Friday, Jan 27th 2012
Concerns over Spain loom over EU summit
Open Europe notes:
“As European leaders meet today in Brussels, there is a growing fear that Spain is preparing to ask for a bailout even larger than the Greek rescue package. Officials in Madrid and Brussels have denied that a Spanish bailout is on the agenda for the summit, according [...]
The first decade of the 21st century has been a difficult one for the UN, as its credibility has taken a serious battering. Incidents such as the international furore provoked by the Volker report on the UN administration of the Iraq sanctions prior to the 2003 invasion, accusations of corruption against the previous UN Secretary [...]
It’s an old cliche that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity. In Haiti however, business and political leaders are not concerned with originality. The catastrophic earthquake was quick to be seen as an opportunity to rebuild the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, with the US thinktank the Heritage Foundation famously writing that [...]
Westland Row
The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom’s time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent [...]
Michael Burke, writing on Progressive Economy today draws our attention to an important debate about Ireland and the contrasting views from some economic heavyweights about whether or not ‘markets’ approve or disapprove of austerity measures. The point was raised by Paul Krugman in a recent blog post that while the Wall Street Journal praised Ireland’s [...]
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
and cannot come again.
I was brought up in the Seventies. Strong colours and oversized jumpers. These are my memories. The boundaries of my world were the Harmonstown road to the Santry river, the shops on Edenmore park, the old dump [...]
Multiplying your forecasting problem | Money Supply | FT.com
What do we know about the British authorities’ view of the multiplier?
In a nutshell, not very much. They are as equivocal about the fiscal multiplier as I am.
In the 2010 Budget, Treasury officials wrote, “with ongoing fiscal consolidation the government sector is expected to detract from growth”. [...]
The writing of history, and the reception of historical works, reveals quite a lot about the values of a given society. I have written before about the often explicit political character of historians’ interpretations of the French Revolution and this applies not only to the twentieth century but also to the period in which the [...]
The current violence errupting in the southern region of Kyrgyzstan is deeply troubling.
If we are to go by the news reports given by the BBC, the violence is the culmination of long standing ethnic tensions. If we are to believe The Economist’s recent article “Stalin’s Harvest” we are seeing the inevitable fruits of Stalin’s labour.
According [...]
Why is the EU is Willing to Provide a Bailout of Such Large Proportions? To Protect Its Banks.
According to a report from the Bank of International Settlements published yesterday evening, "French and German banks have lent nearly $1 trillion to the most troubled European countries and are more exposed to the debt crisis than the [...]
