3 February 2011. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
among the MOST significant omissions was the role of the credit rating agencies, the supposed guardians of the integrity of the financial world.
2 February 2011.
Even as developed countries close, or limit construction of, coal-fired power plants
out of concern over pollution and climate-warming emissions,
coal has found a rapidly expanding market elsewhere: Asia, particularly China.
At ports in Canada, Australia, Indonesia, Colombia and South Africa,
ships are lining up to load coal for furnaces in China,
which has evolved virtually overnight from a coal ex-porter
1 February 2011.
Last month, we ran a disturbing Feature on the darker side of the for-profit micro-finance sector in India.
31 January 2011.
In booming South America, oil-rich Venezuela is the exception: the continent’s only shrinking economy in 2010.
Officials are rationing hard currency. Government takeovers of private businesses are increasing.
One prominent financial analyst recently had just two words of advice for investors here: “Run away.”
Many middle-class and wealthy Venezuelans have done exactly that, creating a slow-burning exodus of scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs and engineers.
The unrest engulfing Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa caught business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum off guard,
but it became the hottest topic among the Arab elite in attendance at Davos —
and we DO mean “elite”, given how much it cost them to get there.
Most of those leaders tuned in to the dramatic events from iPads and BlackBerries,
A video of a chain-smoking 2-year-old boy in Indonesia went viral last year,
making the country an abject poster child for unbridled cigarette use among its young citizens.
The pudgy little boy, Ardi Rizal, smoked up to two packs a day,
and his parents, who had started him at 18 months, said he threw tantrums if denied.
According to NBC News, he went through a successful rehab stint at the end of last year.
But if the toddler kicked the habit, Indonesia has not.
Chief executives, government leaders and academics around the world are headed to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week —
a heady power gathering that mixes business, politics and Champagne in the Swiss Alps.
It is an event that draws a wide range of decision makers
ostensibly to contemplate how to solve the world’s problems.
Inside Amjad Abed’s tiny gold shop, the display cases sit half empty, and the memories of his two grown sons are in the bullet holes that gouge the walls.
Last spring, three gunmen burst in and ransacked the store, scooping up rings that brides choose for weddings and necklaces that husbands buy on credit for anniversaries.
They killed Mr. Abed’s sons, who had been tending the shop.
“I lost my sons, I lost all my money,” Mr. Abed, 55, said. “I cannot give a word for what’s happened.”
More than 500 Chinese and foreigners packed “Freud and Asia,” the 100th anniversary meeting of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Beijing last year,
reflecting growing interest in psychoanalysis in a country some say is suffering high levels of repressed trauma — and ripe for change.
For decades after the 1949 revolution, the Communist Party banned psychoanalysis as bourgeois superstition.
Sports and revolution ardor were recommended for mental health.
24 January 2011.
Everyone knows what a disaster the foreclosure “process” has been in the US,
with banks throwing people out of homes to which they have clearer legal title than the banks.
Unfortunately, the situation isn’t much better in other countries.
Among them is Spain, which has experienced a housing bubble — largely financed by German and British money — and now bust,
