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Archive for the 'Global' Category
Climate-Change: Copenhagen and now?
So the vast “show and photo opportunity” meeting in Copenhagen is coming to an end now and could someone please tell what has actually been achieved in this huge media event.
A 3 page document with some teasers but now clear road-map on who-does-what-and-when. The talks on atomic weapons between the U.S. and Russia that happened at the same venue might prove to be more outcome oriented then that other show.
Will the bankster be allowed to expand their casino games with derivatives / virtual money creation for them to the so-called “Cap & Trade” certificates and thereby will most certainly create a world-wide crisis that will be bigger by orders of magnitude than the current financial crisis?
Will someone start to limit the global levels of pollution instead of fostering opaque trading schemes that are only good for story telling and profiteering - read: the industrialized nations reduced their pollutions - e.g. by 30% while at the same time the polluters have just shifted those factories somewhere else where these are then for whatever reason not counted into the scheme?
Will the whole thing like in other areas e.g. pandemics be handled by some kind of fund or financial instrument that in the past have regularly proven to be the most inefficient way, without any accountability or actual transparency, blowing money on themselves and their buddies, often institutionalized corruption and rates as bad as US$ 1000 put in and a mere US$10 arriving at the actual cause?
Well let’s see what the soon to happen next meeting in Berlin will bring…
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Animation: Credit Crisis visualized (one more time)
An outstanding visualization by Jonathan Jarvis - the 101 guide to the credit crisis animated.
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Health: Millions of lives to save - XDR-TB
…Legendary photojournalist James Nachtwey sees his TED Prize wish come true, as we share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB, a new, drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that’s touching off a global medical crisis…
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Financial Crisis 101: Why CDS could never work
Many still call or describe CDS (Credit Default Swaps) as a kind of insurance policy against credit risk to limit the risk of the lender. Well that might be so in their dreams or it has been used as a camouflage by the bankers to persuade the investors of the quality - or to mislead them on the lack of it - and suggest that there would be an underlying asset.
And that’s were all the problems start. To issue or construct a CDS there was never a requirement to actually being linked to, i.e. having provided or taken out the credit or having an contractual agreement with these two parties.
Everybody could issue CDS completely unregulated and unlimited. This is of course the reason for the incredible amounts being pushed around and it also provides the reason that - in rare cases CDS might have been an insurance against credit defaults - but in general these papers were only betting slips if certain events might occur most similar to betting on horses or dogs races.
If these instruments would have only been allowed to use for …
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Development Aid: The Investment Banks of the Humanitarian Sector
We had some discussions during the last weeks and a few times we ended up with the same question:
Are there institutions / instruments in the Humanitarian / Non-Profit sector that could be compared to the mess in the banking sector specifically with the Investment banks - a species which in that habitat by today got almost extinct.
And yes we found them.
Created during the last decade on the back of the MDG, many have been installed with targets like deregulation of development funding (yes this did happen - aka budgetary aid aka the thin line along institutionalized corruption), avoidance of regulatory frameworks (e.g. via PPPs), avoidance of multi-national oversight across geo-political blocks (to go around the UN) or to just create the illusion of acting / transparency.
And these organizations share many properties with private sector Investment banks:
Fancy names - most of them answer to names like global, facility, fund, emergency plan. They are almost completely unregulated and their activities are at best opaque…
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Video: How fair is fairtrade?
This short video / interview looks at some general aspects of the concept of fair trade and the brand with the same name.
Welcome to a very unfair edition of the Telegraph’s video show “Holy Cows”.
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US Credit Crisis: Fed borrowing shown as a chart
If you would like to see the “official version of how much money the Fed is pumping into banks and financial institutions recently, have a look at the chart below.
The gray shaded areas are times officially recognized as recessions. The underlying data is available at the St. Louis Fed web site together with a charting application that allows you to further customize the range and other parameters.
To better visualize the substantial change we have split the data into two charts:
The larger chart shows the borrowing from the FED for the period 1919 to 2007 and the smaller one data for 2008 only. As you can see during these almost 90 years borrowing remained continuously within a range of almost none to max 8 Billion USD per month.
Since the beginning of 2008 the numbers have drastically changed and are now at about 155 Billion USD per month. The monthly figures for 2008 in detail…
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Pictures of the evolution of space debris
With only 800 of the once launched 6000 satellites still being operational, the pile of space debris is becoming an ever-increasing amount of inactive space hardware orbiting around the Earth.
50% of the mess that besides old satellites also includes broken…
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Global Health: New Inexpensive Malaria Drug introduced by NGO initiative
Every year, malaria kills 1-2 million people and infects 300-500 million. 90 percent of deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease is present in over 100 countries, threatening 40 percent of the world’s population.
Malaria remains the single largest cause of death for children under five in Africa — it kills one child every thirty seconds worldwide. Today a new, inexpensive, easy-to-take anti-malaria pill is being introduced by French drug maker “Sanofi-Aventis” in partnership with “Drugs for Neglected Diseases”, a campaign started by the international medical charity “Doctors Without Borders”. Sanofi-Aventis and the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) announced today that ASAQ, the new fixed-dose combination of artesunate (AS) and amodiaquine (AQ), will soon be available throughout sub-Saharan Africa. ASAQ is the first drug developed by the FACT (Fixed-dose, Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy) partners, managed by DNDi in partnership with Sanofi-Aventis. Chloroquine, developed in 1934, was the first very cheap…
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WEF: Tag Cloud for 26-01-2007
Almost through with searching and processing documents on the World Economic Forum 2007. Here’s the Tag Cloud from documents (304) published on 26-January-2007…
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