finance

China and Russia to establish joint rating agency

RT | June 3, 2014

No more Fitch, Moody’s, or Standard & Poor’s for Russia and China, as they have agreed to establish a rating agency on joint projects, and later, international services, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Tuesday.
“The establishment of an independent rating system is being discussed. Many countries would like to have more objectivity in the assessment of rating agencies,” Siluanov said.

China to ditch US consulting firms over espionage suspicion

RT | May 26, 2014

State-owned Chinese companies will cease to work with US consulting companies like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group over fears they are spying on behalf of the US government.
US consulting companies McKinsey, BCG, Bain & Company, and Strategy&, formerly Booz & Co., will all be snubbed by state-owned Chinese companies, the Financial Times reported, citing sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

Austerity Revisited: How Global Financiers Rigged the Bank Bailouts of the 1980s

In the first part of this Global Power Project series, I examined the origins and early evolution of the International Monetary Conference, an annual meeting (to be held June 1-3 in Munich) of several hundred of the world’s most influential bankers who gather in secrecy with the finance ministers, regulators and central bankers o

Deceptive Gyrations: Rebasing the Growth of the Nigerian Economy

Statistics are the magic, and the manna, of the economist. They are less reliable than weather forecasts; the meteorologist has a better chance of forecasting rainfall than an economist of forecasting economic growth. Things get even more testy over the issue of Gross Domestic Product, that great calculator of a nation’s economic output. The proof, in this case, lies outside the pudding, rather than in it.

The Economics of Egypt’s Coup

Egypt is forming an economic dependence on funds from Saudi Arabia and the UAE that spells economic disaster for the vast majority of ordinary Egyptians who will be left paying the price.
As Egypt inches towards the first anniversary of the July 3 overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi, the economy continues to flounder. The military-backed government promised stability, but it won’t deliver this through reverting to failed Mubarak-era policies and relying on handouts from Gulf Security Council (GCC) states.

Voices of Ukraine: “Kiev, people are not cattle!”

I doubt where the official numbers come from, those that say that Ukraine is evenly divided between those who support the West, and those who feel their identity is closely linked with Russia.
Maybe this might be the case in western Ukraine, in Lvov, or even in the capital, Kiev. But western Ukraine has only a few key cities. The majority of people in this country of around 44 million are concentrated in the south, east and southeast, around the enormous industrial and mining centers of Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and Krivoi Rog.

Colonialism and Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Crisis

Puerto Rico, is usually thought of as a tourism destination or is usually invisible in the U.S. media. In recent times, its fiscal and economic crisis has led to show up in the business pages of the mainstream media with inaccurate comparisons with Detroit or Greece whose fiscal crisis had attracted much media attention. As usual, the mainstream press looks at the illness without looking at the root causes. And the comparisons are usually risky because they tend to ignore history and the nuances of each case.