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rffrydr
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 Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2011 7:35 am Post subject: |
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"Self-referential capitalism" in Italy--is it really that "un-german"?
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a9b07fb8-0b75-11e1-9a61-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dakaozvJ
| Quote: | | It goes without saying that these sophisticated and interdependent webs of power and influence are not confined to the world of politics. Corporate Italy also abounds with these structures of tribal capitalism. Take the recent example of Italy's sixth-largest bank, Banca Popolare di Milano. Patently in need of a complete overhaul of its governance, management and finances, its entrenched local union owners and Milanese bigwigs mobilised their networks to fend off even the efforts of an apparently impotent Bank of Italy to force change. The message was clear. In spite of everything the system does not want reform. The financial adviser to BPM’s recidivists was Milan investment bank Mediobanca, itself a perfect example of the indestructible nature of Italy’s networks of resistance and power. |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 9:46 am Post subject: |
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A new kind of german efficiency:
http://www.economist.com/node/21531032
| Quote: | | Take Italy, say German officials. No sooner had the European Central Bank intervened this summer to stabilise its bond market than the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, retreated from his austerity programme, under pressure from within his coalition. Fear of damnation, not well-meaning exhortation, is the only way to right sinning ways. So the raging fire in the markets should not be quenched; at times it should even be stoked, for example by demanding that private creditors take losses on Greek debt. |
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:05 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | That was what the currency union always implied: entire peoples had to change their ways of life. Conceived as a tool for integrating Germany into Europe, and preventing Germans from dominating others, it has become the opposite. For better or for worse, the Germans now own Europe. If the rest of Europe is to continue to enjoy the benefits of what is essentially a German currency, they need to become more German. And so, once again, all sorts of people who would rather not think about what it means to be “German” are compelled to do so. |
| Quote: | | This is what makes the German case so peculiar. If they had been merely the only big, developed nation with decent financial morals, they would present one sort of picture, of simple rectitude. But they had done something far more peculiar: during the boom German bankers had gone out of their way to get dirty. They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds. The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.) In their own country, however, these seemingly crazed bankers behaved with restraint. The German people did not allow them to behave otherwise. It was another case of clean on the outside, dirty on the inside. The German banks that wanted to get a little dirty needed to go abroad to do it. |
| Quote: | | The Commerzbank Tower is 53 stories high and unusually shaped: it looks like a giant throne. The top of the building, the arms of the throne, looks more decorative than useful. The interesting thing, said a friend, who visited often, was a room at the top, peering down over Frankfurt. It was a men’s bathroom. Commerzbank executives had taken him up to the top to show him how, in full view of the world below, he could urinate on Deutsche Bank. And if he sat in the stall with the door open … |
| Quote: | | Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (xxx), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.” |
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109#gotopage1
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 9:54 am Post subject: |
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With the same dogged determination and chinese strength in numbers applied in, say, industrial espionage, china takes on the once impregnable SAT:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_20/b4228058558042.htm
Most of it is brute study force (53days, 5hr/day memorizing 100 wds) and using math super-superiority to cheat the verbal section, but there's some clever discoveries here including gaming our cultural predilections:
| Quote: | | Jia Wen, a 25-year-old graduate student in finance at Boston College, recounted some other odd New Oriental gimmicks she learned for the TOEFL's listening section. Her teacher told her to remember that if the answer choices involve food, for instance, hamburgers always taste better than pizza. And that girls in the passages are always more intelligent and harder-working than boys. "You don't need to understand," says Wen, who scored 110. "After many practices, you can recognize the correct answer just by looking at the choices." |
| Quote: | Silu Wang and Zhu Xinyu, two Beijing teenagers who each scored 2200 on the SAT, say New Oriental deserves much of the credit. Zhu, 18, prepared essays on luminaries living and dead, such as Thomas Edison, Coco Chanel, James Cameron, J.D. Salinger, Howard Schultz, Woody Allen, and Florence Nightingale. She received the maximum score on the essay, she says. Zhu was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Virginia. She is a "wonderful student from one of the best schools in China" and excelled in an English-language phone interview, says Muth, the UVA associate dean of admissions.
Wang, 19, chose Steve Jobs as her preferred subject. "His experience covers a lot of topics," she says. "You can always use Steve Jobs." |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2011 9:22 pm Post subject: |
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Yes, there's the scar of Weimar. But it is forgotten just how much labor in europe is still indexed to inflation (or greater in the case of Volkswagen). Germans (yes, this means Trichet) are natural hikers.
Don't believe this will go too far...or, as far is already priced in the curve. A lot of jockeying for the Saddle right now.
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:06 am Post subject: |
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Re-capitalization with chinese characteristics:
| Quote: | ....Ping An fell 2.8 percent to 49.45 yuan. The company raised HK$19.4 billion ($2.5 billion) selling shares to a Hong Kong billionaire. The share sale to Chow Tai Fook Nominee Ltd. is “less justified” than a full rights issue from the viewpoint of existing shareholders, Deutsche Bank AG said.
While the placement will “strengthen” the group’s overall solvency ratio above 200 percent even when considering the capital needs of Shenzhen Development Bank Co., “we question the strategic value in introducing Chow Tai Fook,” Bob Leung, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a report dated yesterday. |
Always look to Mr. Big first.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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Russia's love of oil and diamonds springs from ideas that they are one and the same. Abiogenic origin of crude could put a big hole in the the already tattered "Peak Oil" theory:
http://www.economist.com/node/18226803?story_id=18226803
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 8:28 pm Post subject: |
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The Prius: one car, three very different mileage ratings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy_mJzC6YkQ
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:04 pm Post subject: |
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"Globalization" itself is a cycle albeit a grand one and larger than the longest , "secular" time frame frames the markets will ever trade in. You may have heard of cocaine and tobacco traces found in mummies on tv shows searching out the "lost" Atlantis but more relevant to business at hand note this curiosity of history. At the beginnings of the first great trade routes connecting east and west was the pepper trade built off the serendipity of the monsoons.
| Quote: | | The familiar foodstuffs pepper, sugar, and the orange, for example, are ultimately from Sanskrit. Pepper existed in Old English as piper, and comes from a prehistoric West Germanic word itself ultimately, through Latin and Greek, from Sanskrit pippalī "berry, peppercorn." Sugar arrived in the 13th century, via French, medieval Latin, and Arabic from Sanskrit śarkarā "grit, ground sugar." Orange is from the same century, having reached English from Sanskrit through Old French, Italian, Arabic, and Persian. |
The Romans brought olive and fish oil in thousands and thousands of amphorae but what they brought most was what the indians wanted most: gold. I came, as is want from an empire, in coinage. No doubt they thought innate organizational logic of money would also buy influence and build (like our modern-day exporters of democracy) "role-models." NOT. It went to the women. It went for decoration and as such was transformed. There is a whole style of Tamil necklaces made of coins that persists today. Indeed it was even forged as the style spread throughout Kush:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/cm/g/gold_pendant_with_designs_copi.aspx
The sense of destiny with which we infuse modern-day american capitalism is already transformed before it leaves our shores. Don't be surprised that its immutable logic is transformed along the way. We have already grown comfortable with banana republics, crony capitalism, authoritarian capitalism and dictatorial capitalism. Just because a culture buys what we sell doesn't mean they believe in what we sell or even want what we think we are selling. And you can globalize that: tibetans use their chinese washing machines to make butter.
| Quote: | ....The Romans expanded trade with the Tamil Chola, Pandyan and Chera dynasties, establishing trading settlements which would remain long after the fall of the Western Roman empire. Spices were not the only commodity that interested the Greeks and Romans - live xxx were highly prized as garden decor in ancient Greece. In exchange, the Indians got what they wanted from the Greco-Roman world - gold, and lots of it.
Along with gold there were other Mediterranean commodities such as copper, silver, olive oil, and wine, but it was gold that the Indians were after. Rather than use the bartered gold for currency, as did the Greeks, the Indians were simply in search of new ways to decorate themselves. By the latter half of the first century AD Pliny the Elder said of this trade imbalance: "We must be mad bankrupting ourself for India" [5]. One notable manifestation of India's preoccupation with gold and self-decoration was in the Hindu tradition of the "sixteen adornments." |
http://www.allaboutgemstones.com/jewelry_history_india.html
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