Arab investors have lost 2.5 trillion dollars from the credit crunch, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad al-Sabah, whose country hosts an Arab economic summit next week, said on Friday. ‘The Arab world has lost 2.5 trillion dollars in the past four months’ as a result of the global financial crisis, Sheikh Mohammad told a press conference following a joint meeting of Arab foreign and finance ministers in Kuwait. He also said that about 60 percent of development projects ‘have either been postponed or cancelled’ by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states because of the global meltdown. Arab leaders who hold their first ever economic summit on January 19-20 will discuss the impact of the worldwide economic meltdown on the 22 Arab countries. The biggest loss was an estimated 40 percent drop in the value of Arab investments abroad, which previously totalled around 2.5 trillion dollars. Falls on stock markets contributed more than 600 billion dollars to the losses, while Arab investors were further affected by a sharp decline in oil revenues, the declining value of property investments and other repercussions of the global downturn. Next week’s summit will also discuss the Gaza war […]
Despite legal and security hurdles, president-elect Barack Obama says he has a plan to retain his beloved Blackberry once he moves into the White House next week. Interviewed by CNN Friday, Obama said the smartphone was among the tools that he would use to stay in touch with real Americans and avoid becoming trapped inside the presidential ‘bubble.’ ‘I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these. My working assumption, and this is not new, is that anything I write on an email could end up being on CNN,’ he said. ‘So I make sure to think before I press ‘send’,’ he said of his Blackberry, which was an ever-present fixture on his belt or in his hand on the campaign trail. Obama did not divulge just how he will overcome legal constraints, given the requirement of the post-Watergate Presidential Records Act of 1978 to keep a record of every White House communication. Nor did he say how he would persuade his Secret Service protectors that the Blackberry does not pose a security risk, for instance if it is hacked over the air. But Obama, who succeeds the unpopular […]
As the Obama administration details its priorities for its $775 billion stimulus package, it should take at least one cue from the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Officials have thus far dispensed TARP money in ways that make it very likely that private sector recipients of those funds will repay the government over time. As a result, taxpayers will ultimately be responsible for little to none of the TARP expenditures. As the TARP money has been doled out to banks and other financial companies, the government has taken back preferred stock and equity warrants in these companies. The Treasury Department can sell these securities or hold them until they are redeemed by the companies that issued them. So in any company that survives–and most will with the benefit of government support–the government should get all its money back with interest. New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg’s recent estimate that the TARP funds have earned the government a profit of $8 billion in three months only underscores this point. As the new administration looks for ways to revive the economy, it should favor projects that could be sold or leased to the private sector after completion. For example, […]
President-elect Barack Obama pledged yesterday to shape a new Social Security and Medicare ‘bargain’ with the American people, saying that the nation’s long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs. That discussion will begin next month, Obama said, when he convenes a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ before delivering his first budget to Congress. He said his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market. ‘What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further,’ he said. ‘We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.’ In a wide-ranging 70-minute interview with Washington Post reporters and editors, the president-elect pledged quick action on the Middle East once he takes office, promised to support voting rights for D.C. residents, and said he will consider it a failure if he has not closed the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, […]
How did the sister of Machiavelli’s prince get so wealthy during an economic downturn? In popular legend, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara (1480- 1519), stands falsely accused of poisoning her second husband. Victor Hugo portrayed her in thinly veiled fiction as a tragic femme fatale. Buffalo Bill named his gun after her. But new research by USC historian Diane Yvonne Ghirardo reveals that the only sister of Machiavelli’s Prince was less interested in political intrigue than in running a business, undertaking massive land development projects that ‘stand alone in the panorama of early sixteenth-century projects, not only those initiated by women,’ Ghirardo says. Forced by an economic downturn to cut expenses and become an entrepreneur, the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI would control between 30,000 and 50,000 acres in northern Italy within six years. ‘This is a classic case of seeing only what you’re looking for and not getting the whole picture,’ Ghirardo says of the centuries-old mystery surrounding how Lucrezia accumulated her vast personal wealth. Ghirardo notes that historians have long dismissed Lucrezia as stupid because no record exists of her collecting art or antiquities. ‘The information was there in the archives, but […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
