Hillary "Internet Freedom" Clinton's WikiLeaks Issue

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/30/2010 12:02:00 AM
Face it: we all have issues. However, it seems Missus Clinton's foibles are more high-profile than those of the rest of us. Here's yet another case in point. Just a few months removed from making a grandiose speech on the virtues of "Internet freedom" [picture above] in the wake of those dastardly Chinese clamping down on Google's violation of Chinese censorship laws, there's now apparently an Americans exception reserved for WikiLeaks. Unless you've been hiding in a cave somewhere between the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, there has been a media firestorm over the leakage of an interesting set of State Department communications...
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Cancun Climate Conference: An Incremental Solution

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/29/2010 12:28:00 AM
[NOTE: I've been rather silent on environmental issues these past few weeks, so I hope this post and the one before it rectify this imbalance ahead of the Climate Change Conference in Cancun which starts later today.] While I remain ambivalent about the idea of civil disobedience as a spur to public acceptance of climate change as an important global policy issue, I am rather more upbeat about an article which just appeared in the LSE house journal Global Policy. Although my biases may be showing, I do believe it showcases some of the most cogent commentary on global policy issues you can find nowadays. That it's freely accessible...
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Al Gore, the Green Movement & Civil Disobedience

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 11/29/2010 12:02:00 AM
The FT's Simon Kuper is best known as a sportswriter for the Financial Times, but he often writes about much else. In a recent column, he spoke to the South African head of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, who draws a comparison between the green and civil rights movements. Aside from the former not really having a charismatic Martin Luther King-like figure--the just-divorced Al Gore not exempted--the green Naidoo also thinks MLK's strategy of civil disobedience should be followed to direct public attention to environmental causes:Kumi Naidoo, the South African head of Greenpeace International, interrupted Gore. That day Naidoo happened to be wearing a Martin Luther King T-shirt. He said that movements like King’s, or women’s suffrage, or anti-slavery, had succeeded only “when decent people put their lives on the line for the cause”. Naidoo confronted Gore: was he willing to be jailed or risk his life to fight climate change? “I haven’t been asked this question before,” Gore replied....
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Indecent Financial Proposal: IMF Lending to Ireland

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 11/28/2010 04:36:00 PM
No, no, I'm not talking about further dalliances by IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn with his underlings which have spawned a bestseller in France on his alleged penchant for indecent proposals. However, I am still talking about Europeans abusing power at the international lender of last resort. (Even with a rather timid redistribution of voting shares away from European countries to fast-growing Asian ones, the impression remains that the Fund is dominated by Western voices--especially since it's still customary that the Europeans get to choose its head and the Americans its first deputy managing director.) A...
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Shanghai Smog Syndrome and PRC Pollution

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/26/2010 12:23:00 AM
[NOTE: The photo is courtesy of my old classmate Richard who lives in Beijing but found himself in Shanghai during recent days.] Here's another all-too visible demonstration of the problem with Joshua Cooper Ramo's iteration of a "Beijing Consensus." According to Ramo back in 2004, environmental sustainability is one of the hallmarks of Chinese development. Aside from becoming the world's largest carbon emitter over the intervening years, China's problem with keeping its major cities liveable has taken many lumps. Beijing's famously bad air was dealt with by implementing fairly draconian measures like closing down adjacent...
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Tobin Tax Time? Thailand Thinks of Slapping 'Em

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 11/25/2010 12:04:00 AM
What a difference a decade makes! Just a little over ten years ago, Thailand and South Korea were at the IMF poorhouse after exhausting their foreign exchange reserves. Now featuring coffers full of foreign exchange after export-led recoveries in subsequent years, the real problem they face nowadays is coping with the American-led money-for-nothing barrage that threatens to overwhelm their financial systems with an unwelcome influx of hot money.So, we have Thailand reviving that IPE chestnut of an idea, the Tobin Tax. Nobel Laureate in Economics James Tobin once suggested that a nominal tax be applied to financial transactions to both generate revenue (for socially useful purposes, one would hope) and to throw sand in the wheels of international finance. There was much heated discussion here in London when Lord Turner and Gordon Brown voiced the possibility of implementing this tax. The City being Europe or, in a broader sense, the world's financial centre, nothing came of it....
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IIE's Williamson: There Is No 'Beijing Consensus'

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/25/2010 12:02:00 AM
Whether he's found the attention for doing so welcome or not, John Williamson should be familiar to all concerned as the fellow who coined the "Washington Consensus." Although he takes issue with those who identify it with the most extreme forms of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization instead of moderation he says he championed, the label has stuck for better or worse as consonant with neoliberal thought.Likewise, the "Beijing Consensus" is widely misunderstood. As Williamson correctly notes, no Chinese authors have claimed the term for themselves. Rather, it was an American journalist, Joshua Cooper Ramo, who came...
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The China vs Google Dust-Up, Live from London

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/24/2010 12:27:00 AM
On my walking route home from the LSE, I pass by the grandly named Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills on Victoria Street. Just this Monday, little did I know that China and the UK were conducting an "Internet Roundtable" inside. Naturally, the mention of China in the context of the Internet raises interesting questions. A few days ago, I discussed Google's new white paper where it argued that the "free flow of information" should become a free trade issue. (Our friends at the IELP offer more recent thoughts.) Let's just say I was not entirely convinced by Google.It appears the Chinese used this event here in London...
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Lobotomarkets, Korea and the US Dollar Edition

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/24/2010 12:10:00 AM
As 2008 demonstrated, there is little rhyme or reason to financial markets. Today, however, I must being your attention to an example of the seeming brainlessness of foreign exchange markets that defies explanation. Literally, forex is a lobotomarket. When a lobotomy is performed, you just don't know how the patient (victim?) will respond. In the current situation, the operation in question was the recent fatal attack by North Korea on South Korea. While certainly a headline-grabbing event, I am utterly bemused by the subsequent response from the foreign exchange market. In particular, the US dollar has rather inexplicably strengthened. Here is a typical explanation care of Reuters:The euro languished at two month lows early in Asia on Wednesday, threatening to deepen its losses, while the euro zone debt crisis and heightened tensions in the Korean Pennisular helped underpin the dollar.Longtime readers know that I am perma-bearish on the US dollar. Notably, there have been occasional...
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My Way or the Huawei: Security & Chinese Tech

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/23/2010 12:10:00 AM
Poor, poor Huawei. All it wants is to sell routers and other telecoms hardware in the West, but it keeps getting caught up in the great game of geopolitics between America and China. To make a long story short, the recurring theme is one of US regulators barring Huawei from doing business Stateside over purported security concerns. Not only does is deal in equipment crucial to the information backbone of the Internet, but more sinister motives are attributed to it being unable to fully disprove that its ownership includes Red Army interests. In an interesting twist to the IPE notion of "sovereignty at bay" which in its traditional...
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Churchill and 3M Famine Deaths in Bengal in 1943

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 11/23/2010 12:07:00 AM
It's the debate that just won't go away: being a wartime prime minister, was Winston Churchill culpable in the death of 3 million Bengali subjects of the British Empire in 1943? A new book by Madhusree Mukerjee suggests the answer is in the affirmative. TIME has a book review of Churchill's Secret War:In 1943, some 3 million brown-skinned subjects of the Raj died in the Bengal famine, one of history's worst. Mukerjee delves into official documents and oral accounts of survivors to paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia. And he did so with a churlishness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet.As Mukerjee's accounts...
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Ex-IMF Chief Economist: IMF HQ Should Be in PRC

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,,, at 11/22/2010 12:03:00 AM
Former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson should be familiar to readers of the fine Baseline Scenario blog which he writes together with James Kwak. While visiting the Bloomberg website, I came across a rather intriguing op-ed in which he discusses the Ireland crisis. Aside from the usual European political-economic gyrations to consider, he makes a seemingly off-the-wall suggestion that had me thinking: Given that they are the world's new moneybags compared to the hard-pressed Europeans and subprime-addled Americans, he believes the Chinese are well-placed bail out troubled Eurozone economies. What's more, he says doing so...
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Do You Want Fries With That US College Degree?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 11/22/2010 12:01:00 AM
You've got to hand it to our American friends when it comes to exporting thigh-slapping, mock-serious deadpan humour. Take their econocomedian of a finance minister Tim Geithner with his utterly riotous "Strong Dollar" slapstick routine. Or, if you prefer something more tragicomic, consider the "American Dream" of home ownership that led to the subprime crisis that's messed up the world economy in the process. (Home prices never fall continuously, right?) For kicks, you can also try that Horatio Alger-ish "Land of Opportunity" howler in the OECD country with the second lowest level of income mobility next to one where they...
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Spain's Too Big to Fail, But is It Too Big to Bail?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/19/2010 02:13:00 AM
Here's something to tide you over while we wait for the details of the impending EU-IMF bailout of Ireland. Dear readers, I point you in the direction of a series of videos the WSJ's Andy Jordan filmed on site in each of the embattled PIIGS countries--Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. (To rub it in perhaps, he even made a segment on the German paymasters.) Though Italy is thankfully a longer shot at the moment for feeding at the trough, prospects for Spain are troubling indeed. With unemployment hovering at the 20% mark due to a system that handicaps younger workers' ability to find employment (ditto for many other European countries), things aren't looking up on that front. If rethinking the employment and public benefits structure are crucial to Europe's fate going forward, then Spain is certainly in the frontline.Anyway, the other videos are well worth watching too if you want images to match to the news reports about the plight of peripheral European countri...
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Cam Ranh Bay, Now Open for Business

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/19/2010 12:05:00 AM
Here's another story that has failed to get much play in Western media for one reason or another. Being a Southeast Asia scholar, however, I believe that I should point out its implications. I probably needn't explain the importance of Cam Ranh Bay in the Asia-Pacific (above is a picture of it in its Soviet-era prime). This Vietnamese port has been a gateway to Indochina in particular and Southeast Asia in general for centuries. Very recently, the Vietnamese government declared that it would reopen Cam Ranh Bay for business to undertake ship repairs and other services to passing vessels--both commercial and military [1, 2,...
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Bernanke Happy-Slaps China on Global Imbalances

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/19/2010 12:03:00 AM
There's a new Bernanke speech that he will deliver tomorrow at a central banker's shindig in Frankfurt that's sure to garner a lot of comment as it focuses on very topical global economic imbalances. Bernanke is certainly no stranger to coining memorable phrases such as the "global saving glut," and he may have a brand new bag here with his idea of a "two-speed recovery." My summary?The US is pursuing appropriately accommodative monetary policies given its situation;Emerging economies complain about capital inflows negatively affecting their economies, but it's a natural manifestation of their positive return differentials and higher growth rates;Certain developing countries (that's you, China) exacerbate these inflows by intervening to keep their currency weak, making speculative monies enter in the expectation of future revaluation;Remedying global economic imbalances will be facilitated by crisis-hit developed economies running accommodative policies and fast-growing developing...
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Ratko Tales + IMF is America's Stooge, Kosovo Ed

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 11/19/2010 12:01:00 AM
Something that I enjoy at the LSE is attending presentations I know relatively little about. To paraphrase a certain song, I need to know a little bit about a lot of things lest I blog about the same topics over and over again. Variety is the spice of life. At LSE IDEAS, we have just held the well-received launch event of our sister Balkan International Affairs programme featuring Serbian Foreign Affairs Minister Vuk Jeremić and his Bulgarian counterpart Nickolay Evtimov Mladenov. This is a post in two parts:I. When I last wrote about Serbia in these parts, I was planning my adventure to aid Serbia's EU accession by going...
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