While Turkey’s Economic Star Rises, Sarkozy’s France Finds Irrelevance
5 March 2011
Category: Markets
At a Glance: 2011 Indian Union Budget
Finance Minister Pranab Muhkerjee announced India’s 2011 Union Budget yesterday. So what does India’s 2011 Union Budget mean for India Inc?
At a glance:
.77 percent tax surcharge cut in corporate tax for domestic firms. Not a major reduction, but a welcome relief. In addition, minimum alternate tax has been raised marginally to off-set the surcharge cut.
Food Price Hike Drives 44 Million People into Poverty
Rising food prices have driven an estimated 44 million people into poverty in developing countries since last June
as food costs continue to rise to near 2008 levels, according to World Bank Group numbers.
“Global food prices are rising to dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world,” said World Bank Group President Robret B. Zoellick.
US Housing Prices Fell Again in December
Home real estate prices slid again in December, pushing a leading price index
within a whisper of its lowest level since the housing crash began, data released Tuesday showed.
Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index of 20 large metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in December from November,
although the drop shrank to 0.4 percent when the data was adjusted for seasonal variations.
The only city in the index that posted a monthly gain on an unadjusted basis was Washington.
India Telecom Scandal Highlights Systemic Problems
22 February 2011.
With the arrest earlier this month of Andimuthu Raja, former telecommunications minister in India’s current Congress-led coalition government,
the deeper problems afflicting its unusual combination of a dynamic economy
with a weak and corrupt political system have been glaringly exposed to public view.
Raja was a small-town lawyer from a regional political party in a southern Indian state.
Gene Sharp: Theorist of People Power Revolutions
“If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”
Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo,
an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here.
His name is Gene Sharp.
Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.
But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.
Wall Street’s Blatant Derivatives Conspiracy
17 February 2011.
As regular readers know, Economy Watch has been extremely concerned with the destructive power of derivatives —
and their STILL yet-to-be-fully-felt impact on the world political economy —
Serengeti Highway Pits Economy vs Eco-System
14 February 2011.
Every spring, in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, an endless sheet of yellow grass,
two million wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and other grazers march north in search of greener pastures,
with lions and hyenas stalking them and vultures circling above.
It is called the Great Migration, and it is widely considered one of the most spectacular assemblies of animal life on the planet.
But how much longer it will stay that way is another matter.
Twelve Mega-Booming Megacities of the Future
In 2008, urban populations out-numbered rural populations for the first time, and they’re still pouring into the cities. In the coming decades, there’ll be an even more pronounced difference between rural and urban populations – with the city winning the people’s vote over the countryside.
New York and Tokyo remain the largest cities in 2005 – but in terms of high growth in GDP, per capita GDP and population, the emerging markets and even London are leading the way.
