The foreign born population in the United States dipped slightly last year for the first time in more than a generation, as this nation of immigrants weathered its worst recession in decades, figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week indicated.
The Bureau’s American Community Survey showed the total foreign-born population dipped by around 99,000 people to 37.9 million in 2008, as the U.S. sank into its most extended recession since the Great Depression. It was the first recorded decline since 1970.
The Census Bureau cautioned that the dip in the foreign born, to 12.5 percent of the population in 2008 from 12.6 percent in 2007, was well within the margin of error, although analysts found it nevertheless suggestive.
“It’s a modest decline when you’re looking at the overall size of the foreign born population of about 38 million …. but that said, it is the first time that there has been one,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
“We believe it’s very much tied to economic conditions in the United States and the fact particularly that immigrant flows to the United States have declined significantly during the downturn, and … illegal immigration flows in particular,” added Mittelstadt, who is the co-author of a report on global migration flows and the recession published this month.
The U.S. foreign born population includes naturalized Americans, refugees and both legal and illegal immigrants, of whom there are some 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the shadows.
One sign that immigrants have been hurt by the recession are falling remittances to Mexico, which began a decline last year for the first time on record. Cash sent back to Mexico fell 16.2 percent in the year to July to $1.83 billion, down from $2.19 billion a year earlier, according to figures released by Mexico’s Central Bank earlier this month.
Whether or not migrants, legal or otherwise, were returning home in the downturn remained moot.
Mittelstadt said evidence suggested that the foreign born population was not being replenished by fresh immigration, rather than significant numbers of people leaving the United States — although other analysts disagreed.
“Fewer people are coming, and significantly more people are going home,” Steven Camarota of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies think tank in Washington.
“For these numbers to look as they do, it strongly implies that it’s illegal immigrants who are coming in lower numbers and going home in higher numbers,” he added.
Whatever the cause, the tentative decline in the foreign born population is more likely temporary than structural - with immigration likely to trend upward with the economic recovery, Mittelstadt said.
“We believe … this is cyclical and tied to the economy. Within the next two to five years as you see the economy take off again, you will see immigration increase,” she said.
“If this ends up being a jobless recovery … and if Americans decide to consume less and cutback on spending … this could in turn affect migration patterns.”
Germany’s “cash-for-clunkers” scheme expired on Wednesday with a last-minute surge in demand a full three weeks before the Sept. 27 election and much faster than anyone thought possible.
The government’s 5-billion euro incentive programme has led to the purchase of 2 million new cars in the last eight months, according to the website of the Federal Office of Economics and Export Control that has been keeping a live update of how much money was still available. New car registrations are up about 30 percent this year — in the middle of the country’s worst post-war recession.
By any measure the “Abrwackpraemie” (car junking bonus), as the Germans informally referred to the government’s more official “Unweltpraemie” (environment bonus), that offered new car buyers 2,500 euros for scrapping their older vehicles has been a great success story — a textbook example of pump priming that would make have made Franklin D. Roosevelt proud.
It was among the 81-billion euro basket of stimulus measures the government put together to soften the impact of the recession and was later copied in many other countries, including the United States.It started out as a 1.5-billion euro scheme but that had to be quickly topped up in the spring as a frenzy swept the country.
It gave the economy an important glimmer of hope as gross domestic product contracted by a post-war record 3.5 percent in the first quarter. The government’s heavy-handed intervention did, however, disrupt the free markets — hitting the market for used cars and causing problems for retailers as we pointed out in this story in April.
My colleague Paul Carrel pointed out in an analysis today that the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme helped private consumption in Europe’s biggest economy grow by 0.1 percent in the first half and without the scheme it would have declined 1.0 pecent compared to the first half of 2008.
The Social Democrats led by Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier — pictured here on the left inspecting a new car as it rolls along on the assembly line — have claimed credit for the Abwrackpraemie, saying it was their idea that helped the car industry in Germany and elsewhere with the generous subsidies for new cars for those to junk their older vehicles. That may be the case but voters don’t seem to care: the SPD still trails Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives by about 12 points in opinion polls.
The pressing question now is: What will happen to the car market now? Will demand for cars collapse? Did the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme simply encourage would-be car buyers to pull forward their purchases? Will the market be sucked dry? Or did it help stimulate genuinely new demand from people who otherwise would have held onto their ageing vehicles? Will it prove to be a “Strohfeuer“, a flash in the pan?
PHOTOS: Top: Junk cars piled up at a scrap yard in Offenbach near Frankfurt, REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach (GERMANY)
Lower: Steinmeier (2ndL) talks to an employee about the A3 production line during a visit to the German car manufacturer Audi in Ingolstadt. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - Some Americans are swapping homes for motels as the ranks of the homeless swell during the recession, crowding out shelters and forcing cities and states across the country to find new types of housing.
In Massachusetts, a record number of families are being put up in motels due to high unemployment and the rising number of homes going into foreclosure, costing taxpayers $2 million per month but providing a lifeline for desperate families.
“I feel like this has saved my life,” said Tarya Seagraves-Quee, a 37-year-old former nurse.
Seagraves-Quee has lived in a cramped one-bedroom suite in a hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with three of her four children for nearly two months. “I’m managing the best way possible. I’ve learned to make things in the microwave oven.”
In Massachusetts, homeless shelters are at capacity. State law requires temporary accommodation for those without shelter, leading authorities to place 830 families, including 1,125 children, in 39 motels — an unprecedented number.
“This truly is the highest we have ever seen it,” said Nancy Paladino, director of the family team for the Boston Health Care for the Homeless.
Other cities are noticing a similar trend. In Indianapolis, Indiana, overcrowded homeless shelters are turning families away, forcing growing numbers to seek vouchers for hotels provided by nonprofit groups such as United Way.
“Anecdotally, it’s increased,” said Michael Hurst, director of the Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention Indianapolis. The advocacy group started to compile statistics on the number of homeless families living in hotels this year after noticing signs of an increase.
“The hotel owners will tell you it has increased. The homeless service providers and the school officials will say we know there are more people living in hotels and putting their kids in school because that is the address they are giving us.”
In the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, the large Wilson family turned to a budget motel as a weeklong transition between a homeless shelter and an apartment.
“Each step we’re going it’s just a stepping stone,” said 42-year-old Frederick Wilson as he sat with his wife, Annette, in a one-bedroom suite they share with four of the six children in their care, including a grandchild.
Called by God, they said, to move from Minnesota to Texas, the family has rapidly made a shift from homeless status to paid employment. Annette has just landed a job as a bus driver, while Frederick said he will work in an office that offers clerical support to Medicaid patients.
They spent two-and-a-half weeks in a homeless shelter in Dallas and were preparing to move into an apartment from the motel. The Urban League, an organization that helps struggling African Americans, is paying the $204 cost of their suite, which does not include sheets, pillows or toilet paper.
(Click on the video below for an audio slideshow about the Wilson family by photographer Jessica Rinaldi, narrated by the Wilsons)
In Phoenix, demand for emergency accommodation is swamping available services as the recession and spiraling foreclosures turn even more families out of their homes.
One nonprofit bought two former hotels — a Days Inn and a Super 8 — in a gritty downtown neighborhood to provide emergency accommodation for homeless and low income families. When the $23 million project is finished in September, it will be able to house 156 families, up from 112 now.
“We’ve seen a whole new subset of homeless families due to job loss and foreclosures, and our waiting list has doubled in the past year,” said Nichole Barnes, chief fund development officer of the UMOM New Day Centers.
“Some were previous homeowners. Due to the housing market out here, they’d got into a mortgage with a flexible interest rate. Some were working full time, but lost their jobs, went through their savings trying to save their home, and then found themselves without a home due to foreclosure,” she said.
FORECLOSURES AND FAMILIES
In many cities, foreclosures are a big part of a spike in homeless and rise in families living in hotels or motels.
Nearly 80 percent of homeless services providers and advocacy agencies say at least some clients became homeless as a result of a foreclosure, according to a joint report by four of the largest U.S. homeless advocacy groups.
Staying with family or friends and in emergency shelters were the most common post-foreclosure living conditions, followed by hotels or motels, according to the June report.
“In many areas shelters are now completely full, so the only option to keep their families together is to rent a motel room for $200 a week. That’s pretty standard for many who lost their homes to foreclosure,” said Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Unlike Massachusetts, most states do not pick up the tab. “People are spending 80 percent of their total income on hotels,” he said. “And food costs are higher because they can’t cook.”
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Seagraves-Quee found refuge at a budget hotel after losing her job in Georgia more than a year ago and going without health care for 10 months. She suffers from multiple sclerosis, anemia and lupus, and was recently found to have two cancer spots on her breast. Two of her children, aged 16 and 6, are autistic.
She spent $700 — almost all her savings — on plane tickets to Boston, where she had relatives. Soon the family was in a shelter.
Local authorities later moved her to the hotel and Seagraves-Quee was given medical treatment as part of a program carried out by Boston Health Care for the Homeless.
“Right now, I am picking up from where I left off in Georgia 10 months ago. When I got here I was in really bad health,” she said. “I’ve heard some people say ‘Oh that is a ghetto shelter.’ But to me it’s a wonderful place.”
(Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard in Dallas and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix; Editing by Doina Chiacu. Cambridge photos and audio slideshow by Brian Synder, Dallas photos and audio slideshow by Jessica Rinaldi)
Climate health costs: bug-borne ills, killer heat Tree-munching beetles, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and deer ticks that spread Lyme disease are three living signs that climate change is likely to exact a heavy toll on human health. These pests and others are expanding their ranges in a warming world, which means people who never had to worry about them will have to start.
Moving a 17-metre high monument to Christopher Columbus 100 metres down the road is how the Spanish government is interpreting the advice of John Maynard Keynes. The economist once argued it would be preferable to pay workers to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than allowing them to stand idle and deprive the economy of the multiplier effect of their wages.
U.S. gunners scanned a lush Afghan valley from their helicopter, as a white van containing a badly burned baby inched toward another Black Hawk waiting at the army outpost. Eight soldiers had flown into the heart of hostile eastern Afghanistan, in a convoy of one air ambulance and one “chase” helicopter for protection, to collect 18-month-old Amanullah who knocked a pot of scalding water over his legs, penis and scrotum.
No one could say they hadn’t seen it coming. The sand dunes had been advancing for decades before they swallowed the houses of families in Ilha Grande, an island in Brazil’s Parnaiba river delta. Standing on a dune that covers his old home, one man describes the landscape of his childhood — cashew trees as far as he could see. Not a dune in sight.
It’s not break-dance, it isn’t rap either. The name is kuduro and its beat is electrifying dancers from Luanda to Lisbon and New York City. In Angola’s capital city, men and women are often seen performing robotic moves, bouncing off walls or pretending to drop dead once kuduro’s hard-hitting beat stops. The creator of kuduro, which means “hard-ass” in Portuguese, said he came up with the sound while watching martial arts expert Jean Claude Van Damme dance in a 1994 movie.
Cattle theft is a growing problem as thieves realize that stealing cows is a relatively easy way to raise a quick buck. Stolen cattle are often taken straight from their farm or ranch to auction at a stockyard. “When people think cattle rustling they think John Wayne. But it’s not like that. Cattle thieves are … technologically savvy. “
Staring at the locked gates of a Fiat car factory, Mimmo Vacchiano says many families in this poor corner of southern Italy face a stark choice unless its turnstiles reopen. “If they close this plant, there’s nothing else here, only unemployment or the mafia.” Pomigliano d’Arco, a town of 40,000 people in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, relies on Fiat for its lifeblood. Residents now fear they may pay the price for cash-strapped Fiat’s high-stakes strategy to survive the recession by expanding to become the world’s second largest car maker.
The odors of death and decay are gone from the corridors of Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital, replaced by the smells of medicines and food for the patients who are once again coming for treatment. Nowhere is the change in Zimbabwe more evident than in the hospitals that just months ago failed so woefully to cope with a cholera epidemic that killed more than 4,000 people. Doctors and nurses have returned to Harare’s Parirenyatwa General Hospital. UNICEF has been helping to pay allowances to some doctors and nurses while the government is now paying them $100 a month like other state employees.
If the U.S. recession has an epicenter in California, it may be the working-class neighborhoods called the “Inland Empire,” full of boarded-up homes, vacant storefronts, jobless workers. It faces years coping with foreclosed homes, jobless rates over 10 percent, a poorly educated workforce and empty warehouses.
The memory of assassinated Lebanese leaders lives in symbols and slogans of their heirs who are battling for Christian votes crucial to deciding the parliamentary election. Nayla Tueni and Nadim Gemayel are young, even by the standards of Lebanon’s dynastic politics. Running as allies in the June election, both evoke memories of fathers killed for their views.
The population of Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades may have grown to as many as 150,000 as the non-native snakes breed in the fragile wetlands. Wildlife biologists say they have been dumped by owners who no longer want them and pose a threat to endangered species like the wood stork and Key Largo woodrat. “They eat things that we care about,” said an Everglades National Park biologist.
There is a growing feeling of “fin de siecle” in Brussels these days, a sense of degeneration, of euro-depression.
But people across the European Union do not seem to care.
The collective EU leadership is widely seen as weak and demoralised and the Czech government has collapsed in the middle of its six-month presidency of the 27-nation bloc, an unprecedented event that is bound to leave much unfinished business before an election to the European Parliament in June.
Nobody knows what the EU’s institutions are going to look
like in the future, with the Lisbon treaty that is supposed to
reform them in limbo.
The executive European Commission and the parliament are in
transition, the former avoiding difficult decisions and debates
for fear of harming the treaty’s ratification. As a result, an
important debate on EU budget reforms can’t even get started.
The global economic crisis is forcing governments to take
extraordinary measures that do not always coincide with EU rules
but the Commission seems to turn a blind eye in some cases. But
then, the EU has always been good at fudging.
But do people care? Judging by a poll this week, the answer
is no.
The Eurobarometer poll showed turnout in the election
could be the lowest ever. Only 34 percent of EU adults are
certain they will vote, a sign of no-confidence in the EU
institutions.
A “fin de siecle” should offer hope of rebirth, a new
beginning. It’s hard to feel any at the moment. The EU’s
bureaucratic machine will lumber along until better times come.
But how much does anyone care?
So President Medevedev would like to create a “Speakers’ Corner” in Central Moscow for Russians to vent their political passions.
“It looks cool,” Medvedev told a group of human rights activists. “I need to speak with the Russian authorities and build our very own Hyde Park.”
Was this just a rhetorical flourish to impress his guests, a signal that he would loosen the reins that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, has pulled so tight? Free speech, say the rights activists, is not something Russian authorities have prized, whether on the streets or in the media. Would it, could it, work in Moscow? Where ever would you put it in that crowded, bustling city? Who would go there? What would they do there?
Singaporeans, not know for a culture of dissent and protest, have led the way, setting up their own speakers’ corner to protest over economic hardship. Hundreds meet there every Saturday to demand government help. No trouble reported yet.
The London speakers’ corner is held up by some as a symbol of British democracy, a place where anyone can stand on a box and say (more or less) whatever he wants without fear. Yes, in their day, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx haunted the place, touting ideas that would have had them dragged away by police in their own countries. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote in her memoirs that the Bolshevik leaader was most impressed watching speakers “harangue the passing crowds on diverse themes”. All jolly stuff and not something he himself encouraged when he set up the dictatorship of the proletariat back at home.
These days though, for the most part, London’s speakers’ corner is a gathering place for quirky exhibitionists and comedians, political oddballs of left and right and religious eccentrics of all ilks warning sinful tourists of hell and damnation. The occasional thoughtful soul will read through Shakespeare’s sonnets or expound the virtues of a forgotten philosopher. Heckling seems to be a central part of the fun. A policeman may be at hand in case things turn nasty, but they rarely do.
Possibly, the spot in the north-east corner of Hyde Park was chosen for its closeness to Tyburn gallows where once the condemned would make their last declarations. The Moscow equivalent to Tyburn, I suppose, would be Red Square, where villains were put to death by the axe – though, in the Russian tradition, without those last words. Perhaps, then, Moscow’s Speakers’ Corner might fit nicely nearby at Alexandrov Gardens, at the Kremlin Walls. Arguably, though, a bit too close to
Medvedev’s seat of power. My proposal would be a few hundred metres up Tver Avenue, on Pushkin Square where the Soviet Union once maintained its own bizarre and macabre form of speakers’ corner. Perhaps I should call it the hat-takers-offers corner.
Every Human Rights Day, a keen crowd of journalists and plain-clothes KGB officers would gather in the winter cold around the perimeter of the square named after the great liberal poet Alexander Pushkin. As the hour of eleven approached, a tense hush would descend. A single figure would eventually appear, walk to the centre of the square, stand for a moment, and then take his hat (usually a rabbit-skin ‘shapka’) off; a symbolic protest against the suppression of human rights in the communist state.
In an instant, the KGB officers would swoop down upon him, drag him across the square, bundle him into a van and speed him off to the Lubyanka prison. A few minutes would pass and a second dissident would arrive, take off his hat and stand to attention before being likewise borne away by the forces of order. And so it went on.
Pity though the ‘innocent’ citizen who strayed unwittingly onto the square on that December day, carrying perhaps a magazine or a string bag of potatoes, and found himself suddenly the focus of this hawkeyed gathering. He would break his step and look around, of course, in wonder at his sudden and unexplained celebrity. Me?
That was more enough. Hat or no hat, he followed the rest, bundled into the van and away. It happened, sadly.
Finally, I ask myself who would pitch up at Moscow’s speakers’ corner and in what frame of mind? Memories of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the coups, the civil wars, the anger and the hardship, are still fresh. Economic crisis raises fears of another plunge into uncertainty and the eternal search continues. Kto Vinovat? Who is to blame?
What makes London’s Speakers’ Corner possible, amid all the mockery and sometimes quite pernicious views, is that most people just don’t take it seriously. They laugh, make fun. There may be anger but it knows its bounds. People throw up their hands and walk away, triumphant or humiliated before their peers.
How would Speakers’ Corner take root in Russian soil? Would liberal literati feast on Pushkin and Gogol, while the preachers invoke the fires of hell? Would it become a platform for Muscovites nursing private grievances against uncaring state institutions, the police, big business, the President? Could a Chechen malcontent plant his flag alongside angry nationalists and red-banner waving Stalinists?
Are Russians ready yet to laugh at profanity?
For all the shouting and nose-to-nose confrontations, visitors to Havana’s Parque Central might think they had walked into a brawl or counter-revolution … but here in the park’s Hot Corner, the topic almost always under discussion is baseball, Cuba’s national obsession.
At night, Salah Abbas Hisham wakes up screaming. Sometimes, in the dark, he silently attacks the boy next to him in a tiny Baghdad orphanage where 33 boys sleep on cots or on the floor. Salah, who saw both his parents blown apart in a car bomb, can never be left alone at night.
Colombian soccer champions America de Cali are first to admit cocaine dollars had a hand in their sporting heyday. But after years of paying the price, they’re trying to wipe the slate clean … Cali’s mayor is leading a campaign to have the team removed from a U.S. anti-drugs blacklist.
In a grimy part of eastern Paris an editorial conference is underway, similar to planning meetings in newsrooms everywhere, except this is being blogged live and readers can join in … The meeting is at Rue89 … one of the interactive sites to have appeared as a global crisis in the press squeezes French newspapers.
A shy 14-year-old girl plucked from obscurity by the White House has come to symbolize a battle over how to fix dilapidated U.S. schools. Ty’Sheoma Bethea’s story proves that one small act — in this case writing to President Barack Obama — can have a big impact. It also highlights a battle over how far the federal government should fund U.S. education.
All his life elderly Mexican farmer Gonzalo Cardenas has planted a stalky weed that grows wild in southern Mexico to form a sturdy live fence around his tropical fruit trees. Now it turns out the weed, jatropha, could be used to fuel jet planes.
The congregation at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral on Borneo island intones in Malay: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of Allah”. Now the government in this mostly Muslim Southeast Asian nation wants to prevent “Allah” being used by Christians.
When police arrested two Romanians for the rape of an Italian teenager in Rome, a paper owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, reported: “The Romanian beasts have been caught.” Three weeks later, prosecutors admitted the “beasts” could not be guilty — DNA tests had ruled them out .
Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting’s eyes in old age — the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death. China’s last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the “Emperor’s slave”.
Abundant water from the Red Sea could replenish the shrinking Dead Sea if Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians decide to commission a tunnel north through the Jordanian desert from the Gulf of Aqaba. The Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance project would supply the biggest desalination plant in the world.
It doesn’t look like a disaster area. Crab boats dart back and forth on this inlet of the Chesapeake Bay as they have for generations … But watermen aren’t pulling blue crabs out of the Bay … the U.S. Commerce Department declared the fishery a federal disaster last September.
When her children started missing school because of persistent diarrhea and vomiting, Pat Farnelli began to wonder if she and her family were suffering from more than a classroom bug. After trying several remedies, she stopped using the water drawn from her well in this rural corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, the forefront of a drilling boom in what may be the biggest U.S. reserve of natural gas.
Stopping off in New York during a marathon, 18,000-mile diplomatic offensive before next week’s G20 summit in London next week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled a conference held in eerily similar circumstances in London 76 years ago.
Sixty-six nations gathered for the June 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference which was aimed at lifting the world’s economy out of the Depression.
But amid American opposition to European plans to return to a system of fixed exchange rates, the conference collapsed and the world put up trade barriers, jobless ranks swelled and the rise of Fascism took the world into war.
“There was no further progress other than a resort to protectionism for the rest of that decade,” Brown told a business audience during a five-day pre-summit tour that has taken him to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, New York, Brazil and Chile.
Brown must be hoping desperately that history will not repeat itself when he hosts a meeting of leading industrial and developing economies in London on April 2 to try to chart a way out of the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s.
Again there have been signs of transatlantic division in advance of the summit, with many Europeans resisting U.S. pressure for more fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, while the Europeans put the emphasis on tightening regulation of the financial sector.
Mirek Topolanek, prime minister of the Czech Republic which holds the current European Union presidency, was quoted this week as saying U.S. President Barack Obama’s huge economic stimulus plan was “the road to hell”.
Many countries are suspicious that their neighbours are resorting to protectionist policies to try to safeguard jobs at home.
Currency questions have caused friction between the United States and China, whose economies are now closely inter-dependent. Paul Volcker, a senior Obama adviser, gave short shrift to China’s proposal for a new world currency when asked about it at a New York roundtable with Brown this week.
Volcker said he understood restiveness about the “lopsided nature” of the current international monetary system but he said pointedly that the Chinese “didn’t have to buy those dollars in the first place”. A new international monetary system which suddenly devalued the dollar’s role was not practical, he said.
As Brown jetted around the world to bolster support for concerted action to lift the economy, he came up with a variety of ambitious and expensive proposals to revive trade and get the economy going again.
But he runs the risk of setting expectations for the London meeting too high, perhaps bringing crushing disappointment in its wake.
“If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said at a press conference with Brown in Brasilia.
Brown’s G20 envoy, Mark Malloch-Brown, voiced similar fears earlier this month. "If indeed we get anodyne committee conclusions where all substance has been taken out of them, the markets on April 3 will be something of a disaster zone, I have no doubt," he said.
Brown has called for a doubling of IMF resources to $500 billion and for a $100 billion trade financing facility to help reverse a slide in exports. He has also called for an insurance policy for countries with big foreign currency reserves, such as China, so that they will feel able to use some of their reserves to boost the economy without fearing a run on their currencies.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who Brown met in New York, urged the G20 to support a $1 trillion stimulus plan for developing countries.
With so many other demands on their cash, it is doubtful that even the powerful G20 economies will be able to find the vast sums needed for all of these programmes.
The huge media focus on the gathering of Obama and other world leaders in London, and the big protests that are expected to accompany it, will only heighten the anticipation.
British officials are trying to dampen expectations that a big new fiscal stimulus package will be approved at the G20 summit, saying they do not expect countries to put their national budgets on the table next week and suggesting that the results of the summit will be seen over the next year, rather than on the day of the summit.
Harsh economic reality may also force Brown to rein in his own wish to pump more resources into the British economy.
While he was away cheerleading for the G20, events back home kept intruding.
First -- in a move one opposition lawmaker described as a “coup” -- Bank of England Governor Mervyn King warned the government on Tuesday that its soaring budget deficit meant it would have to be cautious about any new stimulus for the British economy.
On Wednesday a sale of British government bonds failed for the first time since 2002, sending a warning to Brown that the markets may balk at financing ever higher British government deficits.
Then on Friday, Brown was given a lesson in economic management by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet who described how the money Chile had put aside in good economic times had enabled it to pump more cash into the economy during the downturn.
Brown’s Conservatives opponents at home say this is exactly what he failed to do during the years of prosperity – reduce the budget deficit so he had more financial firepower to help people through a recession.
As his ambitions clash with harsh reality, Brown may have to lower his sights both for the G20 summit and for the British economy.
[Photo: Prime Minister Gordon Brown (L) listens to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a news conference at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia March 26, 2009. REUTERS/Roberto Jayme]
President Barack Obama on Wednesday stepped out from behind the podium, took off his suit jacket and dispensed with the teleprompters to defend his budget, attack Republicans who label him a tax-and-spend Democrat and express outrage at the bonuses paid at insurance giant AIG.
Obama, who has made no secret of the fact he chafes in the White House “bubble” and enjoys engaging directly with Americans, headed west to California to hold a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, a town of about 113,000 in Orange County that has been hard hit by the recession.
Obama’s critics say his comments expressing outrage at the AIG bonuses and other Wall Street scandals lack passion because they are often scripted and read from a teleprompter.
But on Wednesday, Obama sounded like he was back on the election campaign trail as he rounded on Republicans for criticizing his $3.5 trillion 2010 budget, which he says is crucial to tackling the worst economic crisis in decades.
“Most of these critics presided over a doubling of the national debt. We are inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit. So they don’t have the standing to make this criticism, I think, given how irresponsible they’ve been,” he said.
Under the glare of hot lights in an uncomfortably warm hall at Costa Mesa’s state fairgrounds, Obama invited his audience to ask him questions and feel free to take him to task and tell him if he was a “bum and doing a bad job”.
But there was little danger of that. When he entered the hall, he received a rockstar welcome.
Obama at times spoke with passion, his voice rising above the cheers, while he was at times professorial, explaining credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities and breaking his promise to keep his answers short as he explained how and why America’s economy had plunged to such depths.
Despite the fact that he has only been in office two months, one of the first questions he fielded was from a woman asking him if he would run for re-election in four years’ time.
“I would rather be a good president taking on the tough issues for four years than a mediocre president for eight years,” he replied.
And if he fails to deliver on his promises on health care, education and fixing the economy, then it will be the voters and not he who decides whether he runs again.
Exotic animals trapped in net of Mexican drug trade - From the live snakes that smugglers stuff with packets of cocaine to the white tigers drug lords keep as exotic pets, rare animals are being increasingly sucked into Mexico’s deadly narcotics trade.
End of an era for the Amazon’s turbulent priests - They avoid taking buses, make sure friends know their schedules, and rarely go out when it’s dark. For the three foreign-born Roman Catholic bishops under death threat in Brazil’s northeastern state of Para, speaking out against social ills that plague this often-lawless area at the Amazon River’s mouth has come at a price.
West risks repeating Soviet mistakes in Afghanistan - The foreign warplanes swooped in just as the Afghan village of Ali Mardan was celebrating a wedding. Bombs slammed into the crowded village square, killing 30 men, women and children. After the smoke cleared and the dead were buried, all the able-bodied men left alive took up arms against the invaders. That was 1982…
Drought starts to bite in northern Kenya - Clouds of dust rising above the harsh scrub herald the arrival of more livestock at a borehole in northeastern Kenya, the end for some of a 45 km (28 mile) trek for water that must be repeated every few days. Drought is starting to bite into east Africa’s biggest economy and the government says 10 million people may face hunger and starvation.
World’s largest wetland threatened in Brazil - Jaguars still roam the world’s largest wetland Hyacinth Macaws nest in its trees, but advancing farms and industries are destroying Brazil’s Pantanal region at an alarming rate. “It’s a type of Noah’s Ark but it risks running aground,” biologist and tourist guide Elder Brandao de Oliveira says of the Pantanal.
Indonesian city grapples with quake threat - Remember the name Padang. Geologists say this Indonesian city of 900,000 people may one day be destroyed by a huge earthquake. “Padang sits right in front of the area with the greatest potential for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake,” said Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, a geologist at the Indonesian Science Institute.
‘Protest TV’ tries to bring down Georgian leader - It’s been dubbed “Protest TV”. A man in an improvised prison cell under the 24-hour gaze of television cameras, promising to stay put until Georgia’s president quits. Four cameras and a microphone on the ceiling capture his every shuffling move and political rant. An edited version is broadcast in the evening, before Gachechiladze goes live all night, often with guests.
U.S. farmland fetches top dollar despite recession- On a chilly day in January, more than 200 investors gathered in west central Illinois to haggle over 4,000 acres of prime farmland called the Kilton Farm in the heart of U.S. Corn Belt. The auction came during the most depressing climate for the U.S. economy in decades. But when the hammer fell…
Sunken Green treasures at risk from scuba looters - A corroded mechanism recovered by sponge divers from a sunken wreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1902 changed the study of the ancient world. Hundreds more wrecks beneath the eastern Mediterranean may contain treasures, but a new law opening Greece’s coastline to scuba diving has experts worried that priceless artifacts could disappear into the hands of treasure hunters.
In the north, Afghans fight hunger, not the Taliban - The United States’ decision to send more troops to Afghanistan will mean little to the people of northern Sang-i-Khel village, whose fight is not against Taliban insurgents but against hunger. “Life is not good. There was nothing last year. No water. No wheat. If there is no water this year, I will have to leave…”
percent of the population in 2008 from 12.6 percent in 2007, was well within the margin of error, although analysts found it nevertheless suggestive.
