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It’s amazing how quickly things can return to normal. You wouldn’t know it from watching CNN, but big segments of life in Haiti, including in the capital, Port au Prince, which suffered the greatest damage, have returned to what would have been considered normal in the days and months before the quake. There is plenty of destruction still evident, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of people living in tents or under blue plastic tarpaulins throughout the city and surrounding areas. But shops and restaurants and gas stations are open, petty street commerce has resumed, and children in clean, if faded, uniforms walk to and from school. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
charity,
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Haiti,
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IMF,
infrastructure,
Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission,
Paul Collier,
textile,
World Bank
Attentive and loyal readers of this blog will recall that I wrote, almost exactly a year ago, about China’s proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with the special drawing right (SDR), a unit of account used by the IMF, which is based on a weighted basket of currencies that includes the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the pound. I wrote then that this proposal had virtually no chance of being adopted, one reason being that the Europeans would be loath to abandon their new currency, which already accounted for a growing share of world reserves, in favor of a faceless accounting unit. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Angela Merkel,
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Bulgaria,
dollar,
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Greece,
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IMF,
Ireland,
Portugal,
reserve currency,
Romania,
SDR,
Spain
