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rffrydr
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 Posted: Tue May 15, 2012 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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What's interesting to me in this quote from today's WSJ is not the chinese "willingness to eat bitterness" but the abject confidence manifest in their collective willingness to judge and shape the world beating country they all know they will be. World domination from behind a wall doesn't work out very well usually:
| Quote: | .....Underneath the notice, the Beijing PSB pasted an image of the “strike hard” fist typically associated with Chinese public crackdown campaigns, along with the number for a hotline residents can call to report suspicious foreigners.
The Beijing Public Security Bureau didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The state-run Xinhua news agency said Beijing has about 120,000 foreign residents.
The clean-up campaign arrives in the midst of a heated discussion among Chinese social media users about the way foreigners comport themselves in the country. Last week, the stories of two foreigners – one an American who bought French fries for a homeless woman in the city of Nanjing, the other a Brazilian man who was badly beaten by a trio of thieves after trying to stop a woman from having her bag pickpocketed in Dongguan – spread quickly online as Chinese Internet users engaged in a round of soul-searching over the belief that Good Samaritans in China are in relatively short supply.
A similar discussion took place late last year after a foreign tourist, 34-year-old Uruguayan Maria Fernanda, jumped into Hangzhou’s West Lake to save a drowning woman as dozens of Chinese onlookers stood idly by.
Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke, noted online in China for carrying his own backpack and attempting to buy coffee with a coupon, has continued to build on his popularity in China, most recently by deigning to kneel when talking to a nine-year-old girl in Shanghai.
But much of that goodwill has been erased in recent days thanks to the wide circulation online of a video that appears to show a foreigner caught in the middle of sexually assaulting a Chinese woman. In the video, uploaded on Wednesday and viewed more than 10 million times on Chinese video site Youku (warning: disturbing content), the foreigner is pulled away from the woman, scuffles briefly with a Chinese man and is later shown lying motionless in the street, where he is hit and kicked again before police arrive.
In a notice later posted on Sina Weibo, Beijing police said the foreigner in the video, a Briton traveling in China on a tourist visa, had “acted indecently” toward the woman after drinking and had been detained pending an investigation. Sina Weibo users subsequently flooded the post with comments, many of which accused the police of trying to soft-peddle the incident.
It’s unclear whether the incident is related to the crackdown. But the announcement of the campaign nevertheless prompted an outpouring of anti-foreigner vitriol on social media on Tuesday, propelling “illegal foreigners” into the top 10 list of trending topics on Sina Weibo.
“I raise both hands and both feet in support of clearing out illegal foreigners: Send that foreign trash rolling back to where they belong,” wrote a Sina Weibo user posting under the handle Wenfeng Qingluo, one of many who complained that the China had become a destination for people with poor prospects in their home countries. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2012 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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"Be more german"? They go deep: back to original trauma at birth:
http://www.economist.com/node/21552567
| Quote: | | The “co-ordinated market economy” has withstood dictatorship, wars, revolutions and globalisation. It prizes trust, relying on the principle that nobody will “make full use of his freedom” by grabbing everything he can, says Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld. Its elements are “so tightly meshed”, he has written, “that it would be difficult to replace any one of them with an alien component.” |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 9:06 pm Post subject: |
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Healthier, wealthier, wiser....and suicidally unhappy about it:
http://www.economist.com/node/21546058
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 11:31 am Post subject: |
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The "china jeep":
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 6:09 am Post subject: |
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From today's WSJ, "Asia's Endangered Species, the Expat":
| Quote: | ...In fact, three out of four senior executives hired in Asia by multinationals were Asian natives already living in the region, according to a Spencer Stuart analysis of 1,500 placements made from 2005 to 2010. Just 6% were noncitizens from outside of Asia.
"It's a strategic necessity to be integrated in the culture. Otherwise, the time to learn all of it takes forever," said Arie Y. Lewin, a professor of strategy and international business at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He adds that locals may better navigate a business culture where copycats and competitors often play by different rules. |
"Takes to much time...." that's funny. It's also racist. It's also a lie. What it's saying is that "China for The 21st Century" is a chinese china.
There used to be a time when aisia looked up to the West--and wanted what we had. That might still be true 
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2012 7:10 am Post subject: |
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That old Italian way, internecine rivalry, may be giving way--or cemented:
Italian insurance: a tangled web
| Quote: | Dan Brown could easily top The Da Vinci Code with a page-turner on Italy’s web of banking, political and corporate interests. But even he might struggle to decipher the way bankers and company executives exercise power through cross-shareholdings, nods and winks. A planned four-way merger of Italian insurers steered by investment bank Mediobanca as, variously, underwriter and financier – with support from lender UniCredit (itself a Mediobanca investor and investee) – is a case in point. Mediobanca, which already controls Generali, Italy’s largest insurer by premiums, with a 13 per cent stake, is trying to prop up another insurer, Fondiaria-SAI (Fonsai) to create a business that would compete with Generali. Fonsai has been laid low by paying out dividends at the expense of solvency; it urgently needs €1.1bn of capital.
The rescue plan involves merging Fonsai with controlling investor Premafin, and also Unipol and Milano Assicurazioni – funded by a string of cash calls. Premafin, controlled by the Ligresti family (led by Mediobanca investor Salvatore Ligresti), is groaning under debt – the bulk (€1.1bn) of it owed to Mediobanca. Unipol’s cash call helps fund Premafin’s capital increase, so easing the merger. But for all its complexity, the deal does little to stand Fonsai on its own two feet.
Cue private equity firm Sator and investor Palladio Finanziaria, which have made a far cleaner offer that gives Premafin investors more cash to back Fonsai’s rights issue, and averts an unnecessary merger of convenience. The cash raised would support an independent Fonsai – and keep Mediobanca’s loan safe.
As with Mr Brown’s book, the urge to throw the whole deal at a wall is intense. Sator-Palladio offers the chance to boost insurance sector competition, and a rare opportunity to modernise corporate Italy. |
--LEX
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sat Mar 10, 2012 6:49 pm Post subject: |
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Somebody finally tried to put a number(s) on it:
http://www.economist.com/node/21543487
| Quote: | | Cultural ties matter in business because they lower transaction costs. Tribal loyalty fosters trust. Cultural affinity supercharges communication. Reading a contract is useful, but you also need to be able to read people. Even as free trade and electronic communications bring the world closer together, kinship still counts. Indians in Silicon Valley team up with other Indians; Chinese-Americans do business with Taiwan and Shanghai. |
That works in reverse too!
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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Deng's Constantinian epiphany that in the word "shareholder" communism and capitalism could find common ground may have found it's mascot, Walmart. Sometimes is all comes together, one coddling dictator to another:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/how-walmart-is-changing-china/8709/
| Quote: | | At first blush, such a pedigree would seem to make Walmart an unlikely candidate for an alliance with the People’s Republic of China. And when the company arrived there in 1996, the country was terra incognita for Walmart executives. But the Bentonville behemoth actually shared more commonalities with its new partner than were first apparent—a curious alignment of goals and policies, even of organizational structures and “ideologies.” |
It's a fine line between "the customer always comes first," to "the customer always eats bitterness." As the chinese say, all extremes become their opposite.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 8:16 am Post subject: |
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Vedanta Corporate Structure:
http://www.vedantaresources.com/group.aspx
And all they do is dig stuff up. 
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:39 am Post subject: |
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| rffrydr wrote: | Makes sense to me:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/02/01/858921/sino-forests-diminishing-returns/
I don't know that I'd buy Sino-Forest bonds now as the company has become an international pariah--and probably a whipping boy pretty soon by its own government. But "hard assets" in china are often soft--determined by who knows who about what may or may not be "available." Just like investing in the world's model company, Exxon! |
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-14/sino-forest-truth-may-never-be-known-chairman.html
The "truth" is a faith. $50-million investigating what is and is not real....wasted. Do you own a mine? --a tranche of oil exploration rights in Africa, Kurdistan...Gulf of Mexico? What about a bank? What about a "national champion" EADS; who is also a bank, SocGen? A CDO? Lockheed? Raytheon? where your contracts are decided in smoke-filled backrooms in the Pentagon. What about widgets? What about Saab? Now you see it; now you don't. What is Chrysler when the supplier's trucks stopped unloading? What is Insurance when a hurricane wipes through the East Coast? What is any company september, 08? --What is any company selling Bernanke puts?
It's all faith. See http://www.marketthoughts.com/forum/in-god-we-trust-t10258,highlight,god.html
That's why were in a corporate bond "bubble." This is why the dividend movement is just getting underway (and why buybacks will be resisted). Sino-Forest is only a special case. This company could only exist in the shadows. Now under the light of day "the doors close quickly." Reputation is valued more than law. Who are we to judge the opposite? The "lesson" in not to run from such practices arms flailing in moral turpitude. On this front the french are well ahead of us. Embrace the "grey areas"--diversify!
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2012 8:58 am Post subject: |
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Makes sense to me:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/02/01/858921/sino-forests-diminishing-returns/
I don't know that I'd buy Sino-Forest bonds now as the company has become an international pariah--and probably a whipping boy pretty soon by its own government. But "hard assets" in china are often soft--determined by who knows who about what may or may not be "available." Just like investing in the world's model company, Exxon!
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:12 am Post subject: |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/europe/italians-embrace-a-hero-after-cruise-ship-accident.html?_r=1&hp
“The notion of running away is part of our history, and nails the Italian character,” Mr. Merlo said, noting that cowardice was a theme in many great films of Italy’s neorealist tradition. “That is our history, even when we try to modify it,” he said. And, he added, “our moments of greatness, often, have an element of the accidental hero,” as in the case of Captain De Falco.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2012 10:13 am Post subject: |
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You can't farm spiders--they're cannibals! But don't that stop you:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics
I've been waiting for these goats to pay off since I came to the board....we're just about seeing it. "The Next Big Thing" always seems to take a long long long time. There's a lesson there.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Dec 25, 2011 8:22 am Post subject: |
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Before Apple there was the original sin. No mere fruit, I give you the product, Apple:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/21/111121fa_fact_seabrook
Indeed culture is our first industry. Voted: the "Honeycrisp" ranks with Google as one of 25 innovations that changed the world.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2011 10:04 am Post subject: |
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Let's hope this is the dying gasp of culture succumbing to technocratic indifference:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-13/monti-s-party-of-bankers-prompts-warning.html
| Quote: | | In the 1970s and 1980s, Italy suffered terrorism of all political stripes, from the 1980 bombing of Bologna’s railway station by neo-fascists that killed 85 people to the murder of former Premier Aldo Moro in 1978 by Marxist-inspired Red Brigade militants. That group’s most recent victims were Labor Ministry consultants Massimo D’Antona and Marco Biagi, both of whom were working on overhauling the job market when they were gunned down in 1999 and 2002, respectively. |
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