Archive
Reuters blog archive
from Global Investing:
When Japan was an emerging country
Recent wild swings in Japan's financial markets -- stocks, bonds and the yen -- make Japan look almost like an emerging country.
Back in the 19th century, Japan was an emerging country, with its feudal society based largely on farming.
According to a paper by U.S. based researchers Chiaki Moriguchi and Emmanuel Saez, Japan's GDP per capita in 1890 was at the level of U.S. GDP per capita in 1790, or about $1,200 in 2004 dollars. According to them, this is roughly comparable to the GDP per capita of the less developed countries today.
John Dower, author of Pulitzer-prize winning "Embracing Defeat" which covered the occupation of Japan by the American forces, describes the late 19th century Japan as "a small country with few obvious resources".
from MacroScope:
Talking Turkey … and Greece
Yesterday was another day of turmoil for emerging markets and according to equity index provider MSCI, they have a new member.
For anyone who thought the euro zone’s debt crisis was over, MSCI lowered Greece to emerging market status last night. MSCI’s focus is the useability of the stock market – which it said fell short of developed market status – but its move casts a wider judgment on an economy still deep in recession, with unemployment at 27 percent and which will almost inevitably need a further debt writedown in the future.
from Newsmaker:
Send your questions for World Bank President Jim Yong Kim
World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim will be at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event in London on June 19 discussing the threat to economic development posed by climate change, the business case for going green, global economic development, sustainable growth in the developing world and mobilising capital in international financial markets.
The Newsmaker will be President Kim’s first major public event in London since he was appointed World Bank Group President last year. He has committed the bank to a new strategy that will aim to "end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity".
from Breakingviews:
Zuckerberg and Murdoch rock air-governance shows
By Richard Beales
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch breezed through their latest air-governance shows. Facebook on Tuesday held its first annual meeting as a public company while News Corp shareholders on the same day agreed to split the company. Both may have served the greater good this time, but when founders dominate the voting, as in these two cases, it’s not a given.
from Jack Shafer:
Edward Snowden and the selective targeting of leaks
Edward Snowden's expansive disclosures to the Guardian and the Washington Post about various National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs have only two corollaries in contemporary history—the classified cache Bradley Manning allegedly released to WikiLeaks a few years ago and Daniel Ellsberg's dissemination of the voluminous Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971.
Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don't merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times's David Brooks, Politico's Roger Simon, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen and others have vilified Snowden for revealing the government's aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist.
from Alison Frankel:
MBIA loses $100 million case vs flamboyant distressed debt investor
Is there any private equity investor with a more flamboyant personal style than Lynn Tilton, CEO of the distressed debt private equity firm Patriarch Partners? Tilton is Yale- and Columbia-educated and Wall Street-trained, but here's the first impression she made in a 2011 interview with New York magazine: "Tilton's lipstick is frosty pink, her eyelashes are long and inky black, her hair is Barbie-doll blonde, with curls spilling over cleavage that is invariably visible, invariably tan, invariably accentuated by a diamond necklace, and invariably supported by a tight-fitting garment made by one of her favorite designers. Today she has chosen a Roberto Cavalli miniskirt accessorized with spike-heeled suede boots and a fur-trimmed cape."
Not your typical vulture fund investor, though Tilton did say, "There's never been a carcass I wouldn't put on my back." (Patriarch's current portfolio of 39 companies includes the Rand McNally map business, several cosmetics companies and a bevy of industrial concerns.) Forbes investigated whether Tilton should be included on its billionaires' list in 2011 and ended up deciding that she's probably worth at least $830 million, although the magazine found her so confounding a character that it produced an indelible week-long series of articlesabout (among other things) Patriarch's predilection for extremely complex transactions and Tilton's brassy, sex-tinged antics.
from David Rohde:
The ‘secrecy industrial complex’
An undated photo of National Security Agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. REUTERS/NSA/Handout via Reuters
An odd thing is happening in the world’s self-declared pinnacle of democracy. No one -- except a handful of elected officials and an army of contractors -- is allowed to know how America’s surveillance leviathan works.
from MacroScope:
To ‘taper’ or not to ‘taper’? Fading the Fed semantics debate
Is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke avoiding the word “taper” in order to temper expectations that the U.S. central bank will ratchet down its massive bond buying program? This is one view that’s been widely bandied about in recent days.
But then why is it that the Fed officials who are most eager to "taper" have pretty much stopped using the word, too?
from Photographers Blog:
Closing the chapter on the space shuttle
Cape Canaveral, Florida
By Joe Skipper
The decades-long assignment started with covering the first space shuttle launch, Columbia, on April 12, 1981. A recent visit to Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39A wrapped up the story for me. Often we cover assignments not knowing how long it will take, and my part in coverage of NASA’s space shuttle program seemed as if it would last forever. With the landing of the shuttle Atlantis on July 21, 2011, however, we thought the assignment was over.
But it wasn't complete yet. With the shuttles headed for public display, the assignment continued a bit longer in order to cover the preparation and their ultimate departure from the space center.
from Felix Salmon:
Investing in bonds while rates are rising
James Stewart is worried about the bond market, which has plunged in recent weeks:
If there was an index for fixed income with the status of the Dow Jones industrial average or Standard & Poor’s 500 index for stocks, the carnage in fixed-income markets would have been a big story and we’d all be talking about a bear market in bonds...
