkey are now part of the picture - after the moderate Islamists of the AKP took power in Ankara in 2002. Now it's not that far-fetched to imagine the possibility of Iran in the near future supplying much-needed gas for the ultra-expensive, US-supported Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline.

But the fact remains that for both Tehran and Beijing, the American thrust in the "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia is anathema. They're both anti-US hegemony and US unilateralism, Bush/Cheney style. As emerging powers, they're both pro multipolar. And as they're not Western-style liberal democracies, the empathy is even stronger.

Few failed to notice the stark similarities in the degree of repression of the "green revolution" in Tehran and the Uighurs in Xinjiang. For China, a strategic alliance with Iran is above all about Pipelineistan, the Asian Energy Security Grid and the New Silk Road. For China, a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier is imperative. This would lead to Iran being fully opened to (eager) European investment. Washington may be reluctant to admit it, but in the New Great Game in Eurasia, the Tehran-Beijing axis spells out the future: multipolarity.

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/scramble-for-iraq-sweet-oil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/high-tech-plan-to-seal-saudi-border.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/jakarta-hotels-rocked-by-explosions.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bin-laden-attacks-obama-policies.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-offers-change-to-muslim-world.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/mideast-hanging-on-every-text-and-tweet.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-wins-election-in-middle-east.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/misreading-map.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/opec-set-to-leave-output-unchanged.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/dangers-of.html

Source:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KG26Ad02.html

Tags:

Beijing-Tehran axis, Iran's application, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 2008 summit in Tajikistan, Uighur riots in Urumqi , mythology of "Asian despotism", Eurasia, Bactria, silk, porcelain, horses, amber, ivory, incense, Asian Energy Security Grid, Caspian Sea,

Posted via email from Global Business News

The New Great Game: Iran and Russia, Scorpions In a Bottle

2009-08-07T07:17:00.001-07:00

Things get curiouser and curiouser in the Iranian wonderland. Imagine what happened last week during Friday prayers in Tehran, personally conducted by former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, aka "The Shark", Iran's wealthiest man, who made his fortune partly because of Irangate - the 1980s' secret weapons contracts with Israel and the US.

As is well known, Rafsanjani is behind the Mir-Hossein Mousavi-Mohammad Khatami pragmatic conservative faction that lost the most recent battle at the top - rather than a presidential election - to the ultra-hardline faction of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-Mahmud Ahmadinejad-Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. During prayers, partisans of the hegemonic faction yelled the usual "Death to America!" - while the pragmatic conservatives came up, for the first time, with "Death to Russia!" and "Death to China!"

Oops. Unlike the United States and Western Europe, both Russia and China almost instantly accepted the contested presidential re-election of Ahmadinejad. Could they then be portrayed as enemies of Iran? Or have pragmatic conservatives not been informed that obsessed-by-Eurasia Zbig Brzezinksi - who has US President Barack Obama's undivided attention - has been preaching since the 1990s that it is essential to break up the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing axis and torpedo the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)?

On top of it, don't they know that both Russia and China - as well as Iran - are firm proponents of the end of the dollar as global reserve currency to the benefit of a (multipolar) basket of currencies, a common currency of which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had the gall this month to present a prototype at the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in Aquila, Italy? By the way, it's a rather neat coin. Minted in Belgium, it sports the faces of the G-8 leaders and also a motto - "Unity in diversity".

"Unity in diversity" is not exactly what the Obama administration has in mind as far as Iran and Russia are concerned - no matter the zillion bytes of lofty rhetoric. Let's start with the energy picture. Iran is world number two both in terms of proven oil reserves (11.2%) and gas reserves (15.7%), according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008.

If Iran ever opted towards a more unclenched-fist relationship withWashington, US Big Oil would feast on Iran's Caspian energy wealth. This means that whatever the rhetoric, no US administration will ever want to deal with a hyper-nationalist Iranian regime, such as the current military dictatorship of the mullahtariat.

What really scares Washington - from George W Bush to Obama - is the perspective of a Russia-Iran-Venezuela axis. Together, Iran and Russia hold 17.6% of the world's proven oil reserves. The Persian Gulf petro-monarchies - de facto controlled by Washington - hold 45%. The Moscow-Tehran-Caracas axis controls 25%. If we add Kazakhstan's 3% and Africa's 9.5%, this new axis is more than an effective counter-power to American hegemony over the Arab Middle East. The same thing applies to gas. Adding the "axis" to the Central Asian "stans", we reach 30% of world gas production. As a comparison, the whole Middle East - including Iran - currently produces only 12.1% of the world's needs.

All about Pipelineistan
A nuclear Iran would inevitably turbo-charge the new, emerging multipolar world. Iran and Russia are de facto showing to both China and India that it is not wise to rely on US might subjugating the bulk of oil in the Arab Middle East. All these players are very much aware that Iraq remains occupied, and that Washington's obsession remains the privatization of Iraq's enormous oil wealth.

As Chinese intellectuals are fond of emphasizing, four emerging or re-emerging powers - Russia, China, Iran and India - are strategic and civilizational poles, three of them sanctuaries because they are nuclear powers. A more confident and assertive Iran - mastering the full cycle of nuclear technology - may translate into Iran and Russia increasing their relative weight in Europe and Asia to the distress of Washington, not only in the energy sphere but also as proponents of a multipolar monetary system.

The entente is already on. Since 2008, Iranian officials have stressed that sooner or later Iran and Russia will start trading in rubles. Gazprom is willing to be paid for oil and gas in roubles - and not dollars. And the secretariat of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already seen the writing on the wall - admitting for over a year now that OPEC will be trading in euros before 2020.

Not only the "axis" Moscow-Tehran-Caracas, but also Qatar and Norway, for instance, and sooner or later the Gulf Emirates, are ready to break up with the petrodollar. It goes without saying that the end of the petrodollar - which won't happen tomorrow, of course - means the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency; the end of the world paying for America's massive budget deficits; and the end of an Anglo-American finance stranglehold over the world that has lasted since the second part of the 19th century.

The energy equation between Iran and Russia is much more complex: it configures them as two scorpions in a bottle. Tehran, isolated from the West, lacks foreign investment to upgrade its 1970s-era energy installations. That's why Iran cannot fully profit from exploiting its Caspian energy wealth.

Here it's a matter of Pipelineistan at its peak - since the US, still during the 1990s, decided to hit the Caspian in full force by supporting the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline and the Baku-Tblisi-Supsa (BTS) gas pipeline.

For Gazprom, Iran is literally a goldmine. In September 2008, the Russian energy giant announced it would explore the huge Azadegan-North oilfield, as well as three others. Russia's Lukoil has increased its prospecting and Tatneft said it would be involved in the north. The George W Bush administration thought it was weakening Russia and isolating Iran in Central Asia. Wrong: it only accelerated their strategic energy cooperation.

Putin power play
In February 1995, Moscow committed to finishing construction of a nuclear reactor at Bushehr. This was a project started by that erstwhile, self-proclaimed "gendarme of the Gulf" for the US - the shah of Iran. The shah engaged KWU from Germany in 1974, but the project was halted by the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and hit hard between 1984 and 1988 by Saddam Hussein's bombs. The Russians finally entered the picture proposing to finish the project for $800 million. By December 2001, Moscow also started to sell missiles to Tehran - a surefire way of making extra money offering protection for strategic assets such as Bushehr.

Bushehr is a source of immense controversy in Iran. It should have been finished by 2000. As Iranian officials see it, the Russians seem never to be interested in wrapping it up. There are technical reasons - such as the Russian reactor being too big to fit inside what KWU had already built - as well as a technology deficit on the part of Iranian nuclear engineers.

But most of all there are geopolitical reasons. Former president Vladimir Putin used Bushehr as a key diplomatic peon in his double chessboard match with the West and the Iranians. It was Putin who launched the idea of enriching uranium for Iran in Russia; talk about a strategic asset in terms of managing a global nuclear crisis. Ahmadinejad - and most of all the Supreme Leader - gave him a flat refusal. The Russian response was even more foot-dragging, and even mild support for more US-sponsored sanctions against Tehran.

Tehran got the message - that Putin was not an unconditional ally. Thus, in August 2006, the Russians landed a new deal for the construction and supervision of two new nuclear plants. This all means that the Iranian nuclear dossier simply cannot be solved without Russia. Simultaneously, by Putin's own framework, it's very clear in Moscow that a possible Israeli strike would make it lose a profitable nuclear client on top of a diplomatic debacle. Medvedev for his part is pursuing the same two-pronged strategy; stressing to Americans and Europeans that Russia does not want nuclear proliferation in the Middle East while stressing to Tehran that it needs Russia more than ever.

Another feature of Moscow's chessboard strategy - never spelled out in public - is to keep the cooperation with Tehran to prevent China from taking over the whole project, but without driving the Americans ballistic at the same time. As long as the Iranian nuclear program is not finished, Russia can always play the wise moderating role between Iran and the West. Building up a civilian nuclear program in Iran is good business for both Iran and Russia for a number of reasons.

First of all, both are military encircled. Iran is strategically encircled by the US in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and by US naval power in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Russia has seen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gobbling up the Baltic countries and threatening to "annex" Georgia and Ukraine; NATO is at war in Afghanistan; and the US is still present, one way or another, across Central Asia.

Iran and Russia share the same strategy as far as the Caspian Sea is concerned. They are in fact opposed to the new Caspian states - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.

Iran and Russia also face the threat of hardcore Sunni Islam. They have a tacit agreement; for instance, Tehran has never done anything to help the Chechens. Then there's the Armenian issue. A de facto Moscow-Tehran-Erevan axis profoundly irks the Americans.

Finally, in this decade, Iran has become the third-largest importer of Russian weapons, after China and India. This includes the anti-missile system Tor M-1, which defends Iran's nuclear installations.

What's your axis?
So thanks to Putin, the Iran-Russia alliance is carefully deployed in three fronts - nuclear, energy and weapons. Are there cracks in this armor? Certainly.

First, Moscow by all means does not want a weaponized Iranian nuclear program. This spells out "regional destabilization". Then, Central Asia is considered by Moscow as its backyard, so for Iran to be ascendant in the region is quite problematic. As far as the Caspian goes, Iran needs Russia for a satisfactory juridical solution (Is it a sea or a lake? How much of it belongs to each border country?)

On other hand, Iran's new military dictatorship of the mullahtariat will react savagely if it ever had Russia fully against it in the UN Security Council. That would spell a rupture in economic relations - very bad for both sides - but also the possibility of Tehran supporting radical Islam everywhere from the southern Caucasus to Central Asia. Under these complex circumstances, it's not so far-fetched to imagine a sort of polite Cold War going on between Tehran and Moscow.

From Russia's point of view, it all comes back to the "axis" - which would be in fact Moscow-Tehran-Erevan-New Delhi, a counter-power to the US-supported Ankara-Tblisi-Telaviv-Baku axis. But there's ample debate about it even inside the Russian elite. The old guard, like former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, thinks that Russia is back as a great power by cultivating its former Arab clients as well as Iran; but then the so-called "Westernizers" are convinced that Iran is more of a liability.

They may have a point. The key of this Moscow-Tehran axis is opportunism - opposition to US hegemonic designs. Is Obama - via his "unclenched fist" policy - wily enough to try to turn this all upside down; or will he be forced by the Israel lobby and the industrial-military complex to finally strike a regime now universally despised all over the West?

Russia - and Iran - are fully committed to a multipolar world. The new military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran knows it cannot afford to be isolated; its road to the limelight may have to go through Moscow. That explains why Iran is making all sorts of diplomatic efforts to join the SCO.

As much as progressives in the West may support Iranian pragmatic conservatives - who are far from reformists - the crucial fact remains that Iran is a key peon for Russia to manage its relationship with the US and Europe. No matter how nasty the overtones, all evidence points to "stability" at this vital artery in the heart of the New Great Game.

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/bloody-china-crackdown-on-muslim.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/scramble-for-iraq-sweet-oil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/high-tech-plan-to-seal-saudi-border.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/jakarta-hotels-rocked-by-explosions.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bin-laden-attacks-obama-policies.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-offers-change-to-muslim-world.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/mideast-hanging-on-every-text-and-tweet.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-wins-election-in-middle-east.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/misreading-map.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/opec-set-to-leave-output-unchanged.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/dangers-of.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/russia-considers-bail-out-for-banks.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/putin-urges-innovation-to-revive-russia.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-eu-summit-ends-with-differences.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-stockpiles-diamonds.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-parades-new-missile-defense.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/kremlin-crisis.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/admiral-mullen-calls-for-new-us-russian.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russian-economy-declines-faster-than.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/world-undiscovered-gas-and-oil-is.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebooks-new-russian-shareholder.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/chinas-empire-must-end-reliance-on-one.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/pervasive-nature-of-corruption.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-draws-line-with-china-on-climate.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/buy-china-policy-set-to-raise-tensions.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-treasury-secretary-assures-china-its.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-stuck-in-dollar-trap.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-answers-global-crisis-with-new.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/hu-obama-discuss-positive-stable-us.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-reaches-seminal-climate-change.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-to-deploy-foreign-reserves.html

Source:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KG25Ak03.html

Russia and the US: An Uncertain Reset

2009-08-05T07:13:00.001-07:00

Predictably, both Russia and the United States have portrayed the recent summit in Moscow as a success. Indeed, the summit did produce some positive signs: a resumption of serious arms control negotiations after years of neglect, an agreement on U.S. military overflights of Russian territory to Afghanistan, and the creation of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, a structure that could give the relationship a high-level institutional focus.

But much more is needed for the "reset" to be real. Most important, the United States must overcome what I first described in an essay from October/November 2007 as "the unmistakable impression that making Russia a strategic partner has never been a major priority." This will require not only new vocabulary -- such as "reset" -- but a new sense of priority toward Russia from the Obama administration.

Such an approach need not come at a cost to U.S. interests or values. But it will require an honest recognition that, since U.S. and Russian interests are not identical, Moscow is unlikely to accommodate Washington's concerns unless it sees something for itself in return.

The United States' priorities with respect to Russia are Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea. Regarding Iran, neither Washington nor Moscow wants to see the clerical regime develop nuclear weapons. However, Iran is a major Russian trading partner and -- unlike Turkey, a U.S. ally -- offered no encouragement to separatist movements in the North Caucasus or support for pipelines that bypass Russia. Some in the Russian government fear that a Western rapprochement with Iran could disadvantage Moscow if Iranian gas were to become available for export to Europe.

Although Russian officials strongly oppose any military strike against Iran's nuclear installations, they privately acknowledge that such an attack could benefit Russia by increasing energy prices and creating a global backlash against the United States.

As for Afghanistan, Russia does not want to see the Taliban defeat U.S. and NATO forces and the country descend into chaos. Nevertheless, it is frustrated at being shut out of the Afghanistan after then President Vladimir Putin supported U.S. military intervention and encouraged the Northern Alliance to provide muscle to unseat the Taliban in 2001.

Moscow's priorities are different from Washington's: curbing NATO expansion, preventing the establishment of U.S. missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and maintaining and enhancing Russia's influence in the post-Soviet region. At times, Moscow can sound like its own worst enemy, when, for example, it makes inflated claims that any expansion of NATO is unacceptable or demands privileged interests in its "near abroad."

However, notwithstanding the August 2008 war against Georgia, Moscow's practical ambitions are fairly limited -- especially in comparison with suspicions that Russia is seeking to reestablish the Soviet Union by coercion and force. It is hard to take Russian statements about dominance in the post-Soviet space seriously when even Russia's closest allies in the region -- Armenia and, particularly, Belarus -- are regularly defiant of Moscow's wishes. As for the Caucasus, although Russia did invade Georgia proper, it did so after its own forces in South Ossetia came under attack by Georgian troops. The Russian army then ultimately stopped short of entering Tbilisi and directly challenging the rule of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Even after the war, most of Russia's neighbors feel free to ignore its preferences and have not expressed fear of a Russian attack.

The United States would be wise, therefore, to make a distinction between Russia's nostalgia and bravado, on the one hand, and its actions and capabilities on the other. This would leave several options for developing common ground. The United States already recognizes that neither Georgia nor Ukraine is ready for NATO membership. (This will not change anytime soon, and few NATO members support accelerating the process.) On the question of missile defense in Europe, President Barack Obama and his advisers do not share the almost religious commitment of the Bush administration -- suggesting that a joint system may be possible, as is providing Russia with guarantees that if the Polish and Czech sites are eventually operational, they could not be used against Russian interests.

Given all this, Russia's immediate concerns can be addressed fairly easily without sacrificing anything of real importance to the United States. The modest results of the summit are less a function of U.S. interests or even Russian conduct -- which too often is counterproductive and provides good cause for those skeptical of cooperation -- and more due to the Obama administration's failure to make the "reset" a priority. In this respect, U.S. policy has not changed much since the Bush and Clinton administrations.

Before the summit, Washington promised a "reset" but sent a series of mixed messages. In May, NATO conducted military maneuvers in Georgia despite strong objections from Russia. Although there were good reasons to proceed with the exercises -- they were small-scale, planned before Russia's war with Georgia, and included an invitation to Russia to participate -- the Obama administration could have made a stronger effort to convince the Russians that the maneuvers were not directed against them. A good use of Obama's political capital would have been a presidential or cabinet-level conversation with Moscow to discuss U.S. motives and interests.

Then, days before the summit, Obama criticized Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for having "one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new." Considering that Putin continues to influence Russian national security, it was predictable that Russia's political elite would interpret Obama's statement as endorsing the allegedly more liberal Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, against Putin. This could hardly have been helpful to Medvedev, whose political legitimacy still depends on Putin's support and approval.

Meanwhile, Russian questions about Obama's intent only intensified when Michael McFaul, a top Russia specialist at the National Security Council, said, "We're not going to reassure or give or trade, you know, anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense." He went on to align U.S. "national interest" on these questions with "the interests of our allies in Europe." This statement was seen within Russia as a sign that the Obama administration was not prepared to negotiate on the issues most important to Russia and would instead settle these questions without regard to Russia's perspective and with input from new NATO member states considered antagonistic toward Russia.

In Moscow, however, this is not quite how Obama acted. All issues were on the table and -- to Russia's satisfaction -- the two presidents signed a statement affirming the link between strategic offensive and defensive weapons. This linkage was vague, but Medvedev cited it as an acknowledgement that Russian views counted. Then, to compensate for his earlier criticism of Putin, Obama praised the prime minister's "extraordinary work" while president. Still, this did not overcome the resentment of some on the Russian side over Obama choosing to spend one of his two nights in Moscow at a nightclub with his family rather than with his Russian hosts.

From Moscow's perspective, Russia offered a significant goodwill gesture in allowing U.S. military planes to fly over Russian territory on their way to Afghanistan -- but it did not receive a goodwill gesture in return. In fact, on the question of repealing the Jackson-Vanik amendment -- a move promised by the Obama administration and three preceding administrations -- U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke said in Moscow that Russia must remove restrictions on U.S. poultry and pork imports as "a significant first step" toward persuading Congress to repeal the act.

The Moscow summit was a useful step and certainly did no damage. However, it did not send a clear signal that Obama has decided to make the U.S.-Russian relationship a personal priority. Without such clarity about the president's commitment, the relationship is unlikely to progress significantly. The Bilateral Presidential Commission is helpful as an expression of presidential commitment but cannot be a substitute for it.

More fundamentally, the United States needs to think more strategically about what is required to turn Russia into a responsible stakeholder in international security. Early last century, the Treaty of Versailles excluded Germany and Russia from European security architecture and thereby contributed to a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War II. Now, more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia remains outside this NATO-dominated structure.

Most officials in the United States and Europe were dismissive of Medvedev's call for a new European security treaty that would include Russia as a full partner. It is understandable that Western leaders are reluctant to do anything that might weaken NATO's mandate, especially when the alliance continues to play a role in providing security in places such as Afghanistan and Kosovo, but this should not obscure the fact that marginalizing a great power such as Russia could push it into seeking partners outside Europe, such as in China or Iran, to the detriment of U.S. interests.

Estrangement from the West would cost Russia dearly, but it would not be without costs to the United States either. An isolated Russia could make it harder to use such international institutions as the UN to advance U.S. interests, as well as provide the hint of an alternative to U.S. primacy, potentially emboldening other U.S. competitors and rivals. Pursuing a partnership with Moscow is difficult and frustrating, but neglecting Russia could severely compromise the pursuit of vital U.S. national interests tomorrow and in the years to come.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/misreading-map.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/opec-set-to-leave-output-unchanged.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/dangers-of.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/russia-considers-bail-out-for-banks.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/putin-urges-innovation-to-revive-russia.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-eu-summit-ends-with-differences.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-stockpiles-diamonds.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russia-parades-new-missile-defense.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/kremlin-crisis.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/admiral-mullen-calls-for-new-us-russian.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/russian-economy-declines-faster-than.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/world-undiscovered-gas-and-oil-is.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebooks-new-russian-shareholder.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-reaches-seminal-climate-change.html

Source:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65203/dimitri-k-simes/an-uncertain-reset

Tags:

Russia, USA, Medvedev, Putin, Obama, Russia-US Summit, U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, Treaty of Versailles, NATO, Taliban, Iran, North Korea, Georgia, UN, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Germany, Global Development News, Europe, Ukraine, CFR, Armenia, Belarus,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Corruption Arrests Shock American Jewish Community

2009-07-31T07:15:00.001-07:00

The arrests of more than 40 prominent politicians and Jewish leaders in New Jersey and New York on corruption and money laundering charges have sent shockwaves through the close-knit Syrian Jewish community there.

Federal investigators in New Jersey announced Thursday they had arrested more than 40 people, including public officials charged with corruption. Charges against others included international money laundering, selling counterfeit goods, and the black-market sale of human organs. In addition to three mayors, officials arrested five influential rabbis from New Jersey and the New York borough of Brooklyn.

"They used purported charities, entities supposedly set up to do good works, as vehicles for laundering millions of dollars in illicit funds. The rings were international in scope, connected to the city of Deal, New Jersey, Brooklyn, New York, Israel and Switzerland," said Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra about the money-laundering scheme.

The rabbis are accused of using their congregations' charitable organizations to launder about $3 million by passing money from alleged illicit activity through their charities' bank accounts. The FBI said the rabbis then kept about 10 percent for themselves. All of the rabbis come from the close-knit and wealthy Sephardic Jewish communities of southern New Jersey and Brooklyn - and the arrests have put the spotlight on a usually quiet community.

One of the rabbis arrested, Saul Kassin, is considered the leading cleric of the U.S. Sephardic community, comprised of families that emigrated mostly from the Middle East, Syria in particular, following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. Rabbi Kassin leads the largest Sephardic synagogue in the United States, Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, and has written books on Jewish law. Members of the community have expressed shock and disbelief over the allegations against Rabbi Kassin. Many have been reluctant to speak publicly. One member of Shaare Zion, Ezra Kassin, told reporters he did not believe the charges.

He's just a very honorable person. I can't believe it, I don't believe it. Whatever they want to say, it's hogwash," he said. Authorities said an FBI "cooperating witness" helped federal investigators gather evidence in the case. Media reports said he was arrested in 2006 for bank fraud. FBI agent Weysan Dun said the probe seeks to root out corruption in New Jersey, wherever it is found.

"This case is not about politics. It is certainly not about religion. It is about crime, corruption, arrogance. It is about a shocking betrayal of the public trust," he said. The FBI said the two-year probe is part of a wider investigation into political corruption and money laundering that started 10 years ago.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/pervasive-nature-of-corruption.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-twitter-arrest.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bush-is-gone-but-halliburton-keeps.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/mexican-state-bans-cops-from-carrying.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/former-south-korean-president-roh-dead.html

Source:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-07-24-voa36.cfm

Tags:

Syrian Jews, American jews, FBI, Rabbi Kassin, Shaare Zion, Ezra Kassin, political corruption, money laundering, Global Development News, U.S. Attorney Ralph J. Marra, 40 prominent politicians, Jewish leaders in New Jersey, New York, Sephardic synagogue,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Bill Gates' Name Surfaces On Patent Applications

2009-07-30T07:16:00.001-07:00

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was one of several names that surfaced last week on five patents filed by Searete, which is associated with a Bellevue, Wash. company called Intellectual Ventures formed by former Microsoft executives as a factory for new inventions.

Critics have complained that Intellectual Ventures will raise patent litigation costs, but the company claims to be working with more than 500 scientists and technicians in addition to universities, research labs and Fortune 500 companies.

Intellectual Ventures co-founder Nathan Myhrvold advised Gates for years as Microsoft's chief technology officer and in 1991 founded Microsoft Research. The idea behind some of these patents is to create equipment that would lower the force of hurricanes by cooling the water, altering its surface tension, and shifting it away from recreational areas.

They're not the only Searete patents attached to Gates. Since he stepped down last year as Microsoft's CEO, he has been freer to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to improve global health and education and reduce poverty, and pursue a variety of other interests.

Some of these interests are reflected in Searete's patents. Gates' name has been on patents for an electromagnetic engine and a method of delivering medication.

Gates and Myhrvold have also filed a series of patents for a temperature-controlled keg to store medicine -- and, separately, beer and wine -- at optimal temperatures. The keg would come with sensors and an electronic display that would allow people to monitor the liquids without having to open the container.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-that-speaks-your-language.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-inquiry-into-hiring-at-high-tech.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-attacks-heart-of-microsoft.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/bing-meaning-but-it-not-google.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microsoft-to-eliminate-need-for-game.html

Source:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/legal/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218500495&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Tags:

Intellectual Ventures co-founder, Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's chief technology officer, Microsoft Research, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Searete, Fortune 500 companies, electromagnetic engine, a method of delivering medication, temperature-controlled keg to store medicine,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Abu Dhabi Firm Buys Stake in Tesla Motors

2009-07-29T07:15:00.001-07:00

Tesla Motors has yet to turn a profit, but that isn't stopping an Abu Dhabi investment firm from buying a stake in the electric car maker from Daimler, the latest sign of interest in the San Carlos startup.

Daimler sold part of its 10 percent stake in the electric-car manufacturer to Aabar Investments, bringing its largest shareholder into a venture to develop alternative powering systems.

Aabar, which will own almost 4 percent Tesla, bought the stake under an agreement to increase cooperation with Daimler after the investment company acquired stock in the German carmaker in March, the companies said today in a joint statement. They didn't disclose a price.

Daimler, the world's second-largest maker of luxury cars, bought just under 10 percent of Tesla for a "double-digit million-euro" sum in May. The Stuttgart, Germany,-based manufacturer reiterated today that it plans to install Tesla's lithium-ion battery packs and charging equipment in 1,000 electric-powered versions of its Smart car.

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/mitsubishi-rolls-out-zero-emission.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/world-most-expensive-car.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/teslas-founder-sues-teslas-ceo.html

Tags:

Tesla motors, Aabar Investments, Daimler-Benz, Smart car, Stuttgart Germany, Auto industry, Electric cars, electric car makers, Global Development News, Global Best Practice,

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/businessupdate/ci_12827600?source=email&nclick_check=1

Posted via email from Global Business News

China Launches Arabic TV Channel

2009-07-28T07:19:00.001-07:00

China has launched a 24-hour Arabic-language television channel aimed at addressing "distorted" views of China in the Middle East and North Africa.

The satellite channel, launched on Saturday, is expected to reach about 300 million people in 22 countries. China Central Television (CCT already broadcasts foreign language channels in English, Spanish and French. Zhang Changming, deputy president of CCTV, said that through the Arabic channel "the world can know China and China can know the rest of the world even better". "Our principle is to be real, to be objective, to be accurate and transparent. CCTV will present the world with the real China," he said at the launch. The channel will mainly broadcast news, but Zhang promised it would also feature entertainment and educational programmes.

'Good journalism'

Ying Chan, the director of Hong Kong University's journalism and media studies centre, told Al Jazeera that China saw the channel as a way to counter "unfair" portrayls of China in the international media. "There's no question that the Middle East is a very strategic area and China wants its voice heard there," she said.

"They want to announce their policies more to the world, and they also felt that the international media, led by the Western media, has not been fair to China." China exerts a great deal of control over its media and often censors the reporting of sensitive topics. "It [CCTV] will face challenges in how much it will allow its own reporters to report news as it is, as it happened," Ying said. "I think CCTV, in order to gain influence, has to deliver good journalism."

Investment plans

CCTV has also said it plans to open more foreign bureaus. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper reported that Beijing was prepared to put 45 billion yuan ($6.6bn) into the development of its media, an amount which could not be confirmed by Chinese sources. China's Arabic language channel joins other foreign government media networks broadcasting in Arabic. The UK's BBC launched its Arabic channel last year and the US set up al-Hurra, an Arabic-language channel based in Virginia, in 2004.

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/sarkozy-to-go-all-way-against-internet.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/american-muslims-and-jews-consider.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/scramble-for-iraq-sweet-oil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/high-tech-plan-to-seal-saudi-border.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/jakarta-hotels-rocked-by-explosions.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bin-laden-attacks-obama-policies.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-offers-change-to-muslim-world.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/mideast-hanging-on-every-text-and-tweet.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-wins-election-in-middle-east.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/misreading-map.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/opec-set-to-leave-output-unchanged.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/dangers-of.html

Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/07/200972563026919452.html

Tags:

Chinese State, CCTV, China's Arabic language channel, BBC launched its Arabic channel, US set up al-Hurra, Global Development News, South China Morning Post , Hong Kong University, journalism and media studies centre, Al Jazeera,

Posted via email from Global Business News

United Future World Currency

2009-07-26T10:36:00.001-07:00

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev illustrated his call for a supranational currency to replace the dollar by pulling from his pocket a sample coin of a “united future world currency.”

“Here it is,” Medvedev told reporters today in L’Aquila, Italy, after a summit of the Group of Eight nations. “You can see it and touch it.” The coin, which bears the words “unity in diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G-8 delegations, Medvedev said.

The question of a supranational currency “concerns everyone now, even the mints,” Medvedev said. The test coin “means they’re getting ready. I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdependent we are.”

Medvedev has repeatedly called for creating a mix of regional reserve currencies as part of the drive to address the global financial crisis, while questioning the U.S. dollar’s future as a global reserve currency. Russia’s proposals for the G-20 meeting in London in April included the creation of a supranational currency.

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-to-deploy-foreign-reserves.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-treasury-secretary-assures-china-its.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-stuck-in-dollar-trap.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-answers-global-crisis-with-new.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-reaches-seminal-climate-change.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/kremlin-crisis.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/time-to-cash-out-why-paper-money-hurts.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

Source:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aeFVNYQpByU4

http://www.futureworldcurrency.com/

Tags:

United Future World Currency, Dmitry Medvedev, G8, Russian President, Unity in Diversity, Laquila Italy, Supranational currency, G20, Global Economic News, coin, hard currency, Belgian mints, SDR’s,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Blogger Sentenced For Leaking G N'R Album

2009-07-25T10:28:00.001-07:00

A blogger who admitted to leaking part of the Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" was sentenced to a year of probation.

U.S. District Magistrate Judge Paul L. Abrams also ordered Kevin Cogill to serve two months of home confinement, subject his computers to government scrutiny and record a public service announcement for the RIAA.

Cogill pleaded guilty earlier this year to one misdemeanor count of copyright infringement for posting nine tracks from the long-awaited Guns 'N Roses album last year. Cogill apologized for his actions in court Tuesday and said he didn't mean any harm by posting the tracks online.

"I never intended to hurt the artist," Cogill told Abrams. "I intended to promote the artist because I'm a fan." Abrams noted that Cogill is an artist, and should have known better.

A federal prosecutor pushed for a short prison term to act as a deterrent to others. "This is the type of case where I believe the court needs to send a strong message," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian. Too many people think of posting copyrighted work online as a "victimless crime," he said.

Cogill's attorney argued against a prison term, saying his client realized his wrongdoing and had suffered serious repercussions already. "He did lose his job as a result of this case," defense attorney David Kaloyanides said.

Missakian said after the hearing that while prosecutors hoped Cogill would be incarcerated, the case should serve as a warning to others that the government takes copyright infringement violations seriously. Abrams said he thought Cogill had learned his lesson, and did not think he would repeat his mistake.

As part of his plea deal, Cogill will have to allow authorities to search or seize his computers. He will not have to pay any fines or restitution, although authorities at one point calculated the losses from his actions at more than $371,000.

Kaloyanides said after the hearing that arriving at any damage amount was difficult and that sending Cogill to prison could have created a backlash. "It doesn't help to educate the public of the importance of respecting copyright law when you become too heavy-handed with punishment," Kaloyanides said.

Cogill will have some input into the public service announcement he records for the RIAA, which has used lawsuits to pursue people it suspects of illegally downloading music. Kaloyanides said he hoped the ads would target fans who upload and download copyrighted works by explaining to them that they're really hurting their favorite bands.

"You need to reach the fans," he said. "He (Cogill) speaks their language."

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/big-media-seek-21st-century-business.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/internet-service-providers-not-keeping.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/ballmer-all-traditional-content-will-be.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/drug-war-on-another-border-canada.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microsoft-and-publicis-strike-deal.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/virgin-universal-launch-music-download.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/medium-is-still-message.html

Source:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090714/ap_on_re_us/us_blogger_arrested

Tags:

RIAA, Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy", Kevin Cogill, Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian, Global Best Practice, David Kaloyanides, blogs, blogger, blogging, copyright, intellectual property,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Merger of Middle East Real Estate Giants

2009-07-24T07:25:00.001-07:00

The deal is so big and so unprecedented; none of the parties involved knows the estimated value of the transaction at this date. One thing they do know is that the debt load of the combined entities will be huge - about $3.65 billion, U.S. (13.4 billion dirhams)

Emaar Properties, one of the world's largest commercial real estate companies, wants to merge with three real estate units of Dubai Holdings -- Sama, Tatweer and Dubai Properties. Dubai Holdings is a 100 percent state-controlled entity, while the government of Dubai owns a 32 percent stake in Emaar.

The parties expect to complete the deal valuation by August 2009. The Economic Times of Dubai reports the merger is expected to take about four months and could be completed in October 2009, pending the approval of shareholders and regulators.

The entities' total assets will be 194 billion dirhams, Emaar said in a statement to the Dubai Financial Market. The total debt is about 7 cent of the company's total assets. As of March 2009, Emaar's own external debt obligation was 10 billion dirhams, the newspaper reports. The real estate major had about 68 billion dirhams in book value of assets.

"As for Dubai Holdings, we believe the 126 billion dirhams in assets quoted in the press release consists mostly of land, which could be potentially valued much lower given the current market conditions," according to an Emaar spokesperson.

"We currently have no idea as to what Dubai Holdings' cash position is and what is owed to its contractors and suppliers," the Emaar spokesperson told the Dubai Financial Market.

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/bloody-china-crackdown-on-muslim.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/sarkozy-to-go-all-way-against-internet.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/american-muslims-and-jews-consider.html

http://globaldevelopmentnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/scramble-for-iraq-sweet-oil.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/high-tech-plan-to-seal-saudi-border.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/jakarta-hotels-rocked-by-explosions.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/bin-laden-attacks-obama-policies.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-offers-change-to-muslim-world.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/mideast-hanging-on-every-text-and-tweet.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-wins-election-in-middle-east.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/misreading-map.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/opec-set-to-leave-output-unchanged.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/dangers-of.html

Tags:

Dubai Holdings, Emaar Properties, world's largest commercial real estate companies, dirhams, Sama, Tatweer, Dubai Financial Market, Global Best Practice,

Source:

http://www.realestatechannel.com/international-markets/residential-real-estate/emaar-properties-dubai-holdings-sama-tatweer-dubai-properties-middle-east-commercial-real-estate-giants-alex-finkelstein-1012.php

Posted via email from Global Business News

Budget Deficit Tops $1Trillion For First Time

2009-07-23T14:53:00.001-07:00

Nine months into the fiscal year, the federal deficit has topped $1 trillion for the first time.

The imbalance is intensifying fears about higher interest rates and inflation, and already pressuring the value of the dollar. There's also concern about trying to reverse the deficit — by reducing government spending or raising taxes — in the midst of a harsh recession.

The Treasury Department said Monday that the deficit in June totaled $94.3 billion, pushing the total since the budget year started in October to nearly $1.1 trillion. The deficit has been propelled by the huge sum the government has spent to combat the recession and financial crisis, combined with a sharp decline in tax revenues. Paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also is a major factor.

The country's soaring deficits are making Chinese and other foreign buyers of U.S. debt nervous, which could make them reluctant lenders down the road. It could force the Treasury Department to pay higher interest rates to make U.S. debt attractive longer-term.

"These are mind boggling numbers," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at the Smith School of Business at California State University. "Our foreign investors from China and elsewhere are starting to have concerns about not only the value of the dollar but how safe their investments will be in the long run."

Government spending is on the rise to address the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and an unemployment rate that has climbed to 9.5 percent. Congress already approved a $700 billion financial bailout and a $787 billion economic stimulus package to try and jump-start a recovery, and there is growing talk among some Obama administration officials that a second round of stimulus may be necessary.

This has many Republicans and deficit hawks worried that the U.S. could be setting itself up for more financial pain down the road if interest rates and inflation surge. They also are raising alarms about additional spending the administration is proposing, including its plan to reform health care.

President Barack Obama and other administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have said the U.S. is committed to bringing down the deficits once the country has emerged from the current recession and financial crisis.

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-treasury-secretary-assures-china-its.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-stuck-in-dollar-trap.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-answers-global-crisis-with-new.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/hu-obama-discuss-positive-stable-us.html

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-to-deploy-foreign-reserves.html

Source:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_12827891?source=email

Tags:

Treasury Department, Great Depression, Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary, Government spending, Smith School of Business, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Global Economic News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Schwarzenegger For Open Source Digital Textbooks

2009-07-22T13:14:00.001-07:00

The Calif. Gov. Wants to Save Money by Dumping Printed Books for Online Texts; Is it Feasible?

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/schwarzenegger-for-open-source-digital.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/california-ills-give-us-headache.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/california-paying-bills-with-ious.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-hot-pursuit-of-fusion-or-folly.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-links-311-call-center-to.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microlending-taking-off-in-us.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-economy-change-buying-habits.html

Tags: open source, open source textbooks, California budget crisis, governor Schwarzenegger, McGraw-Hill Education, Global Best Practice, OpenContent.org, education, k-12, David Wiley, Brigham Young University, Neeru Khosla,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Big Pharma: Big Lobby, Big Money

2009-07-22T07:28:00.001-07:00

The pharmaceutical and health products industry has long been the top dog on K Street. Since 1998, the industry has spent more than $1.6 billion on federal lobbying. Last year alone, it spent more than $234 million — a sum that translates into roughly $125,000 every hour that Congress was actually in session.

http://globalbestpractice.blogspot.com/2009/07/big-pharma-big-lobby-big-money.html

Tags: Obama, K Street, PHRMA, Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP, Medicare Part D, FDA, Vioxx, Hatch-Waxman Act, Greater Access to Affordable Pharmaceuticals Act, Global Best Practice,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Corporate Profits a Boost for US Industry

2009-07-21T20:51:00.001-07:00

Corporate America took another step along its long road to recovery on Tuesday as companies from the industrial heartland of Peoria to the technology hubs of Silicon Valley reported stronger-than-expected profits and bullish outlooks.

China to Deploy Foreign Reserves

2009-07-21T20:14:00.001-07:00

Beijing will use its foreign exchange reserves, the largest in the world, to support and accelerate overseas expansion and acquisitions by Chinese companies, Wen Jiabao, the country’s premier, said in comments published on Tuesday. “We should hasten the implementation of our ‘going out’ strategy and combine the utilisation of foreign exchange reserves with the ‘going out’ of our enterprises,” he told Chinese diplomats late on Monday. Mr Wen said Beijing also wanted Chinese companies to increase its share of global exports.

The “going out” strategy is a slogan for encouraging investment and acquisitions abroad, particularly by big state-owned industrial groups such as PetroChina,Chinalco, China Telecom and Bank of China. Qu Hongbin, chief China economist at HSBC, said: “This is the first time we have heard an official articulation of this policy ... to directly support corporations to buy offshore assets.” China’s outbound non-financial direct investment rose to $40.7bn last year from just $143m in 2002.

Mr Wen did not elaborate on how much of the $2,132bn of reserves would be channelled to Chinese enterprises but Mr Qu said this was part of a strategy to reduce its reliance on the US dollar as a reserve currency. “This is reserve diversification in a broader sense. Instead of accumulating foreign exchange reserves and short-term financial assets, the government wants the nation to accumulate more long-term corporate real assets.”

State-owned groups, particularly in the oil and natural resources sectors, have stepped up their hunt for overseas companies and assets on sale because of the global crisis. China Investment Corp, the $200bn sovereign wealth fund, has been buying stakes in overseas resources companies and has taken a 1.1 per cent stake in Diageo, the British distiller.

In an interview published in state-controlled media, the chairman of China Development Bank said Chinese outbound investment would accelerate but should focus on resource-rich developing economies. “Everyone is saying we should go to the western markets to scoop up [underpriced assets],” said Chen Yuan. “I think we should not go to America’s Wall Street, but should look more to places with natural and energy resources.”

http://globaleconomicnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/chinas-empire-must-end-reliance-on-one.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/pervasive-nature-of-corruption.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-final-report-card.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-draws-line-with-china-on-climate.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/china-solar-drive.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/china-google-and-pornography.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/green-power-takes-root-in-chinese.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/buy-china-policy-set-to-raise-tensions.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/america-snubbed-as-china-india-and.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-treasury-secretary-assures-china-its.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/china-silences-twitter-bing-yahoo.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/geithner-goes-to-china-hat-in-hand.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-stuck-in-dollar-trap.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-answers-global-crisis-with-new.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/hu-obama-discuss-positive-stable-us.html

http://globaleconomicpulse.blogspot.com/2009/07/g8-reaches-seminal-climate-change.html

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b576ec86-761e-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html

Tags: Chinese Monetary Reserves, US Dollar, USD, EURO, Yen, Swiss Franc, Chinese State Firms, Sovereign Wealth Funds, Diageo, PetroChina, Chinalco, China Telecom, Bank of China, China Investment Corp., HSBC, China Development Bank,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Dispute Finder: Intel Program Finds Dubious Online Claims

2009-07-20T12:50:00.001-07:00

Intel has launched software that sniffs out questionable claims at websites.

A "Dispute Finder" crafted by Intel researchers in Berkeley, California, for Firefox web browsers alerts Internet surfers to contentions that are contradicted by information elsewhere online.

"The reason this is important is that very often you'll read a website and not realize this is only one side of the story," Intel research scientist Robert Ennals said in an online video.

Dispute Finder automatically highlights text containing contested claims and then links to boxes summarizing points and counter-points. The data base is designed to grow and evolve with user input.

Votes regarding the reliability of information are used to filter dubious data. Researchers reportedly envision a version of the software that will scan caption information in television programs for specious claims and a mobile device capable of "listening" for questionable comments in conversations.

The mini-program, which works with Firefox web browsers, became available Thursday online at disputefinder.cs.berkeley.edu.

http://globalitnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/glimpse-of-intel-futuristic-gadgets.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/intel-and-nokia-announce-long-term.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-inquiry-into-hiring-at-high-tech.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/intel-to-buy-wind-river-systems-for-884.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/homebrewed-cpu-is-beautiful-mess-of.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/cell-phone-that-never-needs-charging.html

http://globalitandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090619/tc_afp/usitinternetsoftware

Tags: Intel Labs, DisputeFinder, Firefox, Berkeley, Dubious data, Rober ennals, Global IT News, Global Best Practice, contested claims, competing claims, opinion comparison,

Posted via email from Global Business News

California ills give US a Headache

2009-07-20T07:29:00.001-07:00

California’s fiscal crisis is in danger of becoming a serious headache, not just for the state and its feuding politicians in Sacramento, but for the entire nation.

In public, federal government officials talk about California’s problems as if they were ringfenced – a crisis for the state but with few national ramifications. They know the slightest whiff of federal intervention would take away the incentive for California’s politicians to agree on tough spending cuts and tax increases. But they know they cannot ignore a fiscal crisis in the most economically important state in the middle of a global financial crisis. So they are keeping a careful eye on events and it would be surprising if they were not also reviewing the options at their disposal to mitigate the damage.

California has a budget deficit of $26.3bn (€18.85bn, £16.18bn) on revenues of just $113bn, according to Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, a broking firm. It has a balanced budget rule that forces it to eliminate the deficit but no agreement as to how. It has already effectively decided to selectively default – paying vendors with IOUs rather than cash. Worse could follow if the impasse is not resolved soon.

The worst case scenario would be a default by the state which has $59bn in general debt, $8bn in bonds linked to securitised revenues such as tolls and $2bn commercial paper, according to Standard and Poor’s, the rating agency. A California default would be a shock for fragile financial markets. While no other state is in quite as difficult a position, there would be danger of widespread contagion in US markets and beyond.

Default still looks like a so-called “tail risk” – a high cost but low probability event. California’s constitution makes debt service a high priority. Its main constraint is cash flow. The decision to pay bills in IOUs saves cash for debt servicing and that should be enough for now. But it is not sustainable indefinitely. In the absence of a fix for the underlying deficit, vendors and banks will eventually lose faith in the value of the IOUs, forcing California to pay for vital services in cash instead. Moreover, there are institutional reasons why the budget gap is proving difficult to close.

Aside from the absurdity of having to balance the budget in the midst of the worst recession in half a century, California’s fiscal flexibility is diminished by other statutory restrictions, mostly imposed by state referendums known as propositions. These restrictions make it exceptionally difficult for the state to raise property taxes or cut basic education spending. About 25 per cent of revenue is, meanwhile, ringfenced.

If the gridlock continues for months and the risk of default escalates, it would take a brave Treasury secretary not to step in with some kind of guarantee, credit line or outright bail-out for California. The immediate outlays involved would not be vast compared with federal bail-outs for banks and carmakers. Yet, the federal government could not help California without aiding other troubled states, and a de facto or even de jure federal guarantee for all state debt would add a huge fiscal burden. Nor is it clear what the exit strategy would be: if the federal government blinked this year, it presumably would blink again next year if the problems were not resolved.

The most likely scenario is that California’s feuding politicians eventually reach a deal to close the $26bn budget gap. But even then there would be ramifications. The state’s economy is already weak; unemployment is 11.5 per cent and the multiplier effects of $26bn in geographically concentrated spending cuts and tax increases could be high.

Moreover, as KBW highlights in a research note, cutbacks at the state level will put additional pressure on highly stretched counties and municipalities. Like the state, these entities have little latitude to raise revenues. State-level fiscal consolidation could easily lead to a rash of defaults at the local level, which could roil the market for municipal debt nationally. If this happened, the federal government might have to support the municipal bond market, possibly through a guarantee scheme with risk-based pricing. Alternatively, it could decide the best antidote to state fiscal contraction is further federal stimulus.

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/california-paying-bills-with-ious.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-hot-pursuit-of-fusion-or-folly.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/san-francisco-links-311-call-center-to.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/microlending-taking-off-in-us.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/future-of-us-capitalism.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-economy-change-buying-habits.html

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/82185bf0-6f01-11de-9109-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

Tags: California’s fiscal crisis, KBW, Public Finance, Government finance, California has a budget deficit of $26.3bn, on revenues of just $113bn, Keefe Bruyette Woods, Global Economic News, Global Economic Pulse, IOU’s, Standard and Poor’s,

Posted via email from Global Business News