On a day which sees yet more evidence that the US economy may in fact be slowing down, and when news from the courts only serves to highlight the continuing precarity of the growth and stability pact, the FT runs a story about how a group of prominent Italian economists are suggesting that the budget measures adopted last week under heavy EU pressure may only consists of a batch of one-off measures that disguise the deteriorating underlying state of Italy’s public finances.
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Author Archives: Edward Hugh
The Broader the Band
Hi everyone. I’m back from holidays, work and stuff like that. Well, now we know what all that amazing broadband in South Korea is being used for. What is rather less well known is that whilst South Koreans are apparently happily downloading pirated movies they are quietly enduring a government inspired block on a big part of blogland. So the PRC isn’t by a long way the only state which practices blocking!! Rebecca McKinnon reports that her Nkzone site, which ironically is to raise peoples awareness about the conditions of life in North Korea, is in fact subject to blocking in the South. Even the popular South Korea expat blog The Marmots Hole seems to have to be constantly on the move to avoid the block.
Festive Spirits?
Well even though today is a holiday in many EU states, there is nothing particulary festive about the atmosphere. All eyes are on the commodity markets to see what is going to happen to oil prices. The consequences of a flawed Iraq play are gradually coming to be recognised, and even the ridiculous demise of a ‘restyled’ Berlusconi doesn’t seem to offer the entertainment value it once might have.
Go on David, tell me, I’m being too gloomy!
We have reached a turning-point in international politics as well as in Iraq. President George W. Bush is widely seen to have gambled on Iraq and lost. The impact of that loss goes well beyond Iraq. The US has not been defeated in battle and is unlikely to be so but it can no longer impose its will on Iraq because it lacks the moral authority to do so.
Lawrence Freedman, Financial Times
Overproduction Crisis in Brussels
This wouldn’t be the first time. Now, however, it’s not milk or potatoes that are at issue, but words.
An acute difficulty of excess verbiage has lead Neil kinnock to crack down and order that in future no Commission report should be more than 15 pages long, except in undefined rare circumstances. This compares with the present average of length of 32.
The reason for this change unfortunately is not the arrival of sound sense, but rather that of 10 new members.
“Officials at the European Commission produce a mountain of jargon-laden reports every year, some of them incomprehensible in any language.”
I’m not sure if verbal apoplexy is a fatal condition, or merely chronic: I shall have to check.
Be Careful When You Choose Your Password
I have no comment on this extremely preoccupying situation except to advise that you choose your passwords very carefully indeed:
“CBS reported on Thursday that Berg was questioned by FBI agents who discovered he had been interviewed before because a computer password he used in college had turned up in the possession of accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zaccarias Moussaoui.”
Equally preoccupying is the question I feel now compelled to ask myself: have these people gone completely mad?
“NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) – U.S. forces intensified their war against Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Friday, for the first time sending tanks into Najaf’s vast cemetery to blast guerrilla positions among its tombs.”
If you want to know why I see it like this, Juan Cole – who knows a hell of a lot more than I do about Islamic customs – also puts it a hell of a lot better than I could: here, here, here.
“My own view is that Muqtada has now won politically and morally. He keeps throwing Abu Ghuraib in the faces of the Americans. He had his men take refuge in Najaf and Karbala because he knew only two outcomes were possible. Either the Americans would back off and cease trying to destroy him, out of fear of fighting in the holy cities and alienating the Shiites. Or they would come in after Muqtada and his militia, in which case the Americans would probably turn the Shiites in general against themselves. The latter is now happening.”
“I don’t care what Sufouk told them the Americans are most unwise to engage in major combat in Karbala so close to Husain’s tomb. They make themselves look like Yazid. If they, or whoever is reading this, don’t know who Yazid is, then they have no business being in Iraq, much less in Karbala.”
Also see this Washington Post article.
The people authorising all this would seem to have no values which they hold sacred, the astonishing thing is that they imagine others don’t either, and that them remaining in this ignorance will have no significant military and political consequences. Fear and respect are not the same thing at all. A war like the one we are supposed to be waging on terrorism will not be won through fear, only by our winning respect. At the moment all we are doing is putting up ‘own goals’ on the scoreboard.
I don’t know which makes me feel more afraid: seeing all this chaos unfolding before my eyes, or the thought that US electors might vote in November that this is a ‘just fine’ way of doing things.
Postcript: People often make the inevitable comparisons between what is happening now and the war in Vietnam. I may be corrected, but I never recall having the sense of ‘ethical anarchy’ during that war that I have now. Brutal and atrocious things may have happened then, but the sense of ‘out of controlness’ seems much greater now. Equally it seems to me to be one thing to appear to show contempt for the political ideology of another people and quite another to appear to reveal the same contempt for their most sacred religious beliefs.
Postscript 2: people may be right to say that this war was not about petroleum. But it is right there in the middle. And we have a global economy which is hanging precariously on a very thin thread which depends on every metre of advance – or retreat – made by those tanks.
Getting Worse Until Things Improve
The Financial Times reports today on Deutsche Telekom’s first quarter results. The expected fall in the domestic fixed-line business was compensated for by a 12 per cent rise in revenues on the part of T-Mobile. A big part of this increase is due to the fact that they added a record 1.2m net new mobile subscribers in the US. Also helpful was their strong UK showing where they are now challenging to take the number one slot.
The one blemish on the report card: Germany. The fixed line T-Com section saw a 6% decline in sales, whilst T-mobile was reported as showing a disappointing drop in margins, “ascribed to one-off effects, increased marketing spend and the feeble German economy”.
“James Golob, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said: “The mobile business accounts for nearly all of our medium-term earnings and sales growth forecasts – and, of that, half is related to the performance in the US.” The German mobile figures “raised concerns that the sudden drop in margins could represent a trend that could last for as long as the weakness in the German economy continues.””
Unfortunately, if I am right about the German economy, this means there could be a long, long wait ahead of us.
Something Is Worrying Me
Well clearly a lot of things are worrying me, many of them right now associated with the grizzly images of human suffering and degradation (both those which are intensely individual and those which are collective and for that seemingly more anonymous) which we cannot avoid contemplating day in day out. Against these images words seem powerless. All I am left with is silence.
So you will forgive me if in place of the big worries which we must all be feeling I share with you some seemingly more trivial ones. In this case the starting point would be an issue which has arisen about the state of the European biotechnology industry. Strange as it may seem, as well as struggling to get through the ‘hell’ that is today today, we could also usefully spare some time thinking about the ‘heaven’ of tomorrow: or what the future might be like when we eventually get there.
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More Than Meets The Eye
This may seem to be a story about goings-on in a far distant land, but then again some of the implications may arrive a lot nearer home than we may like to admit. Most of you will have noticed that in recent days the press has been full of material about a Japanese pensions scandal. Without getting bogged-down in the minutiae, the key point seems to be that various politicians haven’t exactly been paying their dues. Now where’s the big deal in this you might ask………. well the problem is that a not insignificant number of Japanese citzens already believed before the scandal broke that the fund wouldn’t live to see the day when current contributions could be recovered in the form of benefits.
Now they have simply discovered that many of those responsible for running the thing have also come to the same conclusion….
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Everything It Appears To Be?
The revelation yesterday that the EU was planning to offer to eliminate its agricultural export subsidies in an attempt to revive progress in the Doha world-trade round may not be all it appears to be. Astute readers of my post yesterday on China’s global impact may have noted the following:
“In the first place the Common Agricultural Policy, whose funds have long been directed to supporting farmers from prices which were considered to be too low, may find them increasingly committed towards protecting urban consumers from the consequences of world foodstuff prices which are considered to be too high. In the process the whole debate about farm subsidies may take a new and unexpected turn”.
Believe it or not I actually wrote this before the announcement. If this is right, the new and unexpected turn is not a matter of generousity, but of a changed reality (like half-empty grain silos across the planet). Cancelling subsidies may be no great sacrifice since there may not be too many to cancel: the CAP fund allocation can be eaten-up keeping the price of bread and other staples down.
All Along The Watchtower
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief”
Not in Namangan Viloyati (Uzbekistan) you’d have thought there wasn’t. But again I am obviously wrong. Man – sorry person – hole covers have been disappearing all over the Namangan region according to this link-up I’ve just discovered with the Argus.
The global watchtower at work again. If you want to know what globalisation 3.0 is all about, then here you have it. But I don’t know which of the two is the more symbolically significant detail: the scrap metal dirty dealings in Chust or the tooing-and-frowing of this little meme.