Loomnie

Robert Frisk writes in The Independent:

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn’t need Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Here. H/T Keith Hart on FB.

Joris Luyendijk, Dutch anthropologist and journalist, is currently blogging an anthropological study of bankers he’s doing in the City of London for Guardian. From the introduction to the blog:

It is quite a change for me, exploring bankers. I used to do anthropological fieldwork among students in the slums of Cairo, then worked as a Middle East correspondent going back and forth between Hamas leaders and Jewish settlers. The latter were people who knew they might die at any moment for their convictions, and had made their peace with that. Meanwhile those students lived off less than a dollar a day.

Compare this to the bankers and I have moved from freestyle boxing to billiards. Then again, readers’ responses may not be that different.

When I wrote about Israel and the Palestinians some readers would judge an article exclusively by whether it was likely to make one camp look good or the other. In particular, pieces that humanised their objects of hate elicited very aggressive letters to the editor – or worse. I expect the same thing with bankers.

The Middle East is a pretty intense place but unless you have family living or serving there, for most readers it is also a pretty far away place. Finance is not. If somebody told you your savings aren’t safe, she’d have your full and immediate attention, wouldn’t she? But if she then said the words “bank reform” many would have to suppress a yawn.

This is paradoxical. Finance directly affects everyone’s interests, but many have a hard time maintaining their interest in it. But as the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the following three years have shown, the financial world is too important to leave to the bankers – in fact in some countries democracy is beginning to look like the system by which electorates decide which politician gets to implement what the markets dictate. The people in this very powerful sector are worth learning more about. And the good news is, when you listen to them in their own words, that can actually be pretty entertaining. And humanising.

The first batch of posts is a series of profiles of different actors who work in the City. You can read the whole thing here.

The closest thing to this on Wall Street is Karen Ho’s book Liquidated, which I wrote about here.

A feature article on Al Jazeera. Here is what I wrote a while ago on the subject.

From NYTimes: TRUNG SON, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the residents hoped.

Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing completion. But only a few hundred Vietnamese ever got jobs. Most of the workers were Chinese, about 1,500 at the peak. Hundreds of them are still here, toiling by day on the dusty construction site and cloistered at night in dingy dormitories.

“The Chinese workers overwhelm the Vietnamese workers here,” said Nguyen Thai Bang, 29, a Vietnamese electrician.

China, famous for its export of cheap goods, is increasingly known for shipping out cheap labor. These global migrants often work in factories or on Chinese-run construction and engineering projects, though the range of jobs is astonishing: from planting flowers in the Netherlands to doing secretarial tasks in Singapore to herding cows in Mongolia — even delivering newspapers in the Middle East.

But a backlash against them has grown. Across Asia and Africa, episodes of protest and violence against Chinese workers have flared. Vietnam and India are among the nations that have moved to impose new labor rules for foreign companies and restrict the number of Chinese workers allowed to enter, straining relations with Beijing.

In Vietnam, dissidents and intellectuals are using the issue of Chinese labor to challenge the ruling Communist Party. A lawyer sued Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung over his approval of a Chinese bauxite mining project, and the National Assembly is questioning top officials over Chinese contracts, unusual moves in this authoritarian state.

Chinese workers continue to follow China’s state-owned construction companies as they win bids abroad to build power plants, factories, railroads, highways, subway lines and stadiums. From January to October 2009, Chinese companies completed $58 billion of projects, a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

From Angola to Uzbekistan, Iran to Indonesia, some 740,000 Chinese workers were abroad at the end of 2008, with 58 percent sent out last year alone, the Commerce Ministry said. The number going abroad this year is on track to roughly match that rate. The workers are hired in China, either directly by Chinese enterprises or by Chinese labor agencies that place the workers; there are 500 operational licensed agencies and many illegal ones. Continue reading.

From Deutsche Welle: Iranian filmmaker Narges Kalhor has applied for asylum in Germany after her visit to a film festival. The move is likely to ruffle feathers in Tehran, as her father is the media advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Narges Kalhor decided at the last minute that she would not return to Tehran after showing her film at a human rights film festival in Nuremberg.

“I had definitely planned to go back,” Kalhor told the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD) on Wednesday. But shortly before she was due at the airport, a phone call from Iran let her know she would probably be arrested upon her arrival in Tehran. She therefore decided to apply for asylum in the southern German city.

Kalhor’s father Mehdi is said to be one of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s closest confidants. The former documentary film producer has advised the Iranian president on cultural issues since August 2005.

Iran’s Kafkaesque penal system

Kalhor attended the Nuremberg festival with her short film “The Rake.” It is based on Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” but the story is transported to Iran.

In “The Rake” people’s crimes are etched into their skin

In the film, a machine called “the rake” stands in a deserted cellar vault. It punishes convicted prisoners by carving the commandment they had disobeyed into their bodies. The only possible escape from this procedure is death – there is no chance of defense.

“This film reflects our emotional situation in Iran,” Kalhor told the FTD. “I hope viewers will recognize the parallels.” Kalhor both wrote the script and directed the film.

Nuremberg’s “Perspective” is the first German festival to be dedicated to the subject of human rights. This year, the program included a special series on films from Iran.

News spread quickly

Kalhor told news agency AFP that she came to the event to establish contacts.

“This is important for me as a filmmaker,” Kalhor said. She hadn’t expected her participation in “Perspective” to spread so quickly. After all, this was “a small festival in a small town,” she said.

After her arrival in Germany, her mother told her that news about the film festival was available through the Internet in Iran. After the first screening of the 10-minute film, her sister had called her to tell her: “They’re asking where you are. It’s better if you stay in Germany,” Kalhor said.

Mehdi Kalhor confirmed to the Iranian Mehr news agency that his daughter had applied for asylum, but said he did not know what her reasons were. He said he had not seen his daughter since he divorced his wife a year ago. His daughter had been exploited by “enemies of the country” for propaganda purposes, he said.

“I have had political problems with my father for some time,” Kalhor told AFP.

Kalhor took part in the mass protests in Iran this summer following the controversial presidential elections. Though none of her friends died, some were arrested and treated poorly, she said.

“From the moment of arrest until their release, they were treated violently,” she told the FTD.

The 25-year-old is currently in a refugee center near Nuremberg, festival spokesman Matthias Rued said.

1. Remember the list of debtors that was published a last week by the Central Bank of Nigeria? Well, some of the money is now recovered

2. It seems that the Nigerian stock market is getting over the initial shock of the banking reform

3. More on the effects of the rescue of Nigerian banks by the Central Bank

4. Now to the US, 1,000 Banks to Fail In Next Two Years: Bank CEO

5. How does one modernise the Middle East’s Economies?

President Obama granted his very first one-on-one interview as a president to a media house that broadcasts out of Dubai. The White House Blog titles the post that announces the interview ‘President to Muslim World: “Americans are not your enemy”‘, which clearly shows that the interview was meant as an interview, or an address, if you will, to the Muslim world. The interview has him talking about having Muslim relatives, and about having lived in Muslim countries. The Economists Democracy in America blog thinks it was a good move for the president to have granted his first interview to a foreign media house, because an American media outfit would have probably asked Rob Blagojevich-related questions. That is true, but I also think that the interview is part of his defense and foreign policies. He did the symbolic thing of making sure that his first call as a president was made to Mahmoud Abass; that, I think, was an apology of sorts for having kept quiet during the recent Gaza bombings. Now, he has made his first interview one in which he talks directly to the Muslim world, and one in which he makes them understand that he does not see them as the enemy.

Responses
Responses to the interview have varied widely, from ‘I am so proud to be American’ to ‘Bush protected Israel, Obama is going to destroy her’. (You can check the Al Arabiya website for some of the comments.) My impression is that this is a really smart man, who understands that so much is tied to a peaceful relationship with the Muslim world. I think this interview is a great blow to Al Qaeda, and that it makes a case for extremist Islam a lot harder to sell. But, in case anybody thinks this is a sign of weakness, just remember that this same man who is saying that America is not the enemy of the Muslim world commands the best-equipped Army in the world.

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From The Economist:

Though banking standards have certainly risen a lot in recent years, they still lag behind those of America and the European Union, particularly in terms of transparency. In April, United Bank for Africa, one of the country’s biggest, fell foul of American regulators who served the bank with a $15m fine for ignoring anti-money-laundering regulations despite several warnings. “There’s no resemblance at all between operating in Britain or America and operating in Nigeria,” says Fola Fagbule, a research analyst with Afrinvest. “It’s light years apart, and it’s an issue [the banks] need to address”. Read in full.