By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: March 5th, 2012 China is so vast, its leaders so inscrutable, it’s future so tied to imponderables — including who will succeed premier Wen Jiabao, whether the country can realistically remain a one-party-state and the true depth of state-sponsored graft — that its mid-term economic prospects are hard to gauge. The country [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: November 17th, 2011 In its first ever formal assessment of the stability of China’s financial system, the International Monetary Fund has blamed heavy-handed state intervention for creating “vulnerabilities” in the system, at the same time as providing Beijing with a detailed blueprint for reform. What the IMF recommended and China’s reaction [...]
October 3rd, 2011 So it was endemic fraud and the collapse of the rule of law—not global imbalances or government and regulatory failure—that destroyed the financial system. In a keynote speech given at the Post Keynes conference in Denmark earlier this year, the Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith of the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: July 26th, 2011 The package of measures thrashed out by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European policymakers at their emergency summit on July 21 was immediately hailed for its boldness. After months of prevarication the continent’s leaders seemed to have pulled out all the [...]
June 1st, 2011 In wake of the resignation of “le seducteur extraordinaire” Dominique Strass-Kahn, we are in desperate need for some fresh thinking on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Yet the EU is determined to impose the French finance minister and former corporate lawyer Christine Lagarde as the IMF’s next boss (and she has been touring BRICs [...]
May 22nd, 2011 Even several days after the story first broke, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair beggars belief. One of the most powerful men in the world, on whose input it is argued the very future of eurozone depends — and someone who could easily have become the next president of France – stands accused of sexually [...]
May 16th, 2011 The surprise arrest last Saturday of the IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at Kennedy airport in New York on sex charges could not have come at a worse time for international financial markets. Rather than dwell on innocence, guilt or the detail of the offences of the former French finance minister is alleged [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: January 9th, 2011 One of Scotland’s leading investors has added his voice to the growing chorus of analysts who see 2011 as a year of possible meltdown for the euro. Euan Munro, head of multi-asset investing at Standard Life Investments, said that a combination of German reluctance to [...]
November 30th, 2010 Taiwanese-based Next Media Animation has produced its take on 300 years of Irish history. Okay it does simplify things a bit but it is funny. Or as @thestalwart says on Business Insider, “Not necessarily hilarious, but actually this is one of the most succinct explanations of the whole crisis we’ve seen yet.” [...]
November 27th, 2010 You know that things must be getting desperate in Ireland when significant numbers of the country’s population want to draft in Michael O’Leary, the controversial and famously outspoken Ryanair chief executive, to help run the country. According to a Reuters report the no-nonsense Cork-born airline chief, whose opinion of the country’s politicians [...]