Some differences with the UK & US and Sri LankaJackPoint,
1. The public debt in those countries has shot up recently because of the bailouts. UK debt was around 40% prior to the crisis.
2. They have already achieved a high standard of living. Even if they stagnate or decline, it is from a high base. We are still poor.
3. The public debt, apart from the bailouts has funded for the most part infrastructure and services of value. In SL it is being used to fund interest repayments, pay salaries (for which very little is delivered). What infrastructure has built gone to the pockets of cronies in building white elephants.
a) this would be against the ideology of free marketProviding energy at cost as against free market prices would probably enable wages to be reduced while maintaining same standard of living and while making US manufactured goods competitive because of reduced labor cost and energy cost. But then unhappily there is the free market ideology and energy lobby standing in the way of that idea.
b) the energy company lobby (lobby is another word for bribery and corruption) is too strongly entrenched in US politics.
As they say talk is cheap, and show me the money. So what is the money, (i.e people who stand to loose or gain based on Sri Lanka's economy) doing. Sovereign Yield spreads and CDS spreads on Sri Lanka indicate medium risk, and definitely nowhere near the Greece's CDS spreads. Another indicator that even the man on the street understands are foreign exchange black market rates and property prices. The difference between the Official exchange rate and the Black market is a about two rupees. Property prices are rising even in Jaffna. If the economy (and human rights) were so bad you would expect property prices to decrease and the black market exchange rate to increase. i.e. People desperately want to sell their property and move it out of the country by buying foreign currency in the Black Market.You can also read about Life in Argentina after it defaulted and Life in Russia after the economic collapse. You can also read a tongue in the cheek article (initially emailed around 2008) on Mortgage debt (MBS) and the dynamics of the US-China economic relations Fannie Freddie and the Chinese: The IOU Laws
Assets 1,081,773.00
Liabilities 1,036,174.00
Equity 45,599.00
# of shares 395.44
i.e. Book value /per share = 45,999/395.0 = 115.00
Thats the price Warren Buffet bought at.
We know that level 3 assets are 70 billion
i.e. 7% of assets (70,000/1,081,773)
Does not sound a big deal, right ?
Say now your Level 3 assets are over valued.
Value needs to be reduced by 30%, i.e approx 20 billion (30% =20 billion/70 billion).
30% haircut on Level 3 assets is very optimistic, more likely 80% right now.
You equity is now 45,599.00 - 20,000 = 25,599
i.e. Book value /per share = 25,999/395.0 = 65.00
And thats still optimistic. If its 80% GS is insolvent. !!
He then lays out his theory of decline: as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase, until there comes a point where extra resources devoted to meeting new challenges produce diminishing and then negative returns. At this point, societies become less complex (they collapse into smaller societies). For Tainter, social problems are always (ultimately) a problem of recruiting enough energy to “fuel” the increasing social complexity which is necessary to solve ever-newer problems.Cruel Windfall: Hows wars plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches can also be quite enlightening
• “Sri Lanka's external indebtedness is approximately 40 percent of GDP; also well above its single-B and double-B rated peers.”I would agree Sri Lanka's external indebtedness sounds rather bad. But then compared to a few other A rated countries its does not appear too bad. So for comparison, I have presented below GDP, External debt and Balance of Payments of a few first world countries.
• “Any reduction in both will be difficult to achieve while defence spending continues to account for 20 percent of government disbursements and post record highs each year”.
• Its Current account deficit will be 20 percent of GDP in 2011 and will increase in 2012. Geopolitical developments in the Middle-East have already taken their toll on its balance of payments and will continue to do so.
| Country | GDP (Billions USD) | External Debt (Billions USD) | External Debt Per capita | External Debt as % of GDP | Balance of Payments (Billions USD) | Balance of Payments as % of GDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland |
207
|
2,378.00
|
519,070
|
1,165
|
-3.2
|
-2%
|
| United Kingdom |
2,250
|
8,981.00
|
144,338
|
400
|
-66.6
|
-3%
|
| France |
2,563
|
4,698.00
|
74,619
|
182
|
-77.9
|
-3%
|
| Greece |
305
|
532.9
|
47,636
|
174
|
-19.9
|
-7%
|
| Germany |
3,286
|
4,713.00
|
57,755
|
142
|
149.3
|
5%
|
| New Zealand |
141
|
0.2
|
52,300
|
134
|
-4.5
|
-3%
|
| United States |
14,527
|
14,825.20
|
47,568
|
99
|
-599.9
|
-4%
|
| Australia |
1,237
|
1,169.00
|
52,596
|
95
|
-30.4
|
-2%
|
| Canada |
1,577
|
1,009.00
|
29,625
|
64
|
-52.6
|
-3%
|
| Argentina |
370
|
160.9
|
3,971
|
43
|
7
|
2%
|
| Sri Lanka |
50
|
18
|
881
|
36
|
-1.8
|
-4%
|
The most heinous atrocity of the 21st Century was committed on the shores of an obscure lagoon eighteen months ago and six thousand miles away. The world was in the dark about it and if not for a few brave British journalists, and thanks to our free press, it would have gone altogether unnoticed.On a BBC website he comments
Sri Lanka must be subject to a regime of punitive economic sanctions if it fails to heed our calls for an independent international inquiry into war crimes. Every bully and despot must understand that there are consequences for those who disregard our call not to crush democracy and human rights under foot. Otherwise, we risk being taken for lightweights and our words will count for nought.
The comments posted by the editor are unrepresentative as Sinhalese outnumber Tamil comments by a ratio of 5:1. Yet the 500,000 British Tamils outnumber Sinhalese by a similar ratio. The key issues which unite all Tamils behind a candidate is their stance on the suspension of the GSP+ trade concession, and, the prosecution of war crimes against elements in the Sri Lankan military establishment. Candidates who support both will get the Tamil vote in their seat en-masse.So it appears Arujuna Sivanathan is trying to skin the cat by other means. Given that his organizations have not made headway on Independent War Crime Inquiries, maybe he is trying to drum up public opinion on false perceptions of the dire state of Sri Lanka's economy.
Arjuna Sivananthan, London, UK
Arjuna Sivanathan closes another one of his “scholarly” articles with concern that “The only question which needs to be answered is whether Sri Lanka’s policy makers will remain sufficiently disciplined and ensure that there is no policy slippage under duress from their overwhelming political compulsions”. Really, that much concern for Sri Lanka when in an another life he had an article titled “Sri Lanka must be subject to an independent war crimes inquiry” Arujuna Sivanathan says that “Sri Lanka must be subject to a regime of punitive economic sanctions.
You see, AS portrays himself as unbiased author writing scholarly academic analysis of Sri Lanka. I think the issue of unbiased authorship is self evident from the previous paragraph. Anyway whats a little bias among friends so long as the writing is a scholarly academic analysis. So lets have a look at his scholarly analysis.
AS article about currency devaluation, of which Sri Lanka has expereience about 10% with respect to the US dollar. Maybe I am wrong, would not comparison of Sri Lankan currency devalualtion to a another couple of currencies have made sense. In this day and age these are not too hard to do. Below is a link to a chart/graph Indian Rupee (INR), Euro (EUR) and Sri Lanka Rupee (SLR) with respect to the USD. You know this took me just 5 minutes to create. http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1330956590611&chddm=179530&cmpto=CURRENCY:USDINR;CURRENCY:USDEUR&cmptdms=0;0&q=CURRENCY:USDLKR&ntsp=0
Lordy, Lord looks like INR, EUR and SLR have all been been depreciating against the USD. So what could be happening. Maybe Investors having to fill dollar obligations. i.e pay up in USD, margin calls and anticipated CDS (you know the area AS used to work in) payouts. So institutional investors are liquidating their foreign investments and converting to dollars. So they will for example sell their stock in the Indian Stock Exchange (that has been down) and with the INR buy dollars making the INR depreciate.
When I see, Foreign Investors selling all thier property in an disorderly exit from Sri Lanka, that will be day, and I personally will be dancing a little jig.
Anyways whats a little chart/graph or two standing in the way of scholarly analysis among friends. Maybe forgeting to mention that the Fed Reserve article that forms the basis of AS’s analysis was written in 2005. You know the time Roubini (and Raghuram G. Rajan among others) were predicting increase of financial risk with the creation of Credit Derivatives and depreciation of Mortgage Backed Securities. Maybe AS could really have been analytic and used the model described in the Fed Reserve Paper with data on Sri Lanka and compared the results with the 25 odd countries analyzed in the paper.
So may be these articles of AS have not achieved unscaled and unparalleled heights in scholarly analysis. Anway, what matters is that they have been written as AS volunteers by one whose “academic credentials you may at any point contact my PhD supervisor Professor Vito Antonio “Anton” Muscatelli FRSA FRSE AcSS who is the Principal of the University of Glasgow”. Really Arjuna, “ask my Professor”, isnt that a little puerile. Dont you think citing a peer reviwed article of which you may have even been the tenth co-author might have been better. Your Peer reviewed article does not have to be in The Economist or the Quarterly Journal of Economics, even the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic studies would suffice.
It suddenly struck me, maybe AS is not really writing for us donkeys who look at these articles a little critically. AS is writing for like minded people who have his same agenda. This way when goes for those “voluntary political activist” meetings he can raise up his hand and like any armchair warrior proudly roar, I too have worked for the CAUSE …of a “regime of punitive economic sanctions” against Sri Lanka.
Ta, Ta, Arjuna, please keep up the good work. Dont forget to let your PhD supervisor Professor Vito Antonio “Anton” Muscatelli FRSA FRSE AcSS who is the Principal of the University of Glasgow know of the your excellent articles of scholarly anaysis. I am sure he will be delighted to know that he has taught you well.
Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World.
As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.
The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges.
Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.
But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.
Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.
And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. ¶ One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise.
The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.
Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?
Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.
Dabur Lanka to export 3.36 million litres of Lankan water to India every monthposts.
and the
Climate Change, Food Security & Virtual Water an Asymmetric Threat to Sri Lanka
Beginning about 20 years ago, it dawned on the bankers and some major corporations that if oil was a lucrative commodity water would be even more so. Everyone had to have water, even if they rode bicycles to work or took public transit. The trick was how to take it away from the people and sell it back to them.
The first water privatization story I ever heard was out of Bolivia. Cochabamba, Bolivia, is a semi-desert region. Water is a scarce precious resource. In 1999, the World Bank told Bolivia that in order to obtain a much-needed $600 million in international debt relief, it would have to privatize Cochabamba’s public water system, giving the concession to a Bechtel subsidiary, International Water.
The Bolivian Congress caved in, passing the ‘Drinking Water and Sanitation Law’ in October of 1999, ending government subsidies to municipal utilities and authorizing privatization. International Water took over in Cochabamba. The minimum wage is less than $100 a month, but IW raised the price of water to an average of $20 per household.
One classic example would be in the Plachimada community in the state of Kerala. Coke opened a bottling plant there in 2000; the community immediately suffered from chronic drought and polluted water. The reasons are hardly in dispute.
Three years ago, the little patch of land in the green, picturesque rolling hills of Palakkad yielded 50 sacks of rice and 1,500 coconuts a year. It provided work for dozens of labourers. Then Coke arrived and built a 4-acre bottling plant nearby. In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, owner of the small holding, could manage only five sacks of rice and just 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry because Coke draws up to 1.5 million litres of water daily through its deep wells... To make matters worse, the bottling plant was producing thousands of gallons of toxic sludge and, as the BBC reported, disposed of it by selling the carcinogenic material to local farmers as "fertilizer."
Coca-Cola is big in Mexico, very big. At the same time, and not coincidentally, 12 million people have no access to piped water and 32 million have no access to proper sewage. Coca-Cola’s resource monopoly simultaneously creates a scarce water supply and an abundant supply of Coke. The country is also the second largest consumer of bottled water, much of it sold by guess who. The process of making Coke requires at least two liters of water for each liter of the finished product; some estimates are as high as five-to-one. The business end is covered by dozens of water concessions from the Mexican government which handed the company the legal right to take water from, as of 2008, 19 aquifers and 15 rivers, many of these in indigenous territories. They have also picked up the right to dump toxic waste in at least eight different public water sources.
The process of privatization has nearly swallowed the entirety of the country’s water. Yet the country hasn’t received much in return from Coca-Cola. In 2003, the company paid $29,000 for water concessions in the entire nation; in 2004, their profits from the bottling plant in San Cristobal de las Casas, the largest in the country and second largest in the world, alone reached $40 million.
contrasted to Sinéad O'Connor's heartfelt songs about the the oppression of the Irish by the English, M.I.A seems sadly lacking. To the contrary of what little political message she sings, she has sold out and joined the establishment. i.e. she
"speaks about terrorism and Sri Lankan politics and all the while lives in a fancy house in a tony neighborhood with her billionaire husband
Bottom line, M.I.A. cant articulate what if any oppression the Tamils have had, just a lot of "Agitprop Pop" music. The music is good, but M.I.A. is probably a milquetoast messenger advocating war for moral fags.
