Sitting in the other day on a citizenship ceremony - a few dozen people from all round the world (Sierra Leone, Poland, Turkey, Bangladesh, Somalia, Cambodia, Nepal and the rest) becoming British citizens, with a fairly low level of ceremony. Holst on the dodgy CD player and the deputy mayor [...]
9:45:30 AM: Cool, it’s almost over and now the Wifi works #rp09
1:50:46 PM: Interesting talk about internet activism in the Middle East by an inspiring young woman - Esra’a Al Shafei of mideastyouth.com
1:54:44 PM: Esra’a Al Shafei the difference between digital activism in the East and in the West: here [...]
10:35:40 AM: Didn’t get much out of the German Privacy Commissioner Peter Schaar’s talk except for “well, there’s more problems than ideas to solve them.
1:39:45 PM: Really liked Ralf Bendrath’s talk about emerging democratic structures in social networks with particular reference to facebook. #rp09
1:42:47 PM: The follow-up chat at the [...]
12:19:18 PM: I’m far too tired, but in Berlin, trying to cope with 140 character posts… let’s hope the WiFi coverage at the conference will get better.
3:21:56 PM: This seriously feels like 300bps. John Kelly of the Berkman center held an interesting talk about link structures in different blogospheres.
3:24:01 PM: [...]
Well don’t come to this blog looking for good economic news at the moment, becuase quite frankly, at least as far as Europe is concerned, there isn’t any. Today we learn that Latvia’s economy is in freefall. The economy contracted 10.5 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the [...]
Exports from Germany fell back again in December after suffering a record fall in November. This only confirms the general impression that the German recession is steadily deepening. Sales abroad, adjusted for working days and seasonal changes, were 3.7 percent from November, (when they dropped 10.8 percent), and by 7.7% [...]
The French economy, which is Europe’s third largest, will slip into its first recession in 16 years in the first quarter of 2009 according to the Bank of France this morning. French gross domestic product will shrink 0.6 percent in the three months through March, following a 1.1 percent contraction [...]
“A significant amount, if not all, of the speculative attacks on the ruble are funded by the central bank itself,” said Vladimir Osakovsky, Moscow-based economist for UniCredit
The underlying dynamics of the current ruble devaluation are provoking more than a little consternation in Russia at the moment. In the forefront of [...]
Well it seems Guilio Tremonti was paying brinksmanship with someone last Friday, since according to Bloomberg this morning:
UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank, said institutional investors will buy its convertible bonds after its biggest investor, Fondazione CariVerona, said it wouldn’t subscribe to its share of the securities. Mediobanca SpA, UniCredit’s [...]
Some readers are asking whether issuing EU bonds is possible under the Maastricht Treaty. The answer would seem to be yes, under article 119. As follows:
Article 119
1. Where a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with difficulties as regards its balance of payments either as a [...]
“Has anyone else noticed that the current crisis sheds light on one of the great controversies of economic history?” Paul Krugman asked his readers back in Novermber last year. In fact on reading this I felt immediately filled with the urge to stand on my chair and shout out [...]
Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti is a strange and controversial figure.The peculiar phrase in the title to this post in fact came out of the very mouth of Tremonti himself, though they were addressed to an astounded, if now world famous, US economist, Nouriel Roubini, in front of an equally [...]
Well it’s pretty clear to me at least that there is now one, and only one, major and outsanding topic towering head and shoulders above all those other pressing and important problems those of us following the EU economies currently find lying in our macro-policy in-trays: the issue of wage [...]
This post is partly about Russia, partly about how to follow the present economic crisis on a day to day basis and partly methodological.
So Which Are The Worst Affected Countries In The Present Crisis?
Obviously the simple answer to this question is “all of them”, and in particular all those countries [...]
The German economy is about to suffer its deepest recession since World War II according to economics Minister Michael Glos speaking in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag due to be published tomorrow (Sunday). Glos said growth in Europe’s largest economy is now expected to drop by [...]
A senior official from Germany’s ministry of defense was in Tbilisi on Tuesday, meeting counterparts and doing the things that senior defense officials do, including a reception put on by the German embassy. According to one person present at the reception, during his brief remarks he said the Georgia was [...]
OK, so now here’s the chart you really need to see (below). The JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI hit 33.2 in December, a series record. More to the point you can get a comparison between what is happening now and the 2001 “recession lite” with only a swift glance, and, [...]
And lands in China.
Well China isn’t quite in Great Depression mode yet, but manufacturing activity - which forms the core of the Chinese economy and accounts for 43% of all activity - is already very close to a technical recession, and phew, it wasn’t very long [...]
Well, maybe. I’m in a hopeful mood today.
A tree fungus could provide green fuel that can be pumped directly into tanks, scientists say. The organism, found in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces a mixture of chemicals that is remarkably similar to diesel.
“This is the only organism [...]
“The Kazakh government is ready to step in,” Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Masimov said this morning in a telephone interview with Bloomberg “The Kazakh banking system with the support of the government and central bank will fulfill all obligations to international investors…..We have our own specific plan to survive [...]
Well taking my cue from the worthy and well thumbed play-book of the Brothers Coen, I thought I’d follow up on my long and indigestibly serious analysis of the plight of the Hungarian economy, with something in rather lighter vein. The Miss Iceland Look-alike show is not the only talent [...]
“We do not have a federal budget, so the idea that we could do the same as what is done on the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t fit with the political structure of Europe,”
Jean-Claude Trichet, commenting last week on the Eupean “summit” in Paris last Saturday“If you concentrate [...]
Bad news for the old crook.
Through his family-controlled Fininvest empire, Berlusconi runs Mediaset, by far the biggest commercial TV broadcaster in Italy. His empire also runs the biggest national advertiser, the biggest publisher and much else. Given Italy’s long tradition of political interference with public sector broadcasting, this means [...]
In honor of the wedding…
Kind of unfair she’s usually “former model Carla Bruni”.
Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits - this one in particular - persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968), which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said [...]
British urban-exploration geeks report on their tour of a wealth of cold-war and Nazi bunkers in the former East Germany back in 2003. Thrilling and uncomfortable stuff—they were the first to revisit the ultimate DDR fortress, the bunker that was built as an alternate seat of government for Erich [...]
If you’ve already taken the blog reader survey on another blog, your answers will be applied to this blog too if you click the link (and you’re on the same computer, with cookies enabled), so please give us three seconds of your time.
If you haven’t taken the survey, [...]
The first issue of a new pan European magazine - Indigo - is available online in English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Polish, and Italian. According to the German VISDP magazine, Indigo’s publishers want to put the magazine’s content on paper eventually. Collaborating with CafeBabel, the magazine [...]
The Globalist’s Stephan Richter weighs the pros and cons, difficulties and opportunities of an increased German military involvement in Southern Aghanistan and comes to the - in my opinion correct - conclusion that increased combat participation is much less a domestic policy problem than it is usually thought [...]
On the day following Israel’s national holocaust memorial day, writing in Haaretz, Fania Oz-Salzberger reminds both Israelis and Europeans that, for centuries, Jewish history has been an enriching element of European history. Concerned about the effect of class trips of “roudy groups” of Israeli teenagers to Auschwitz, she [...]
Regular commenters may have noticed that a disturbingly large percentage of their comments have been held as spam. This issue should now be resolved. For the information of other Akismet/MT users, the problem was that our spam filter assigned a score of +1 if one’s URL had been previously [...]
On the 68th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom, Germany’s president Koehler joined with other dignitaries in inaugurating a new synagogue in Munich.
Neo-Nazis plotted to bomb the ground-breaking ceremony for the Munich synagogue exactly three years ago. Members of the group were arrested and their leader is now [...]
This falls under the category “Not Europe” here at AFEM but on the internet the world is a global village and one of the voices in that village has just been silenced, albeit in his own neighbourhood, along with a few others. Mahmood from the Bahrain weblog [...]
