By Julia Pastor, in Madrid | In a context of crisis that is becoming worse and worse, and with the arrival of the new government lead by Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s cooperation challenges need to be revised. The unavoidable decrease in resources must be faced by an improved, more finely tuned project selection and the need for greater transparency must be satisfied by including the goals that each project intends to attain,…
The happiness of Beijing residents is in recession for the fourth consecutive year. The reasons behind such state of mind are not exclusive of the Chinese capital and they represent the challenges the Communist Party will have to face during the year that has just begun in China. In Europe, the year 2012 exudes pessimism. Conversely, according to Chinese astrology, the symbolism attached to this mythological animal will bring power…
NEW YORK | It has been one of the main topics at Davos, according to The New York Times: A number of foreign officials complaining to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about the Volcker rule. It hasn’t come from the usual suspects, American banks, but from other governments. European, Japanese and Canadian officials have objected to one aspect of this already polemic new regulation: the fact that it restricts US banks…
By Luis Garicano, in London | NADA ES GRATIS (fedeablogs.net). A very brief and worrying observation that the media does not seem to have noticed: the IMF forecast of which the press this week has been constantly talking about and that predicts a decrease in the Spanish GDP of 1.7% does not include an additional fiscal adjustment due to the deviation of the 2011 deficit. That is to say, if the deficit…
NEW YORK | It’s a catastrophe, experts say: about 1.2 million US students drop out every year and this imposes a huge cost on the whole economy. “Many of these schools [with high dropout rates] are in the inner-city and are made up of blacks and Latino students who are not graduating at great rates. This increases the level of poverty, it increases crime, it increases the incarceration rate. 80…
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2012 Report highlights dystopia as one of the major three risk cases. The concept is used to describe a scenario where literally “life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” This is an ideal far away from the motto behind the Chinese Dream so insistently emphasised by the state’s propagandistic apparatus: prosperity will be achieved thanks to a society that works in unison…
NEW YORK | In his fourth speech in front of the nation, president Barack Obama addressed the financial crisis and pledged to fight for economic fairness. In the middle of the race to the November election, the president couldn’t find a better moment to speak about inequality. Earlier on Tuesday, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney –Obama’s most likely opponent, according to some experts– disclosed that he paid an effective income…
Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, was talking on Tuesday in Berlin about the obvious economic challenges in 2012, and a possible policy path for global cooperation to restore confidence and growth. Readers from around the peripheral European Monetary Union zone have convinced The Corner that Ms Lagarde’s words have achieved quite an echo among member states currently undergoing net austerity pressures. These are some of the most celebrated…