Liveblogging World War II: May 23, 1943 http://t.co/ITxPDjqAUd
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Category Archive: Emerging Markets
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By 2015 Hard Commodity Prices Will Have Collapsed
For the past two years, as regular readers know, I have been bearish on hard commodities. Prices may have dropped substantially from their peaks during this time, but I don’t think the bear market is over. I think we still have a very long way to go. There are four reasons why I expect prices to [...]
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Is Shadow Banking Dangerous for You?
From hedge funds to mortgage-backed securities, unregulated and risky activities have fallen out of favor since the Lehman Brothers debacle. Aggressive, casino-type behaviors and obscure transactions definitely played an important role in the run up to the financial crisis of 2008. But are all financial activities that operate outside the regular banking system bad? Is [...]
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Geopolitical Unrest and Key Oil Producers
Some people observed 9/11 by lighting candles, others by killing more Americans. Yesterday a mob stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. Among other implications, this raises the possibility that the stability that seemed to have returned to that country may be short-lived. As of May, [...]
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Food (Prices) for Thought
Farmers from the U.S. to the former U.S.S.R. have suffered from severe drought this summer. As a result, food prices soared 6 percent in July, after three months of decline. Here’s the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I discus whether the recent surge in food prices has affected/will affect Turkish [...]
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Paying the High Price for Delayed Reforms
It is often said that Russia’s political elite doesn’t want to take unpopular decisions. The Russian leaders have yet to implement structural reforms in the economy, which are necessary for a dynamic economic growth. It is not very difficult to understand the logic of the ruling group. Most of the Russian leaders want to preserve [...]
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Ar’Che’typical approach to capital flows (to Turkey)
In one of the hit songs of the musical Evita, Che sings that “when the money keeps flowing, you don’t ask how.” But that’s exactly what I am planning to do. Here’s the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column, where I discuss why Turkey is attracting so much money. After describing the [...]
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Surely you’re joking, Mr. Basci!- on Turkish monetary policy
First, of all, it is not Mr. Basci, it is Dr. Basci, as Indiana’s sidekick insisted, but so was Feynman, or maybe not- I think the incident that gave rise to the title of the book happened while he was still in grad. school. Actually, Dr. Basci was not even at today’s Central Bank of [...]
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Turkish Gold Exports (and imports)
Since I just had a post about black gold, I thought I should do one about the non-black one as well:) Back at the end of June, I was one of the first who brought up the huge rise in Turkey’s gold exports to Iran. Many journalists and columnists picked up on the story, and [...]
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More on oil prices
Just a short follow-up to my latest post on oil prices: A commenter advised me to look at the term structure of oil prices. The term structure was really important in the past; it hasn’t been of late, but the shift from backwardation to contango did catch the change of direction in oil prices back [...]
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Russia May Share the Fate of the USSR
December 2011 marked twenty years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union; a collapse predetermined by the systematic flaws of the Soviet economic and political system. The Soviet institutions, which had mostly been formed at the turn of 1920s/1930s, were too rigid and unable to adapt to the challenges of the end of the twentieth [...]
