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Spanish banks

World economy 17th February 2014

Spanish banks poised to face trouble

MADRID | By JP Marin Arrese | Not so long ago, markets gauged solvency problems in Spain to lay in former saving banks as many found themselves in a shambles. Few investors cast doubts on the main credit institutions, staunchly anchored in their extensive non-domestic business. Yet sentiment has markedly shifted as trouble is looming on Latin America. Argentina undoubtedly stands as a weird and quirky case. Still, the peso collapse has sent shivers down the spine.

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World economy 14th February 2014

Sacyr and Panama Canal Row Gives Nationalists Some Ammunition

LATAM CORRESPONDENT David Brunat | Across the Panamanian media political pundits are praising the firmness of their government in this dispute, blaming the GUPC and particularly Spanish firm Sacyr for the standoff and for putting Panama on the brink. The pulse has turned into a nationalistic claim and now foreign companies are being accused of misbehaving in Panama.

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World economy 14th February 2014

India: Taxation’s Fatal Neglect?

In poor and unequal India, the level, type, quality and sustainability of spending are vital issues to debate. But the obsession with spending has crowded out discussions on spending’s Siamese twin: revenues and, more specifically, taxation.

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World economy 13th February 2014

Iceland and capital controls: check the politics not just the economics

LONDON | By Sigrún Davíðsdóttir | Those who understood the Eurozone correctly were those who understood that politics mattered more than economics. It might very well be the same in Iceland: in order to understand the course of events regarding capital controls, foreign-owned ISK assets and the estates of the failed banks, politics might weigh more than the economics. And as in Europe the political weight might bode messy course.

Nunes

World economy 13th February 2014

Scatterbrained Central Bankers

SAO PAULO | By Marcus Nunes via Historinhas | Recently I showed this chart [see above] to press the point against the conventional wisdom that the purpose of the sequence of QEs was to lower long term rates.

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World economy 11th February 2014

Pescanova and the vermin of corruption

LONDON & VIGO | By Víctor Jiménez | Chairman Juan Manuel Urgoiti recently called on partners involved in Pescanova’s rescue bargaining to avoid liquidation in a public, desperate letter addressed to shareholders, workers, creditors and ‘the wider market’. But secretly, many more operators in the industry would have not felt it as far-reached if he had included among the receivers a few ancient Greek gods, whose very human moods used to govern haphazard and catastrophe over the Old World.

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World economy 10th February 2014

“The risk of a tech stocks bubble is greater but there are pockets of opportunity”

NEW YORK | By Ana Fuentes | Is there a risk bubble in the tech stocks? For Jonathan Cohen, CEO of TIIC Capital, a company focused on corporate debt investments, there is indeed, and it’s greater than before. However, one can still get very lucky since there are real businesses making real profits. He gives us his recipe for picking stocks and debt issues, although he confesses their “forecast for 2014 is uncertainty.”

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World economy 10th February 2014

Atomic economics

WASHINGTON | By Pablo Pardo | Does anybody remember the origin of modern Economics? Yes, what did those guys—Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill—that we love to quote, try to achieve? They saw Economics just as part of a wider intellectual effort, namely philosophy or, at the very least, ethics.

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World economy 6th February 2014

Mexico: Is it Really Money What Michoacan Needs?

MEXICO CITY | By David Brunat | Mexican government is ready to invest more than $3bn in Michoacan state, which has been rampaged by extortion and assassination in the last years. It has been the raise in arms by civil self-defense forces the fact that has driven Federal authorities to search for a solution. But is it money the recipe to tackle violence?