Category: Globalisation

The Bear’s Lair: Oceans of liquidity

As many commentators have outlined, there is currently a very high level of liquidity in the world economy, with risk premiums for emerging market bonds at low levels and high foreign investment in many countries.  This can’t last, and serious fissures will open up when it changes.

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Monday, August 8, 2005 at 09:04 PM in Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  World Affairs
Comments (5) | Tell-a-Friend

CAFTA

The House is voting on this monstrous trade bill tonight. The unofficial tally is close, many of the political whores are still undecided. I called my rep (he is still siting on the fence) and told him to vote NO. There is still time to call your Rep: Call your rep. toll free TODAY at 877 762-8762. Faxes are probably better. Click here to look up your rep and get the fax numbers. E-mail can also be sent (click here for info).

American Patrol has more.

UPDATE

H. R. 3045 Vote: 217 Yea - 215 Nay

Posted by leslie on Wednesday, July 27, 2005 at 04:59 PM in Globalisation
Comments (19) | Tell-a-Friend

Outsourcing Glitch

I have followed the outsourcing controversy in America over the past year (from about the time campaigning for the election began). But it isn’t just an American issue, it is also a British issue.

So this story caught my eye. It appears some call centre employees in India sold bank details of a thousand account holders for a pittance (the story first appeared in the Sun). But this wasn’t the first. There have been other cases (and this may just be the tip of the iceberg).

Perhaps the Banks ought to have thought about it for a second before outsourcing sensitive data to nations that value crookedness and dishonesty.

In some of the debates here, interesting arguments have been advanced to account for dishonesty that seems endemic in much of Asia (but not just Asia). Our colleague John Ray once suggested that poverty explains it. I have always thought such arguments reflect poorly on Conservatives. If we reject arguments that poverty is what causes violent crime, why do we accept the argument that poverty causes dishonesty?

Posted by Phil Peterson on Friday, June 24, 2005 at 05:04 PM in Globalisation
Comments (3) | Tell-a-Friend

The Bear’s Lair: Three billion new friends

“Three billion new capitalists,” a new book by Clyde Prestowitz, head of the Economic Strategy Institute, highlights the potential rewards and dangers to the U.S. economy inherent in the full emergence of India and China’s 2.5 billion people (and the former Soviet bloc’s 500 million) onto the world’s economic stage. Old patterns are dissolving, old rules are no longer valid, but the new patterns and new rules to deal with them remain shrouded in mist.

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Monday, June 13, 2005 at 09:00 AM in Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  U.S. Politics
Comments (4) | Tell-a-Friend

The Bear’s Lair: The African problem

Professor George Ayittey of American University presented his new book “Africa Unchained” at Washington’s Cato Institute last week, which demonstrates that Africa’s problems primarily result from that continent’s appalling political leadership. This view hasn’t been widely enough vented, and may provide the germ of a solution.  I would however add a rider: the West is at least equally responsible for the mess that is Africa, and the West’s help will be needed to reform it.

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Monday, May 16, 2005 at 11:24 AM in Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  World Affairs
Comments (22) | Tell-a-Friend

The Bear’s Lair: Lashed by dragon tails

In ancient Chinese mythology, dragons live in the center of the earth, and when they awaken and shake their tails, earthquakes result.  The Chinese economic dragon has very clearly awakened; dealing with the lashings of its tail will be no mean feat.

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Monday, April 25, 2005 at 10:51 AM in Business & Industry,  Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  History,  U.S. Politics,  World Affairs
Comments (2) | Tell-a-Friend

Donald Rumsfeld: A Manager’s Life

We are told our governments rule with the consent of the governed.  Schoolchildren are taught this bromide, accompanied with words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. Yet, our lives are engineered by a class largely unknown to the public, a managerial class.  Their actions are not subject to oversight by the public, since they are not elected: they have few loyalties, other than to the international system which they manage; they despise superannuated bourgeois attachments to particularism, religion, ethnicity, or soil.

These managers are not unlike feudal princes, they sit at the top of powerful financial and military bureaucracies like NATO, the World Bank, The United States Federal Reserve System, and the W.T.O. And much like feudal princes they exchange fiefs and titles, and marry among their class, for example a director of the World Bank may be tomorrow’s U.S. Secretary of Defense, or NATO ambassador. They often oppose each other, but never the managerial system itself.

Consider the life of Donald Rumsfeld, a lord in the managerial class:

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Wednesday, April 20, 2005 at 03:27 PM in Globalisation
Comments (39) | Tell-a-Friend

The Agenda of the Ruling Class

Despite the public’s wish for an end to migration to America, the transnational elites that rule the North American co-prosperity zone, formerly Canada, the United States, and Mexico are attempting to destroy the border entirely.

This is what “your” government is doing, el Stupido:

“... the co-chairs call for a loosely defined “border pass”  allowing all North American residents to freely cross internal boundaries.” .

Do we owe such a government our allegiance? Is this the same contract our founder’s signed 215 years ago? Don’t we have the right to abolish a rogue government, as Thomas Jefferson said?

Courtesy

VDARE

.

Posted by leslie on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 at 10:29 AM in Globalisation
Comments (2) | Tell-a-Friend

The Bear’s Lair: An agenda for Wolfowitz

(published by United Press International, March 21, 2005)

  If Paul Wolfowitz survives the inevitable sniping from Europeans to emerge as President of the World Bank, he will at least represent a different approach from outgoing president James Wolfensohn. It’s about time!

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Monday, March 21, 2005 at 05:38 PM in Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  U.S. Politics,  World Affairs
Comments (0) | Tell-a-Friend

Never Renounce Your Heritage

Stunningly obvious were Buckley’s criticisms in 1951 when

God and Man at Yale

was published. Yale being chartered in 1701 to further Christian civilization but by 1951 had degenerated into a platform for socialists and the confused – Buckley noted the obvious: the institution had lost its ‘reason for being.’

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 at 06:56 PM in Globalisation
Comments (8) | Tell-a-Friend

Who Burns First: England or U.S?

It’s an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won’t, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide.

Predictably, as Mr. Auster comments, Steyn entirely misdiagnoses the reasons for our decline; and there is disagreement on another matter: it is the U.S. which is doomed, Britain shall survive.

Here’s the case:

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Saturday, February 19, 2005 at 11:23 AM in Globalisation
Comments (34) | Tell-a-Friend

At War Against the Pirate Culture

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare,” said Geoffrey Chaucer.

An outburst by V.S. Naipaul has simmered in my thoughts ever since it was uttered. Naipaul is a sort common to Rome’s silver age, a man from the provinces who recognized the greatness of a decaying civilization, yet made the most of it: whereas it’s true sons merely piss it away.

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Thursday, February 17, 2005 at 09:11 PM in Globalisation
Comments (8) | Tell-a-Friend

A Plea: Build More Walls!

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.
-James Q. Wilson

Expressing smug satisfaction with the exalted state of Western society my friend proclaimed “and besides all they [foreigners] can do is imitate us. They can’t create anything.”  “Why yes”, I responded, “yet that’s just the point they, they solidify and conserve often at the expense of innovation. China has had great success using this paradigm.” I then asked him “if the West’s reserve of energy and ideas is depleting who benefits then?”

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 01:05 PM in Globalisation
Comments (2) | Tell-a-Friend

The Eleventh Caesar

Tremors, poor balance, rigidity are symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. While being only forty I suffer from them all, though I don’t have Parkinson’s; or maybe, the cause of Parkinson’s is extraordinary.  Perhaps Parkinson’s is caused by superannuation. Those afflicted cannot cope with social instability and they long for a social order long lost but forever referenced by a society unable to restore to itself a sense of purpose.

The 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, featuring T.S. Eliot and his composition

After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy

, were, perhaps, the last outburst of Western chauvinism expressed in an elite institution. In this lecture Eliot…

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 10:57 PM in Globalisation
Tell-a-Friend

The Pace Boys

The Great Depression caused my grandfather to move his family to southwest Missouri, a remote place. Since my father, the youngest of five children, was about twelve at that time he could never quite explain my grandfather’s reasoning. My father told me, he was struggling in Kansas City and thought rural life favorable, or so he speculated.

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Friday, February 4, 2005 at 02:51 PM in Globalisation
Tell-a-Friend

So she’s white and sweet and lives in Chateau Bastard … but is she a globalist?

Here’s to Madame Catherine Gachet, not only a beautiful woman but a maker of the intensely sweet and flowery, white wine of Barsac, in the Gironde … and a skilled marketeer.  For, Madame Gachet has identified her product’s unique selling point and it isn’t the suppleness and finish of a fruit drink.  Nope, it’s the eternal soul of French life: chic with a subtle hint of sexuality.

Unfortunately, it’s just not plain and self-abnegating enough for the French government.  Under the latter’s strict advertising codes for purveyors of France’s greatest technical triumph no joie de vivre may be associated with the pleasures of the vine - no beautiful people, no romance, no excitement, until recently not even a simple description of the product’s taste.  Health and Safety are everywhere, it seems, and set upon the great task of saving the hapless Frenchman from a bibulous end.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, February 3, 2005 at 08:00 PM in Globalisation
Comments (2) | Tell-a-Friend

The Bear’s Lair: The costs of Wilsonism

(to be published by United Press International, January 24, 2005)

Continued...

Posted by karlmagnus on Sunday, January 23, 2005 at 04:18 PM in Economics & Finance,  Globalisation,  U.S. Politics
Comments (3) | Tell-a-Friend

Oil for Food Scandal: Warring Business Interests

The ‘Oil for Food’ scandal has the US government-media complex buzzing. A senator just appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show announcing his interest in the scandal. Currently the primary focus is on Mr. Kofi Annan and his greedy son. Expect this to be an entertaining spectacle but the ‘Kofi Show’ is only a soap opera for the gullible.

Continued...

Posted by leslie on Thursday, December 2, 2004 at 02:36 PM in Globalisation
Tell-a-Friend