Welcome back!
I owe the title of this piece to John Hempton, an Australian who writes the excellent Bronte Capital blog , who told me that the number of visits to his site increased a hundredfold when in 2008 he published a piece with the title “Hookers that cost too much, flash German cars and insolvent banks: an introduction to Swedbank’s Baltic homeland.” It was a long and complex analysis of sovereign risk and bank insolvency in the Baltic States, and ultimately fascinating, but he probably wouldn’t have snagged more than 50 readers without that title. Let’s see if it works for me.
Several years ago I was talking business with a Frenchman in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the topic turned to the very visible Chinese presence in the city, where they were building a soccer stadium, among other projects. He was one of those expatriates who has lived in a place for years and years, and knows everyone and everything. The Malagasy people were getting fed up, he said, with the Chinese taking over every economic activity in sight. Even the local bar girls – and Madagascar has some stunningly beautiful women – were now facing stiff competition from Chinese hookers. I didn’t undertake my own investigation, but I am not surprised. The Chinese, and, to a lesser degree, other Asians, are everywhere on the continent, and the people are not happy about it. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Africa,
Angola,
Botswana,
China,
chinese,
Don Corleone,
Madagascar,
Malaysia,
Mozambique,
Nigeria,
prostitutes,
Sierra Leone,
South Korea,
stadium,
Sudan,
sugar,
Taiwan,
The Godfather,
the scramble for Africa
I’ve just returned from a few days in Sydney, Australia, where it is more or less the dead of winter, which means sunshine, highs in the upper 60s, and lows in the 50s. Not a snowplow in sight. Leaving aside the World Cup and Aussie Rules football and the odd murder and sex scandal, the main news story is the precipitous loss of confidence in Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader who became Prime Minister in 2007, soundly defeating John Howard and his center-right Liberal Party, who had been in power for the previous eleven years. Rudd, a former civil servant in the Foreign Office known mainly for his fluency in Mandarin Chinese and his geekish, technocratic look, was meant to be the antidote to Howard’s proud pro-Americanism and belligerent attitude towards darker-skinned folks seeking political asylum in the Land of Oz. Rudd was the new internationalist, prepared to identify Australia as an Asian country and to place Australia in the vanguard on such cutting global issues as climate change. Barely three years later, and with the next election no more than 10 months away, Rudd appears to be hanging on by his fingernails, facing his lowest poll ratings ever as well as grumblings within his own party that he might have to be replaced by another politician – Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for example – if Labor is to have any chance of staying in power. What went wrong? [click to continue…]
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Australia,
Bolivia,
Brazil,
China,
Iran,
Kevin Rudd,
Labor Party,
mining tax,
Rio Tinto,
sovereign risk,
Venezuela,
Wayne Swan,
Xstrata
The business elite and the political classes are overjoyed by President Obama’s program to double U.S. exports over the next five years. John Castellani, President of the Business Roundtable, says, “”Our member CEOs have long believed that to enhance economic growth and create more and better-paying U.S. jobs, business and government must work together to put domestic and international policies in place for workers and companies to compete in the global marketplace. The President is doing just that by mobilizing the government’s resources through the creation of his Export Promotion Cabinet and by promoting closer cooperation with the private sector through the new President’s Export Council, which will be led by two of our member CEOs, Jim McNerney, President and CEO of The Boeing Company, and Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox.” [click to continue…]
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Boeing,
Business Roundtable,
China,
currency manipulation,
EU Trade Commissioner,
Evan Bayh,
export initiative,
Obama,
President's Export Council
CNN reported yesterday that China may be on the verge of banning human consumption of dogs and cats and imposing fines of as much as 500,000 renminbi (about $73,000) on shops and restaurants that serve the meat and up to 15 days in jail for their customers. The ostensible reason is cruelty: the animals are treated horribly and confined in tiny cages in deplorable conditions. But this can’t be the real reason. Plenty of other animals are treated as badly, or worse. The life of a pig prior to slaughter is no picnic either. The real reason seems to be that given by a certain Professor Chang Jiwen of the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, who is one of the law’s top campaigners. “Cats and dogs are loyal friends to humans,” he said. “A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization.” [click to continue…]
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China,
democracy,
dog meat,
horse meat
When I see the decisions the U.S. Government, the European Union and others have recently taken with respect to international trade, I feel like the Claude Rains character in the classic film Casablanca, who says “I am shocked - Shocked! – to find gambling going on in this establishment,” just as one of the casino employees hands him his cut of the evening’s take.
Days after President Obama imposed a 35% duty on low-end tires imported from China comes the news that the European Union has just hit imports of steel pipe from China with a 40% anti-dumping tariff. This was ground-breaking in its own way. Normally, companies need to demonstrate lost sales attributable to the alleged dumping before their governments will raise duties, but in the words of Georg Berrisch of Covington & Burling, the law firm representing the European steel pipe producers, “The case shows that industries must not necessarily wait for injury to occur…to take measures against an onslaught of dumped Chinese imports.” This sounds very much like George W. Bush’s justification for invading Iraq. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
anti-dumping,
China,
G20,
no protectionism pledge,
Pittsburgh,
steel pipe,
tires
