Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Bank Holiday and Creditors Add to Crisis in Argentina "Government officials . . . said they were forced to act because there was no longer enough money in the banking system to meet obligations. But the drastic measure also appears to reflect the government's growing anxiety at its inability to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that would inject up to $20 billion in new funds into the economy." " . . . 'we run the risk of having the entire system explode' unless the monetary fund and other foreign creditors relented on the issue of provincial spending. 'The crisis affects the entire country and above all the public sector . . . It isn't that a lot is being spent in the provinces, but because people have stopped paying taxes as a result of the crisis. The governors are doing what they can.'" " . . . Mr. Duhalde's government was proposing legislation that would forcibly convert bank deposits into long-term bonds." 4:17:58 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Fictions About the Failure at Camp David "But the measure of Israel's concessions ought not be how far it has moved from its own starting point; it must be how far it has moved toward a fair solution." 4:10:36 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Ending the Death Dance "ere is the essential point: The Palestinian mainstream learned via Oslo that its cease- fire would not produce a fair solution in the form of sovereign and equal states, and that its real interests had been sacrificed on the altar of geopolitics. In effect, negotiations would be bargains reflecting the realities of power and control rather than either a pathway to some mutually acceptable form of parallel states or what many Palestinians had expected--namely, resolution by reference to international law. It is important to appreciate that on virtually every issue in contention, the Palestinians have international law on their side, including the Israeli duty to withdraw from land taken during a war, the illegality of the settlements under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the right of refugees to a safe return to the country that wrongfully expelled them and the generalized support for a Jerusalem that belongs to everyone and no one." 4:09:17 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Once Again, Japan's Fix Is Short " . . . the government's apparent preference for a soft short-term landing makes a mockery of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's claim that he will spare no sacred cows in overhauling the economy. In fact, the continuing mountain of bad bank loans, coupled with the country's weak growth and an accelerating decline in prices, has analysts asking whether, after a decade of policy Band-Aids, Japan can keep riding this economic roller coaster without losing control." "The problems are huge, Mr. Kanno and others say, and they need to be tackled now. Prices have fallen for three years in the worst bout of deflation since the Great Depression. Profits have eroded, and companies are having a harder time repaying their debts, swelling the amount of nonperforming loans held by the banks. To keep up, companies are cutting borrowing, wages and jobs, and that depresses spending." "A host of other issues also loom large, including how to deal with an aging society and pension shortfalls." "'Policy-making over the past decade . . . has been all about system preservation and refusal to face up to the scale of the problems, which seems to be where we are currently heading.'" 2:57:04 PM  Google It!  comment  []

What say ye, Fukuyama? "The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn." "But it isn't just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw 'European culture' as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open- ended 'tolerance' while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions." "There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?" "Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet." 2:45:12 PM  Google It!  comment  []