Andrea Mammone is a lecturer at Royal Holloway at the University of London and she has written an op-ed piece for the New York Times which investigates the rise of right-wing parties in Europe and the growth of anti-European Union sentiment on the continent. It is a perceptive essay and its conclusions are worrisome. Not only does it explain the anti-“other” hatred which is growing in Europe (against gays, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and Roma), but it also suggests that support for the European experiment is weakening among the populations.
The Council on Foreign Relations has published a background piece on Hezbollah, the organization supported by Iran and Syria that operates within Lebanon. The backgrounder provides good information on how Hezbollah operates and what its objectives are. Given the recent upsurge of violence in Lebanon, it is useful to know more about this organization.
The IMF has issued a paper which warns that indebtedness in many of the advanced industrialized countries has reached a 200-year high and that write-downs of the debt are necessary. There are a variety of ways to write-down debt–all of them painful. But each technique for reducing debt falls on different groups. A simple write-off (“we won’t pay the full amount we promised”) hurts the holders of bonds. A write-off that involves increasing revenues to reduce the debt hurts taxpayers, and the tax burden is disproportionately weighted against the poor. A write-off that involves reducing government spending also affects the poor more than the rich. And a write-off that inflates the currency (reducing the “real”, not “inflated” currency, necessary to repay the debt) hurts savers and bond-holders, who are mostly rich. We’ll see what the mix of policies are employed to reduce the debt burden.
This will be the last posting for a few days. I’m off for a vacation and will be posting only sporadically. I’ll be back to daily postings on the 18th of January.
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