The time has come for this international business blogger to bid you farewell. While working on this and brewha-ha has been fun, it has also taken a lot of time from my law practice and our blog, erblawg.
Thanks for being a good audience!
The US has been a leader in financial markets for quite a while now. Unfortunately, as anyone interested in international business knows, that may well be changing considerably. Why? Well, necessary deregulation combined with some archaic laws which remained led to a veritable regulation-phobia, and most everybody involved was making too much money to care. The result? That lack of oversight led to excessive risk taking by entities which were either implicitly government-backed or which, as it turns out, were simply “too large to fail.” That, and many Americans are sitting on properties which aren’t likely to be worth what they paid for them for quite a long time.
Now, that lack of oversight looks to beget yet another. As taxgirl reports on her blog, current proposals would give Treasury Secretary Paulson a $7000 billion blank check, with no congressional or judicial oversight whatsoever. Given the actions the executive branch has taken with oversight during the course of this administration, I’m somewhat skeptical that the money will be spent wisely or effectively.
If you’re in the US I urge you to read it and act, before it’s too late. Those of you abroad, many of whose financial markets are interdependent with ours, just hope we get this right the first time.
Tags: bailout, crisis, financial, international, Markets, mortgage, paulson, TreasuryAccording to the Financial Times, the UK now vies with the US for most developed financial market, with New York narrowly retaining its lead over London as a financial market.
It’s the UK’s second bite at the apple, having been the most important financial center through much of the 1800s.
Tags: london, Markets, New York, UK, USApparently, the prolonged slump continues to encourage smaller US businesses to look overseas for new markets, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s a great way to get a jump on the competition while taking advantage of the weakness of the dollar.
Tags: export, small businessThis seems like a clever project - the BBC have labelled a shipping container with their logo and will be tracking it over the next year to see where it goes and what it ships. You can track it too, using their GPS-driven online map. It’s a very clever and hands-on way to show how international trade works.
If you see it in your town let us know!
Tags: bbc, container, tradeAs I’ve mentioned before, Apple has its eye on the international market for its very popular iPhone. Unfortunately, British regulators have decided that Apple has misrepresented the capabilities of the product by failing to mention that neither Flash nor Java are available natively.
As two of the most common technologies for modern web developing, that’s a pretty big gap, and the advertising regulators weren’t impressed with Apple’s very literal interpretation of its own ad. The web is full of rumors as to when Flash and Java may appear, and developers Adobe and Sun claim they’re working on respective versions for the iPhone. For now, though, Apple has a bit of bad news to digest internationally.
Tags: Advertising, Apple, Flash, iPhone, JavaApparently, the Italians aren’t happy about consolidation in the airline industry, or perhaps they want to remain a country in the eyes of the late Frank Zappa. Either way, they’ve changed the laws to make sure Alitalia will live on, although whether it will be a healthy life remains to be seen. Given the tough economy for airlines, I tend to think it’s prolonging the agony more than anything else.
If you’ve flown Alitalia, let us know whether this is a good thing or not.
Tags: Alitalia, italy
So, while working on my last post, I found a cool tool I didn’t mention - it’s the National Atlas. You can click on a state and show its cities, counties, population, or even bodies of water. In fact, you can even display levels of arsenic in ground water, if you’d like, and you can mix and match any of the display items you’d like. There are also specialty maps showing additional information in a map format. Above, I’ve shown the distribution of zebra mussels in the US as of 2003, and if you’re interested you can check the progression from 1989 through the present. Amazing.
Now, it’s just for the US, but for anyone who needs a good online reference to regions or who is trying to review demographics and distances it’s an awesome tool. If, like me, you just like maps it’s just a whole lot of fun.
image public domain, nationalatlas.org
Tags: Atlas, National, United States
This blog isn’t really about politics, but a recent statement about Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin struck me. Apparently, she doesn’t need foreign policy experience because Alaska is so close to Russia, with variations on the theme citing from seventy to 300 miles or so. Without even addressing the validity of that logic to begin with, it got me thinking - just how far is Anchorage from Moscow, where the real seat of Russian power lies? The answer to that (and any distance questions) is here, at the Distance Calculator.
Apparently, Anchorage is about 4,350 miles from Moscow, only about four hundred miles closer than Philadelphia, where I’m writing this. I guess that means I’m almost qualified to be vice president. The Drudge report had a different take on this line of argument, but either way the distance calculator is kind of a cool tool.
image in the public domain, from nationalatlas.gov
Tags: Anchorage, distance, John McCain, Moscow, Republican, Sarah Palin, Vice PresidentThe University of Maryland runs an interesting International Policy program which conducts opinion polls around the world and posts them on their web site, WorldPublicOpinion.org. Most of the polls relate to politics/government policies and social issues like abortion and divorce but a recent poll looked at how folks in some of the largest Muslim countries view globalization and international trade.
The results of the poll: people in Egypt, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Indonesia, the Palestinian Territories, plus the Muslim population of Nigeria in general are very favorable towards globalization and international trade, with 63% saying that globalization is good for their own country.
This may come as a surprise to some who think of Muslim countries as trying to protect themselves against “western” influences, but it makes perfectly good sense to me. Globalization in general tends to be balancing global wealth, in effect a bit like Robin Hood, taking jobs from the rich countries and giving them to the poor countries. (Ok, I admit the analogy is not great, since we all know that global wealth is still very concentrated in the hands of a few, but middle classes are growing stronger almost everywhere.) The fact that globalization brings jobs to developing countries would tend to make people in those countries see globalization favorably; anti-globalization movements, on the other hand, mostly come from developed countries who are adjusting to job losses in some industries.”It’s the economy, stupid.”
To view the complete report, visit this web page.
Tags: globalization, muslim countries, world public opinionDoing business across cultures
Written by J. Christopher Erb [email], and Jean Mercedes [email] for b5media.
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