He has threatened to veto any new budget that does not at least freeze spending,
European Union Leaders Gather in Brussels Over Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Europeans who are attached to the European Union are now in a minority.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said they felt little or no attachment, up seven percentage points since 2010. In Britain, only 27 percent felt attached to the union.
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Ahead of this week’s negotiations, at least seven countries, mostly those that contribute more to Europe’s coffers than they get back in farm subsidies and other payments, have already warned that they may veto a budget that does not give them a better deal. Among these is Austria, where, according to Mr. Ehrenhauser, who sits on the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, “there is a critical mass building against the European Union.”
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Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views
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Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
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For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
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Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
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Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
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Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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The Greek package: Eurozone rescue or seeds of an unravelled monetary union? | vox - 0 views
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The plan will not work.
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The IMF has the option of suspending its disbursements and forcing a default, as it did with Argentina.
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Once the markets realise this, they will further raise the interest that they request to roll over the maturing debt or simply refuse to refinance the debt.
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Wonkbook: Should high schoolers be reading Executive Order 13423? - geneell@gmail.com -... - 0 views
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More than 25% of U.S. technology companies have at least one foreign-born founder, a majority of Silicon Valley startups have a foreign-born founder, and 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by an immigrant or first-generation American.”
Eurozone: Looking for growth | vox - 0 views
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Empirical evidence suggests deleveraging episodes accompanied by a housing crisis will take on average five and a half years across high-income OECD countries (or seven years when accompanied by a banking crisis (Aspachs-Bracon et al. 2011, IMF 2012).
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Little resolution of banking-sector difficulties in the Eurozone suggests that deleveraging and credit will probably remain slow and impaired for much longer than previously thought. Recoveries that happen without credit are, on average, a third longer than recovery episodes with credit (Darvas 2013).
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Damages to trend growth are notoriously difficult to assess,
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George Soros: how to save the EU from the euro crisis - the speech in full | Business |... - 0 views
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The crisis has also transformed the European Union into something radically different from what was originally intended. The EU was meant to be a voluntary association of equal states but the crisis has turned it into a hierarchy with Germany and other creditors in charge and the heavily indebted countries relegated to second-class status. While in theory Germany cannot dictate policy, in practice no policy can be proposed without obtaining Germany's permission first.
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Italy now has a majority opposed to the euro and the trend is likely to grow. There is now a real danger that the euro crisis may end up destroying the European Union.
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The answer to the first question is extremely complicated because the euro crisis is extremely complex. It has both a political and a financial dimension. And the financial dimension can be divided into at least three components: a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis, as well as divergences in competitiveness
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What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Walking around town, my friend and I had noticed that almost every home had a pile of coal outside, soft dark chunks that people shoveled into stoves for cooking and heating. Thousands upon thousands of coal fires were loading the air with tiny dots of soot. Scientists have taken to calling these dots “black carbon,” and have steadily ratcheted up their assessments of its harm. In March, for instance, a research team led by a Mumbai environmental group estimated that black carbon and other particulate matter from India’s coal-fired power plants cause about 100,000 deaths a year.
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A 31-scientist team from nine nations released a comprehensive, four-year assessment in January arguing that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the little black specks I found on my glasses and clothes have roughly two-thirds the impact of carbon dioxide.
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The rule of thumb is that if a well leaks more than about 3 percent” of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective,
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Euro Zone Interest Rate Remains Unchanged - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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But some analysts warn that the calm could prove temporary because the underlying causes of the crisis remain: too much debt and poorly performing national economies. “The E.C.B. has been very active since Mr. Draghi has been president, and this has been a major factor contributing to stabilize financial markets and thereby avoid much worse outcomes for the euro zone,” Marie Diron, an economist who advises the consulting firm Ernst & Young, said in a note.
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“But the E.C.B. is not the sole actor and cannot save the euro on its own,” Ms. Diron said. “Ultimately the sustainability of the euro zone is down to structural changes at the country and European levels that are beyond the E.C.B.’s remit.”
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Banks in the euro zone can borrow unlimited funds from the E.C.B. at the benchmark rate, provided they post collateral. But banks are not obligated to pass that rate on to their customers and might not do so in countries like Spain where banks are already struggling with large numbers of bad loans.
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PORTFOLIO.HU | Blanchard: Eurozone integration needs to go forward or go back, but it c... - 0 views
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And, while lower investment since the beginning of the crisis has led to a smaller capital stock, again the effect appears quantitatively small. It is also difficult to see why the crisis would have led to a large decrease in total factor productivity. This being said, I would have expected a large output gap to lead to more downward pressure on inflation than we have seen. I see the fact that inflation is roughly stable is a puzzle. We are doing more research on this issue at the IMF.
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O.B.:There is no question internal devaluations are tougher to achieve than when you can adjust the nominal exchange rate. That’s well understood. A number of European countries have a competitiveness problem, which shows up in a large current account deficit.
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olve it. And there is no alternative for them than to become more competitive, to decrease the real exchange rate. Is it happening? I think it’s starting to happen, but it’s happening slowly, and it’s going to take a long time.
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"A Centerless Euro Cannot Hold" by Kenneth Rogoff | Project Syndicate - 0 views
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The bad news is that it has become increasingly clear that, at least for large countries, currency areas will be highly unstable unless they follow national borders.
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With youth unemployment touching 50% in eurozone countries such as Spain and Greece, is a generation being sacrificed for the sake of a single currency that encompasses too diverse a group of countries to be sustainable?
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What of Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell’s famous 1961 conjecture that national and currency borders need not significantly overlap? In his provocative American Economic Review paper “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas,” Mundell argued that as long as workers could move within a currency region to where the jobs were, the region could afford to forgo the equilibrating mechanism of exchange-rate adjustment.
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German and French banks call the shots - European, Business - Independent.ie - 0 views
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German and French banks call the shots Print Email NormalLargeExtra Large ShareNew 0 0 Also in European Debt crisis: European shares edge lower and growth worries persist Bank of England's Tucker 'wasn't encouraged to lean on Barclays' Draghi keeps door open to further interest rate cuts Marks and Spencers sales hit by summer deluge Spain's debt tops 7pc danger level as Madrid gets more time European Home "Shocking" 2012 HoroscopeWhat Does 2012 Have In Store For You? Shockingly Accurate. See Free!www.PremiumAstrology.comExpat Health InsuranceQuick, Compare, Trusted Website Expatriate Health Insurance Quoteswww.ExpatFinder.com/Instant-Quoteshttp://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=BMEejVeb8T8fDKoSG_QaAhrTCB-q_1OYBmoqphxvAjbcB0NkREAMYAyDgw6kIKAU4AFD4gumFAmCpsL6AzAGgAairsfEDsgESd3d3LmluZGVwZW5kZW50LmllyAEB2gFfaHR0cDovL3d3dy5pbmRlcGVuZGVudC5pZS9idXNpbmVzcy9ldXJvcGVhbi9nZX
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d, for reasons best
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known to itself, the ECB -- in clear contravention of both previous market precedent and financial logic -- has insisted that the senior bondholders be repaid in full and has lent the Irish banks, institutions which it must have known were hopelessly insolvent, €70bn to do so.
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No ordinary recession: There is much to fear beyond fear itself | vox - 0 views
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Richard Koo (2003) coined the term “balance sheet recession” to characterise the endless travail of Japan following the collapse of its real estate and stock market bubbles in 1990. The Japanese government did not act to repair the balance sheets of the private sector following the crash. Instead, it chose a policy of keeping bank rate near zero so as to reduce deposit rates and let the banks earn their way back into solvency. At the same time it supported the real sector by repeated large doses of Keynesian deficit spending. It took a decade and a half for these policies to bring the Japanese economy back to reasonable health.
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At the time, a majority of forecasts predicted that the economy would slip back into depression once defence expenditures were terminated and the armed forces demobilised. The forecasts were wrong. This famous postwar “forecasting debacle” demonstrated how simple income-expenditure reasoning, ignoring the state of balance sheets, can lead one completely astray.
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The lesson to be drawn from these two cases is that deficit spending will be absorbed into the financial sinkholes in private sector balance sheets and will not become effective until those holes have been filled.
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Euro crisis deepens as time starts to run out for Spain's banks and regions | Business ... - 0 views
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But the shortcomings of the agreement have once again undermined renewed confidence in the eurozone and sent the bond yields of several countries higher, including Spain and Italy.
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The Spanish government said a predicted rise in GDP next year of 0.4% had proved optimistic, and the economy would suffer another year of recession.
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Regional governments deliver the key parts of the welfare state, including health, education and social services.
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Seven ways to clean up a banking stench | Martin Wolf, Financial Times | Commentary | B... - 0 views
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As Per Kurowski, a former executive director of the World Bank, reminds me regularly, crises occur when what was thought to be low risk turns out to be very high risk.
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Not least, I would do everything I can to eliminate the idea that the state stands behind investment banking. That is an insane idea.
IMF's Blanchard: Global Economy Gripped By Meta-Uncertainty - WSJ.com - 0 views
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In 2008-09, there was a collapse of global trade. We were all very surprised. Output was not doing well, but the collapse in global trade was enormous. We realized at the time that the elasticity of trade with respect to global output was not 1, as you might think, but more like 3 to 4. So this explained it. And then it recovered like crazy.
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This is still true. If global output goes down by 1%, global trade goes down by 3% to 4%.
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What Europe needs to do:
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Worried Banks Pose Obstacle to Forming Financial Union - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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French loans to Spanish banks plunged 34 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 compared with the previous quarter, according to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements.
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For Italian banks, French bankers cut their exposure by 16 percent. German banks have also been increasingly wary of their Italian and Spanish peers, reducing lending to them by about 19 percent last year
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In the last six months, as fears about Spain and Greece have intensified, Spanish and Italian banks have been by far the biggest users of the European Central Bank’s program of cut-rate, three-year loans to banks that cannot find money elsewhere.
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Op-ed: The End of the Euro: A Survivor's Guide - 0 views
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Ms. Lagarde's empathy is wearing thin and this is unfortunate—particularly as the Greek failure mostly demonstrates how wrong a single currency is for Europe.
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The Greek backlash reflects the enormous pain and difficulty that comes with trying to arrange "internal devaluations" (a euphemism for big wage and spending cuts) in order to restore competitiveness and repay an excessive debt level.
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During the next stage of the crisis, Europe's electorate will be rudely awakened to the large financial risks which have been foisted upon them in failed attempts to keep the single currency alive. When Greece quits the euro, its government will default on approximately 121 billion euros of debt to official creditors and about 27 billion euros owed to the IMF.
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Statistics in Africa: Making Africa count | The Economist - 0 views
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IN 2013 Nigeria’s GDP could increase by 40%, which would be impressive even by Africa’s recent bouncy growth standards. The rise will come not from a surge in economic activity but because the country is rejigging the way it calculates its accounts.
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But the new figures may owe as much to political calculation as to hard-nosed statisticians
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Nigeria’s real GDP is based on 1990 prices. It plans to update them to ones from 2008. Ghana did the same in 2010, revising its base year from 1996 to 2006. Its GDP shot up by 60%, propelling it overnight from being a poor to middle-income country, defined by the IMF as having a GDP per person of at least $1,026 a year.
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