Not long ago, China and the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto seemed to be locked in battle, as we documented here in Economy Watch.
First, Rio rebuffed a proposed $19.5 billion investment deal with the Aluminum Corporation of China, or Chinalco, one of the biggest state-run companies.
26 August 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
As consistent readers of this site are well aware, we are not huge fans of the so-called “reform” of the US finance sector
authored by President Obama, and barely squeaking through the Senate, which has pretty much lost whatever prestige it may have once had.
UK firms earn millions advising regimes whose sleazy, often murderous, activities
have stained their countries’ international images.
It has a strong claim to be the world capital of everything from finance to design,
but now London can add a new, more dubious distinction:
it has become the reputation laundering destination of choice for foreign heads of state
whose controversial activities may have stained their countries’ public images.
But is it a good or a bad sign ???
China Construction Bank (CCB), posted a 20 percent rise in second-quarter profit
as the world’s second-biggest lender by market value
seeks to raise $11 billion to fuel growth restrained by a weak capital base.
Profit growth at CCB, China’s biggest lender to home buyers and construction projects, beats analyst expectations,
but slowed from last quarter’s 34 percent pace, foreshadowing the challenges Chinese banks will face in the second half.
As if Google’s alliance with Verizon diminishing “net neutrality” weren’t enough, the emerging Net monolith is making other major moves as well.
Earlier this month, it said it would change its search policy for most of Europe
to allow advertisers to buy and use as keywords terms that have been trademarked by others.
The changes will benefit the company’s hugely successful AdWords service, through which advertisers bid for keywords;
Nearly a dozen current or former lawmakers have been honored by university endowments financed in part by corporations with business before Congress,
posing potential conflicts of interest like that attributed to Democratic Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York in an House ethics complaint.
The donations from businesses to the endowments ranged from modest amounts to millions of dollars, federal records show.
19 August 2010.
Let me go out on a limb and make a prediction; innovation in financial services will increasingly move to emerging markets as the ‘developed’ world continues to grapple with Too Big To Fail banks that need to maintain the payment of large amounts of profit to their ‘talent’ (a third or a half of profits being ‘invested’ this way is not uncommon), in markets that are stagnant or declining.
In a country where Fiats line the streets, Italians have long clung to a revealing proverb: as Fiat goes, so goes Italy.
Fiat’s efforts to make its workers more productive at a plant just north of Naples are testing that maxim as never before,
and may signal whether Italians are willing to embrace the kind of change needed for Italy
to skirt financial ruin and be more competitive with the countries of Northern Europe and the rest of the world.
In the storm unleashed over the implications for net neutrality of the Google / Verizon “plan”,
According to the proposal, Internet service providers would not be able to block producers of online content or offer them a paid “fast lane.”
03 August 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
We said it when we came back from a two-month stint in the States last fall:
Obama’s biggest problem is relying too much on self-interested middlemen to do what the Federal government should be doing.
And we said it again when the so-called health “care” revision package was passed:
