This past summer brought heady days for China’s state-controlled banks.
In July, the Agricultural Bank of China made its stock market debut, bringing in $22 billion for the largest public offering ever.
A sister government-run bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has had one of the highest stock market values of any bank in the world.
But the windfalls have created an unusual problem for China: white-collar unrest.
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch.
The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.
Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
In a new report, Morgan Stanley analyst Arnaud Marès argues that the sovereign debt crisis is not confined to Europe.
“It is a global crisis,” he writes, “and it is far from over.”
The report argues that standard debt/GDP ratios are misleading
A gauge of German investor sentiment fell more than expected this month,
while industrial production in the euro zone was flat in July, according to recent reports that reinforced perceptions that
the region’s economic recovery had peaked well before output recovered to precrisis levels.
The ZEW index of economic expectations, a poll of 277 financial market analysts conducted by the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany,
The European Union agreed Thursday to sign a sweeping new free trade agreement with South Korea —
its first with an Asian trade partner —
after Italy removed objections that had threatened to block the deal.
Politicians and officials welcomed the announcement as an important signal for free trade and
evidence that protectionist pressures are being resisted, despite the uncertainty in the global economy.
15 September 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
Even before coming aboard here at EconomyWatch, we have long argued that one of the major aspects of the American crisis was the intellectual emptiness of those vaunted centers of higher learning and research.
And as the US lurches from one clearly weak or bad “solution” to another in trying to get itself out of its mess,
13 September 2010. By David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
The tiny West African nation of Benin has been a rare success story in a continent not full of them.
It has long taken pride in its domestication of political life:
· an absence of military in the streets,
· a Parliament not in the pocket of the president, and
For more than a decade, Beijing has kept the value of the renminbi, also known as the yuan, more or less constant to the dollar,
a strategy that critics say increases the price of American exports to China and fuels the rapidly growing trade deficit with Beijing.
Lost in the noise, however, is the question of whether de-linkage would actually have any effect on the trade deficit.
On this, the United States’ 40-year history of pressuring Japan to let the yen appreciate against the dollar is instructive.
Nearly a decade ago, when budget deficits ballooned in the United States,
it was widely said that Washington — like Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” — “depended on the kindness of strangers.”
In Washington’s case, foreigners — mostly foreign governments — stepped in to buy most of the new Treasury securities being issued.
Budget deficits have ballooned again, but the story is different this time.
