If Egypt’s turmoil continues much longer, the country may not have enough currency reserves to avoid a long term financial crisis.
Currency traders said on Monday investors have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country since the start of the protests last week.
Banks are still closed throughout Egypt and markets are suspended.
Many fear that once they open, additional millions of dollars will be withdrawn immediately.
An army tank stands guard at the port of Alexandria to make sure no one gets in.
The bigger problem is that next to nothing is going out.
For days now, containers arriving on ships have been stacking up at Egypt’s largest port, shipping company employees and truck drivers here said.
With distribution networks barely functioning and the Internet down since Thursday night,
much of business in Egypt has nearly ground to a halt.
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,
Countries in Europe are tightening their budgets and imposing austerity measures.
But Louis Gallois, who runs the largest European aerospace and military contractor, is not worried.
He is banking on emerging markets like China to help fill in any of the gaps left by the Continent’s tighter spending.
Gallois, the chief executive of European Aeronautic Defense and Space, the parent company of Airbus, said
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.
In China and Taiwan, regulators are imposing fresh restrictions on stock market investments by foreigners.
In Brazil, officials have twice raised taxes on foreign investors.
Even in South Korea, pressure is building on the government to take similar steps.
An increasing number of emerging markets powers have either imposed curbs or are in the process of doing so
to slow the torrent of hot money into their markets.
Credit card scams and fraud have become widespread and common with the use the internet where credit cards are used for transactions and payments everyday.
Fraudsters do everything from stealing credit cards to stealing entire identities to create new credit card accounts and create false payment pages online to capture credit card details – and then go in for the loot.
In the UK alone, fraud was estimated at US$800 million in 2006.
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.
