World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

The Council on Foreign Relations has published an excellent review of the international issues surrounding the Arctic–an emerging region in world affairs due to climate change and the melting of the ice at the North Pole.   Unfortunately, the issues are surfacing sooner than expected as relations between the US and Russia.  Both are interested in the Arctic and have somewhat competing claims.  Additionally, ExxonMobil is exploring for oil and gas in the Arctic and he US does not wish to impose sanctions that might jeopardize those activities.

The Guardian has an interesting essay on the changing nature of protests in the world today.  Specifically, it asks the question why European young people have seemingly stopped protesting.  It is a curious phenomenon since the economic situation in Europe remains grim and static.  But the question is worth pondering in the context of the rather large spike in protests all across the globe and the somewhat quiet period we seem to be entering.

From the Financial Times:

Europe’s banks hold more sovereign debt than at any time since the eurozone crisis, fuelling worries about the potentially destabilising interdependency between the region’s financial institutions and national governments.

Eurozone banks have added to their holdings of government debt, as a percentage of assets, nearly every month since the beginning of 2012, according to data from the European Central Bank.

Government debt accounted for 5.8 per cent of their combined assets in February, up from 4.3 per cent in January 2012, despite warnings by European regulators to tackle a swelling “sovereign-bank” nexus.

Although the data records all government bonds, analysts say most of the increases are in holdings of banks’ domestic government debt, raising the spectre that increasing numbers of lenders are simply “too big to fail”, according to Eva Olsson, director of credit strategy at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities.

“‘Too big to fail’ hasn’t gone away, and it is increasing to some extent,” she said.