FT.com / Asia-Pacific - India to launch first nuclear submarine:
The submarine, the INS Chakra, has been produced at a cost of $2.9bn under the country’s Advanced Technology Vessel Programme and is expected to go into full service in two years’ time.
The gloves are coming off in the European debate on financial regulation:
There is a hilarious escalation in the German/Austrian tax evasion dispute. Austria has promised a new law for 2010 to notify any foreign saver who might be guilty of tax evasion, as a result of which hoards of German customers are withdrawing their funds. To facilitate the “legal” withdrawal and repatriation of the funds, Austria is printing special silver coins, with a nominal value of €1.5, but a much higher market value, given the recent increase in the silver price. Now, savers can legally repatriate €10,000 during each cross-border trip, but when you transport silver coins, it is the nominal value that matters. So you can legally very large euro sums across the border, FT Deutschland reports. The only problem now is that the Austrian cannot meet the massive demand for these coins.
take for example Bundesland Brandenburg, in 2050 tis population will be made up by 90% of over 65. And demographics are the hardest numbers you will ever get about how the future will look.
(the under 20 are not in the picture)
Op-Ed Columnist - 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans - NYTimes.com:
As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states.
FT.com / UK - Rothschild and Freshfields founders had links to slavery, papers reveal:
...UK government’s bail-out of British slave owners when colonial slavery was abolished in the 1830s. It was the biggest bail-out of an industry as a percentage of annual government expenditure – dwarfing last year’s rescue of the banking sector.
Home | TPMCafe:
If the amendment becomes law, which it almost certainly will, the government will have, in effect, a veto over appointments to Israel's highest court, "the most significant change," says the Israel Policy Center, "in the balance of power between the branches of Israel's government since the current system of judicial appointments was put in place in 1953."
www.juancole.com:
ranian reformers are calling for people just to crowd into the bazaars or markets in the major cities, making it impossible for them to do business and thus provoking, willy-nilly, a commercial strike
Edge 291:
Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?
Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs:
Taking the above-suggested vote count at face value - 11 million votes for Ahmadinejad - one cannot brand the current events in Iran as that of people versus the government, as many in the Western media portray, for the government also enjoys a strong grassroots support.
The reality unobserved by the Western media is that today's crisis is not about people against a totalitarian regime. Rather, it is a struggle between two factions of society. One faction is seeking a dramatic liberalization of society, while the other advocates strict adherence to religious principles. This is an extraordinarily unique situation. This is tradition against modernity.
The battle between the two was fierce and merciless during the shah's time before his ouster in 1979. It was the root cause of the revolution, and has continued to stay that way to the present, and will extend into the foreseeable future.
By now he will have understood that he will not become President of the Republic. The deeper understanding of this fact will make him step down.
Email from John Harris: regrets dispute with Dan Froomkin - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:
I asked him why he thinks the power to name-and-shame has almost no effect in the United States, where those who are named as the intellectual authors of repressive legislation feel no shame and suffer no consequences for their actions. He gave a very simple answer: journalists.
The Myth of 2016 - Barrons.com:
A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money
The Italian language is the sweetest ghetto in this world. To make things worse it’s also learned by many for pure pleasure. This adds to Italians’ feeling that they are at the center of the world, the world as they know it.
(to be continued, eheheh)
That Healthy Decoupling:
For the first time in many decades, the world will have to deal with several leading economies that will be competing in a more equal footing. The euro is a reality, Japan has exited its lost decade, despite the recent economic shock, and emerging markets have mostly emerged. The abnormality of the unique position of the US as the only economic locomotive has mostly ended with this crisis. This will allow the US to focus on solving its domestic problems with less concern that the needed restructuring will unduly drag global growth, and hopefully deliver a more balanced global economy. This will also imply that countries that don’t rise to the occasion will run the risk of lagging behind for a long time. The different approach to plant closures across the Atlantic in the restructuring process of the auto industry is a very clear signal that some European countries have not yet realized the competitive threat they are facing.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:
Yes, this obviously was a "divine assessment". They didn't even attempt to disguise the fraud. Which, to me, tells me they panicked. This graph is a red flag to Iran and the world.
FT.com / Africa - Italy and France draw fire over aid:
The report is especially scathing about Italy, which currently chairs the G8 group. It has delivered only about 3 per cent of the increase it promised in 2005.
Consultations with Rome reveal it is planning to cut, not increase, assistance in the future, says the report.
Italy promised to increase its aid from $1.4bn in 2004 to $5.08bn in 2010, but by the end of last year was paying only $1.57bn.
“Based on its performance against the Gleneagles commitments, it has no credibility to host discussions of such global importance,” said Mr Drummond.
FT.com | Willem Buiter's Maverecon | After the Crisis: Macro Imbalance, Credibility and Reserve-Currency:
The question of a world reserve-currency was recently brought up by the president of the Chinese central bank. At first, this could be interpreted as nothing more than retaliation to the repeated declarations of American authorities that China has been manipulating its currency. The article of Zhou Xiaochuan, president of China’s central bank, is however sensible and well reasoned.[8] A supra-national reserve-currency is probably the most important element in the search for a more balanced world. The imbalance of the last decades is due, on the one side, to the unrestricted expansion of expenditures and indebtedness in the central countries and, on the other side, by a conservative export led stance, geared to the accumulation of foreign reserves, in the emerging countries. The issue of credibility, the ultimate determinant of the asymmetry between countries issuing reserve-currencies and all others, is at the root of the two types of behavior.
Modern money is purely fiduciary. It relies only on the credibility of the issuer. Credibility depends, above all, on the perception of economic and financial soundness of the issuer. It also requires a sense of responsibility from the issuer; responsibility for not abusing the privilege bestowed on it. But this does not exhaust the question of credibility. The credibility of a currency is based on the perception of an overall economic soundness of the issuer, but mainly its political, legal and institutional framework. A currency does not acquire the right of being a reserve-currency, to be used in international transactions, without the perception of economic, political, legal and institutional soundness of its issuer. The US dollar, according to these criteria, was a far better alternative than any other, since Bretton Woods. The resounding failure of the attempt to transform the artificial currency of the IMF, the Special Drawing Rights, into a world currency is thus understandable.
FT.com | Willem Buiter's Maverecon | After the Crisis: Macro Imbalance, Credibility and Reserve-Currency:
There is a major difference between the present conditions and those prevailing at the time Keynes elaborated his theses. The General Theory is of 1936. Before that, from 1932 on, sketches of the argument could be found in his essays.[3] In 1932, the economy was still in profound depression, but - as known today - due in a large extent to the errors of monetary policy, the excess of debt of the private sector had been eliminated by the collapse of the financial system. The generalized bankruptcy of banks and firms solved the problem of excessive indebtedness. Banks, enterprises and households were broken, but with no debts. The costs were dramatic, but the excess of debt disappeared. The fact that the mistakes of 1929 have not been repeated, lead to circumstances far different from those of 1932. Financial collapse was avoided and despite the severity of the recession, we are still far from the thorough disorganization of the economy and massive unemployment -close to 30% of the labor force - of the Great Depression. The economy, however, almost two years after the beginning of the crisis, continues to be overwhelmed by unredeemable debts. As long as households and firms continue to bear the brunt of excessive debt, they will try to reduce expenditures and increase savings. Until debt is reduced to levels which are perceived as reasonable, the private sector expenditure will be exceptionally low. After the Great Depression, in the early thirties, there was a lack of demand because there was no economic activity and no income. Today, the lack of demand is the result of the exceptionally high rate of savings required to bring back private debt to reasonable levels. These are very different situations.
FT.com / Comment / Editorial - Obama gets off to a new beginning:
This was not Nixon in China, it was Kennedy in Berlin.
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