Mark Blyth and Stephen Kinsella, guest blogger
The latest Euro crisis summit was different from the 19 others that preceded it in one very important respect: The PR department of the EU played this one very well. Rather than hopes being raised only to be dashed, this time they were dashed before the summit only to be raised after it ended.
And yet hopes are now slowly deflating once again, even as the Eurogroup works out the final details.
Mark Blyth and Stephen Kinsella, guest blogger
The latest Euro crisis summit was different from the 19 others that preceded it in one very important respect: The PR department of the EU played this one very well. Rather than hopes being raised only to be dashed, this time they were dashed before the summit only to be raised after it ended.
And yet hopes are now slowly deflating once again, even as the Eurogroup works out the final details.
It was lucky the Olympics opening ceremony was not washed out by rain, because heavy rain, floods, heatwaves and droughts are among extreme weather events on the rise this year.
Last Friday night’s opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London was widely acclaimed for its spectacular display. But besides the brilliant design and smooth implementation, another factor played an important role, and that is luck.
In mid-July, I participated as a keynote speaker at University of Sydney’s 2012 Research Symposium on Soil Security.
A major topic at the Symposium was carbon farming, which is a payment scheme that allows farmers and land managers to earn credits by storing carbon or reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the land. These credits can then be sold to pay for the various carbon storing activities.
Until recently Spain has been a quiet country known for a successful economic and political transition. In 1977, the entire political spectrum, from the hard right to the communists, signed a compact that sealed the terms of the country’s political and economic liberalization. This was followed by a massive transformation of Franco’s economic legacy during the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, the developmentalist industrialization drive that marked Spain’s postwar period made room for an economic model that aimed to increase competitiveness. It did so by targeting the consolidation and internationalization of the country’s financial, energy and construction sectors. As a result, in the eyes of many, Spain emerged as a European “tiger” economy.
A major weakness haunted Spain’s success, though: permanent double-digit unemployment levels. After a short respite given by German banks inflating Spain’s enormous construction bubble, the specter of unemployment would soon come to question the very bases of the post-Franco settlement.
Last week, in a CNBC interview, Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, said that America should separate investment banking from commercial banking. This separation, of course, was the prime purpose of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, a piece of legislation that Mr. Weill and other bankers had successfully watered down, with Alan Greenspan’s support, before Mr. Weill helped engineer its official demise in 1999. Now, Mr. Weill, the creator of what was once the largest financial conglomerate in the world, suggests that Citigroup and others should be broken up. Banks can no longer “be too big to fail,” he told CNBC.
But what was most eye-catching was Mr. Weill’s claim that the conglomerate model “was right for that time.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Stephany Griffith-Jones and Dirk Willem te Velde, guest blogger
The global financial crisis as well as food and fuel price increases have had a great effect on developing countries. Even though there is a common perception that poor countries were relatively unaffected by the 2008-2010 financial crisis, we estimate that sub- Saharan Africa lost around 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (compared with forecasts prior to the onset of the crisis). Contrary to perceptions, sub-Saharan Africa is a net oil importer (although there are of course some major exporters), and small and vulnerable countries (as a group) are net food importers, so high and vulnerable food and oil prices have very negative effects.
C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
Once again food prices have reached exorbitant levels in world trade, surpassing previous peaks and creating fears of another major global food crisis of massive proportions. What is particularly shocking this time around is how little has been learned from the last crisis just a few years ago, and how criminally slow the international community and national governments have been to put in place measures that would prevent a recurrence of these crazy fluctuations in prices.
It is not just that public memory is short – the more worrying feature is the denial on the part of policy makers about at least some of the important factors that have caused these dramatic price fluctuations; and the associated and continued refusal to take measures that will address the problem. As the last round of food crisis builds up once again and threatens the lives and material conditions of millions of people across the world, it is imperative to take a close and hard look at the evidence on global food prices and their determinants.
One major problem that prevents clarity of understanding on this matter is the persistent belief that prices in global food markets are still fundamentally determined by changes in real demand and supply…..
Developing countries are now facing an economic slowdown resulting from the Eurozone crisis, with a deterioration in GDP growth, exports and lending conditions.
Developing countries are increasingly being adversely affected by the economic recession in Europe and the slowdown in the United States.
The hope that major emerging economies like China, India and Brazil would continue to have robust growth, de-coupling from Western economies and becoming an alternative engine of global growth has been dashed by recent data showing that they are themselves weakening.
Through much of 2010 and 2011 many of us watched the unfolding “currency war.” The currency war construct came into vogue after Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega began to complain openly in 2010 about the pressures placed on his economy and currency (and that of other rapidly-growing developing countries) by the cheap credit made available by the US Federal Reserve and other wealthy country central banks. Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, joined the rhetorical fray later in 2012 by calling US President Obama and European leaders on the carpet for what she termed the “monetary tsunami” of hot money coming from rich countries.