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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »
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… Read More »