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Rebuilding northeast Japan to take years, billions
newsonjapan.com/html/newsdesk/article/88049.php, posted 2011 by peter in business finance fukushima japan jpquake
It took only minutes for the earthquake and tsunami to devastate Japan's northeast. Rebuilding will take years - if it can be afforded. The relentless wall of water that the quake unleashed killed thousands, swept away whole towns, inundated roads and knocked ports, oil refineries, steel plants and factories out of action.
Experts say the cost of the destruction likely exceeds that of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake - estimated by Standard & Poor's to have totaled $159 billion. The four most severely affected prefectures - Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima and Ibaraki - are home to industries from farming to auto parts to electronics and make up some 6 percent of Japan's economy.
Hundreds of thousands of people have spent five nights with little food, water or heating in near-freezing temperatures as they dealt with the loss of homes and loved ones.
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Urban decline in Japan: The alarm bells of Nagasaki | The Economist
www.economist.com/node/17909982, posted 2011 by peter in finance japan
In Mr Ikeguchi’s youth, when Nagasaki was rebuilding itself after nuclear devastation in 1945, the streets near his house rang with the sound of shipwrights walking to the Mitsubishi yard each morning. Now Nagasaki’s economy has gone still. The port city’s fortunes show how three forces sapping Japan’s energies—depopulation, overcentralisation and foreign competition—are hurting not just rural backwaters but once-prosperous cities on Japan’s fringe. The phenomenon remains partly hidden. Residents of luxury apartments across the bay complain about Irifune’s shabby appearance. If only they knew, Mr Ikeguchi says, how bad it really is.
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Dreaming of a New Edo Era by Guy Sorman - Project Syndicate
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sorman12/English, posted 2010 by peter in asia finance japan politics
This second Edo era may sound like a poetic utopia, but it has some influence: Sakakibara observes that Japanese students do not study abroad anymore, and that “nobody learns English.” At a time when South Koreans are becoming more globalized, learning English, and welcoming a growing number of immigrants, Japan is entering a “de-globalization process.”
That is a worrying trend, and not only for Japan: South Korea can hardly stand alone as the lone Asian democracy. If the Japanese do not wake up from their Edo dream, Asia might very well become a Chinese empire.
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A Superpower in Decline: Is the American Dream Over? - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447,00.html, posted 2010 by peter in china eu finance history politics usa
The dream was the country's driving force. It made Florida, Hollywood and the riches of Goldman Sachs possible, and it attracted millions of immigrants. Now, however, Americans are discovering that there are many directions that life can take, and at least one of them points downward. The conviction that stocks have always made everyone richer has become as much of a chimera in the United States as the belief that everyone has the right to own his own home, and then a bigger home, a second car and maybe even a yacht. But at some point, everything comes to an end.
The United States is a confused and fearful country in 2010. American companies are still world-class, but today Apple and Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are investing in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing, and hardly at all in the United States. Some 47 percent of Americans don't believe that the America Dream is still realistic.
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'Peak Oil' and the German Government: Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis -SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - Internat
www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,715138,00.html, posted 2010 by peter in energy finance oil politics
The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.
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Japan's debt problem: Sleepwalking towards disaster | The Economist
www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15868024&source=hptextfeature, posted 2010 by peter in finance japan opinion politics
There are three big reasons why the crisis in Japan’s public finances will eventually come to a head. The first concerns government bonds. The state has for years relied on domestic savers to buy them. But as Japan’s people age and run down their savings, they will have less money to invest in government bonds. An IMF paper calculates that even if the savings rate remains close to where it is now, gross debt may exceed gross household assets by 2015. Japan might then have to rely on foreigners to finance its debt, and they will want much higher returns. That will, at the very least, provide an acute reality check. Goldman Sachs says some foreign investors are already positioning themselves for a “meltdown”.
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The agonies of the eurozone reflect a far more significant hidden deficit | Timothy Garton Ash | Comment is free | The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/24/greece-hhhh-hrgbhjklgbr, posted 2010 by peter in eu finance politics
Behind the monetary lurks the fiscal; behind the fiscal, the economic; behind the economic, the political; and behind the political, the historical. The deepest reality underlying this crisis is that the personal experiences and memories that have pushed European integration ahead for 65 years, since 1945, are losing their force. The personal memory of war, occupation, humiliation, European barbarism; fear of Germany, including Germany's fear of itself; the Soviet threat, the cold war, the "return to Europe" as a guarantee of hard-won freedom; the hope of restored European greatness.
These were massive biographical motivators, which drove people like Mitterrand and Kohl even unto the euro. Can Europeans go on building Europe without such profound motivators? Are there new ones in sight?
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Washington threatens to bypass Europe in battle for bank data | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 05.02.2010
www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5220092,00.html, posted 2010 by peter in eu fascism finance politics privacy terrorism usa
Members of a European Parliament subcommittee dealt a blow to US-EU relations by voting to reject a proposed bank data sharing deal between the US and Europe in a preliminary vote on Thursday.
The agreement allows the US to access information gathered by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) about bank transfers within Europe. SWIFT manages global transactions between thousands of financial institutions in over 200 countries.
Members of the parliament's civil liberties committee voted by 29 votes to 23 to reject the SWIFT deal, arguing that the deal fails to protect the privacy of EU citizens.
US authorities say access to bank details is vital to counterterrorism efforts, but many in Europe object to the widespread invasion of privacy.
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Thomson Reuters NewsScope Archive - Financial - Thomson Reuters
thomsonreuters.com/products_services/financial/financial_products/event_driven_trading/newsscope_archive, posted 2009 by peter in ai business finance news nlp trading
Use past news events to enhance your program trading strategies. Thomson Reuters NewsScope Archive is a comprehensive, machine-readable archive of Reuters news that presents events exactly as they broke to the markets. Each release of information is timestamped to the millisecond and tagged with an array of metadata fields for easy machine consumption.
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Brussels Blogger » Blog Archive » SWIFT - EU to grant USA nearly unlimited access to all EU banking data
brusselsblogger.blogactiv.eu/2009/11/26/swift-eu-to-grant-usa-nearly-unlimited-access-to-all-eu-banking-data/, posted 2009 by peter in eu fascism finance opinion privacy terrorism usa
The move of SWIFT the data server to Switzerland would be an excellent opportunity to stop the nearly unlimited access of US authorities on EU bank transactions. But EU justice and interior minister are apparently keen agree a deal as soon as possible, on 30 November. Why 30 November? Because one day later, on 1 December 2009, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty will be in force and would allow the European Parliament to play a major role in the negotiations of the deal with the USA. A deal one day before will be a slap in the face of democracy in the EU.
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