Fruxants's collective blog

19/12/2008
Publicado por The Wall Sreet Journal, EEUU

Washington.-El presidente electo de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, tiene según sus asesores la intención de nombrar al ex alcalde de Dallas Ron Kirk, un firme defensor del libre comercio, como representante de Comercio, y a la congresista Hilda Solís, una detractora del libre comercio, como su próxima secretaria de Trabajo. Los anuncios reflejan la división que existe al interior del nuevo gobierno sobre el tema.

Durante la campaña presidencial, el único acuerdo comercial que el equipo de Obama trató en forma positiva fue la Ronda de Doha, donde aún no se ha llegado a acuerdo. Los negociadores han suspendido en gran medida sus esfuerzos mientras aguardan a ver qué postura adoptará el gobierno de Obama. Muchos especialistas creen que el futuro presidente, que se considera a sí mismo un internacionalista, encontrará la forma de respaldar la liberalización comercial.

Al nombrar a Kirk, Obama le hace una concesión al ala defensora de la libertad de comercio del Partido Demócrata que, pese a ser pequeña, tiene importantes conexiones con el mundo de los negocios. Como el primer alcalde afroamericano de Dallas, entre 1995 y 2001, Kirk promocionaba la ciudad en sus viajes al extranjero y ensalzaba los beneficios del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte (NAFTA).

En 2001, por ejemplo, lideró los planes para construir una "Autopista NAFTA" entre Estados Unidos y México para acelerar los envíos a través de la frontera. En aquel momento, se refería al proyecto como "un auténtico río comercial entre nuestras comunidades".

Para los aliados sindicales de Obama, no obstante, el NAFTA se ha convertido en un símbolo de la destrucción de empleos, a medida que los salarios más bajos hicieron que muchos fabricantes estadounidenses decidieran trasladar operaciones al otro lado de la frontera. Durante la campaña presidencial, los sindicatos lograron que Obama se comprometiera a renegociar el NAFTA para incluir nuevos requisitos laborales y medioambientales y oponerse a los acuerdos bilaterales pendientes con Colombia, Panamá y Corea del Sur.

El nombramiento de Solís conforta a los demócratas que se oponen al libre comercio. De descendencia mexicana y nicaragüense, Solís fue elegida por primera vez en 2000 para el Congreso, donde representa el Este de Los Ángeles, incluyendo una porción importante de la población hispana. Se enfrentó al Tratado de Libre Comercio de Centroamérica (CAFTA) y trató de recabar apoyo entre los grupos latinos para oponerse al pacto que se aprobó por un margen de dos votos.

El ex legislador demócrata David Bonior, de Michigan, un ferviente opositor al NAFTA, dijo que Solís será "una gran defensora de los derechos de la gente trabajadora".

Solís se ha desempeñado en el Comité de Energía de la Cámara de Representantes así como en el Comité de Educación y Trabajo. También trabajó en la Asamblea Legislativa de California donde se la conocía como una ferviente defensora de la "justicia medioambiental", luchando contra los vertidos tóxicos en los barrios pobres.

Obama ha nombrado a otro partidario del libre comercio, el gobernador de Nuevo México, Bill Richardson, como secretario de Comercio.

El representante comercial del gobierno de Bill Clinton, Mickey Kantor, cree que Obama seguirá oponiéndose a los tratados bilaterales, pero hará un mayor esfuerzo por impulsar acuerdos más amplios como el de Doha, o pactos regionales con América Latina y Asia.

Tomado de la Agencia EFE/Vía Yahoo! Noticias

Costa do Sauípe (Brasil), 18 dic (EFE).- La Cumbre de América Latina y el Caribe (CALC) que concluyó ayer en Brasil puso el dedo en la llaga del bloqueo económico de Estados Unidos a Cuba y lanzó las bases para la creación de una Unión de América Latina y el Caribe.

En la reunión, convocada por Brasil para que los 33 países de la región debatieran sobre integración y desarrollo, Cuba acaparó el protagonismo desde un comienzo por la participación de Raúl Castro, elevado a la categoría de estrella en su primera salida al exterior como presidente para un foro internacional.

Después de la aclamación de la isla como miembro pleno del Grupo de Río en una cita celebrada ayer, el mandatario boliviano, Evo Morales, fue más osado hoy al proponer que los países de la región retiren a los embajadores de EE.UU. si el Gobierno de Barack Obama, que asumirá el próximo 20 de enero, no levanta el embargo a Cuba en un plazo por determinar.

"Sería importante (...) darle un término al nuevo Gobierno de Estados Unidos para que levante el bloqueo económico. Si el nuevo Gobierno no lo hace, (propongo que) nosotros levantemos a los embajadores", dijo Morales en el cónclave celebrado en el balneario brasileño de Costa do Sauípe.

La propuesta no recibió ningún apoyo, al menos públicamente durante la sesión final de la cumbre, pero sirvió para poner de nuevo sobre el tapete un asunto que en general incomoda al continente, más allá de la simpatía o antipatía que los Gobiernos puedan tener por el régimen de La Habana.

Lula, anfitrión de la cita, se desmarcó de la propuesta de Morales y, con el pragmatismo que lo caracteriza, consideró que América Latina debe dar una oportunidad a Obama para que diseñe su política regional antes de plantearle desafíos.

"Tenemos que esperar que el presidente de Estados Unidos asuma su cargo (el 20 de enero), para ver cuál va a ser su propuesta de política para América Latina", apuntó Lula, quien reconoció que en esto es "más cauteloso" que Morales.

Lo que sí quedó claro en la cumbre celebrada en Costa do Sauípe es que América Latina y el Caribe están enviando señales a Washington de que las cosas han empezado a cambiar en lo que durante décadas ha sido llamado el "patio trasero" de Estados Unidos.

"Hay un cambio en la política exterior de América Latina", dijo el jefe de Estado hondureño, Manuel Zelaya, un promotor del regreso de Cuba al seno de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA), de la cual fue expulsada en 1962.

Esa posición fue refrendada por otros mandatarios, que consideran que no tiene sentido la existencia de una OEA sin Cuba.

Para avanzar en un modelo concreto de integración, sin exclusiones y que le dé más peso internacional a la región, los 33 países reunidos en Brasil lanzaron los cimientos para la creación a comienzos de 2010 de un nuevo mecanismo que, según el presidente mexicano, Felipe Calderón, podría llamarse Unión de América Latina y el Caribe.

La fecha señalada tiene un alto contenido simbólico, pues coincide con el bicentenario de la independencia de varios países latinoamericanos, lo que para la mayoría de la región debe marcar un hito en su rumbo político.

"Ojalá podamos avanzar y formar la Unión de América Latina y el Caribe en los 200 años de nuestra independencia", apuntó Calderón en una rueda de prensa conjunta con otros ocho jefes de Estado que participaron en la cumbre.

Explicó que los mandatarios volverán a reunirse en febrero de 2010 en México y lo harán de nuevo al año siguiente en Venezuela, para "avanzar verdaderamente en la gran aspiración latinoamericana" de construir la unidad "sobre bases políticas, sociales, económicas y culturales" que hagan valer la fuerza de la región.

La creación de la Unión de América Latina y el Caribe sería, según Calderón, "un punto culminante, muy valedero en los 200 años de independencia de América Latina".

I have read and heard a great deal of advice on how to ask good questions of students, but nobody has ever told me how to get students to ask good questions. Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it strikes me that if we are ultimately trying to create "active lifelong learners" with "critical thinking skills" and an ability to "think outside the box," it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions.

The best questions force students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. Oftentimes, the answer to a good question is irrelevant—the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to the best questions is another good question. The best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.

Unfortunately, such great questions are rarely asked by students, especially in large introductory courses, such as my 400-student “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.” Much more common are questions such as, "What do we need to know for this test?" This may be the worst question of all. It makes education into a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than a meaningful exploration of the world.

In all fairness, students are conditioned to ask it by the lecture format. This mainstay of introductory courses teaches students to sit in neat rows and to believe and defer to the teacher. Tests often measure little more than how well students can recite what they have been told.

My frustration over this led me to create a learning environment conducive to helping students ask better questions—ones that create lifelong learners. In my introductory anthropology class, students are asked to understand how the world works. But rather than me telling them how it works, students work together to design a two-hour simulation of the last 500 years of world history, using props for currencies, natural resources and other elements that recreate the world system.

A world map is superimposed onto a map of the classroom, and students are asked to imagine themselves living in the cultural and physical environment that maps onto them. Each student becomes an expert on a specific locale, such as the economic systems of the Pacific Islands or the political systems in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Questions loom over every aspect of the creation of this simulation. I am in the wonderful but awkward position of not knowing exactly what I am doing but blissfully learning along the way. My job becomes less about teaching and more about encouraging students to join me on the quest. The journey extends beyond the classroom, facilitated by a custom Web platform that fosters community and media literacy through the integration of a wiki, blogs, mobile phones and other applications.

Students record the simulation on 20 digital video cameras, and we collectively edit the material into one 20-minute world history video. During the last week of class, we watch the video together. By then, it seems as if we have the whole world and one humanity right before our eyes—filled with its cultural and economic differences, and challenges for the future. We see ourselves as its co-creators and realize that the future is up to us. It is in this environment that even the worst questions take on all the characteristics of the best: What do we need to know for this test?

Tomado de la Agencia Prensa Latina, Cuba

Caracas, 27 oct (PL) El Secretario Permanente del Sistema Económico Latinoamericano y del Caribe (SELA), José Rivera Banuet, exhortó a impulsar las innovaciones tecnológicas para incorporar con fuerza a la región en los procesos productivos globales.

Requerimos de una visión de las innovaciones tecnológicas y de los nuevos conocimientos que impulsan a la economía mundial para su incorporación efectiva a los diferentes procesos productivos, con un eje rector consistente en la inclusión social, apuntó.

Rivera Banuet y el Secretario de Desarrollo del Ministerio de Industria y Comercio Exterior de Brasil, Francelino Grando, inauguraron este lunes el Seminario Regional Redes e Integración: Contenidos Digitales, programado para dos jornadas en Caracas.

El Secretario Permanente del SELA destacó que en los últimos años la región alcanzó niveles significativos de crecimiento económico.

Además, dijo que su organización considera importante impulsar la construcción de la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento en América Latina y el Caribe.

Hoy enfrentamos una crisis financiera global cuyo alcance y profundidad aún no acaban de definirse, comentó Rivera.

Sin embargo –agregó-, junto con el reto de seguir creciendo con equidad, sigue estando presente el de lograr transformaciones que incorporen al área geográfica a la economía del conocimiento, de la que aún nos encontramos distantes.

En ese sentido, Rivera elogió una aseveración del doctor Juan Ramón de la Fuente, miembro de la Universidad de Naciones Unidas, acerca de que América Latina y el Caribe viven actualmente “en los suburbios de la economía del conocimiento”.

Nuestra aspiración es que de este diálogo resulten pautas y líneas de trabajo compartidas para acelerar la integración digital con inclusión social entre los países del subcontinente, sostuvo.

Rivera instó finalmente a los especialistas a aprovechar la expansión del mercado internacional de software y a satisfacer demandas internas de las economías regionales en lo referente a este rubro.

Algunos de los temas abordados en el encuentro fueron la inclusión digital como expresión de la Inclusión Social en América Latina, el Panorama Digital de América Latina y el Caribe, y el Proyecto Observatorio para la Sociedad de la Información en Latinoamérica.

Al seminario asisten más de un centenar de expertos provenientes de Cuba, Chile, México, Argentina, Brasil, Jamaica, Barbados y mayormente de Venezuela, entre otras naciones.

EE.UU. se encamina a su peor recesión desde la Gran Depresión de los años 30
Tomado de The Wall Street Journal, US

Washington.-La economía estadounidense se está deteriorando a un ritmo mucho más rápido de lo esperado hace tan sólo unas semanas. Esto sugiere que la recesión será más profunda y duradera de lo que se temía.

El Departamento de Comercio de Estados Unidos informó que las exportaciones, que hasta mediados de año habían servido de salvavidas para la economía, cayeron 2,2% en octubre a medida que la demanda extranjera de bienes estadounidenses continuó cuesta abajo. El déficit comercial subió en octubre a US$57.200 millones, frente a los US$56.600 millones de septiembre, a pesar del considerable abaratamiento del petróleo. Otro informe del gobierno indica que las solicitudes iniciales de prestaciones de desempleo en la primera semana de diciembre saltaron a un total de 573.000, el mayor nivel en 26 años. El número de trabajadores que siguen cobrando compensación por desempleo aumentó a 4,33 millones en la semana que terminó el 29 de noviembre.

Mientras tanto, los datos más recientes de la Reserva Federal (Fed) revelan que las familias del país redujeron su nivel de endeudamiento por primera vez desde que el banco central empezó a recopilar esta información en 1952. Aunque se trata de una tendencia positiva a largo plazo, el aumento del ahorro quiere decir que los consumidores están gastando menos, lo que constituye un nuevo golpe para una economía en la que el consumo equivale al 70% del Producto Interno Bruto.

Pronósticos actualizados

La ráfaga de cifras oficiales obligó a los economistas a actualizar sus pronósticos acerca de la magnitud de la contracción. Ahora creen que la recesión continuará hasta entrado el primer semestre de 2009. Es probable que estas sombrías noticias le den un empujón a los planes del presidente electo, Barack Obama, para orquestar un gigantesco plan de estímulo fiscal.

La consultora Macroeconomic Advisers aludió a las exportaciones y otras señales como justificación para revisar a la baja en un punto porcentual su previsión para el PIB del actual trimestre, a un declive anualizado de 6,6%. Si el pronóstico acierta, este trimestre rivalizaría con los lapsos más negros de la recesión de principios de los años 80. La economía cayó 7,8% en el segundo trimestre de 1980 y 6,4% en los tres primeros meses de 1982.

De todas formas, la cifra final del PIB podría ser más alta. Algunas firmas de consultoría siguen pronosticando un declive de poco menos de 5% para este trimestre y 4% para los primeros tres meses del año que viene.

Los economistas que participaron en la última encuesta de The Wall Street Journal estiman en promedio que el declive del PIB, que empezó en julio, sigua durante los dos primeros trimestres de 2009. Si tienen razón, sería la primera vez en que la economía estadounidense se contrae durante cuatro trimestres consecutivos durante la posguerra.

La mayoría de los economistas espera que junio de 2009 marque el final de la recesión que, según la Oficina Nacional de Investigación Económica, empezó en diciembre de 2007 (EE.UU. no se ciñe a la regla que define una recesión como dos trimestres consecutivos de crecimiento negativo). EE.UU., de esta manera, experimentaría una recesión de 18 meses, el período más largo desde la Gran Depresión. Las recesiones de 1973-75 y 1981-82 duraron 16 meses. "Las peores recesiones solían ser provocadas por sucesos que pillaron por sorpresa a las empresas", apuntó Bruce Kasman, economista de J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Además, añade que es poco probable que las ganancias de las empresas sufran tanto como en las recesiones pasadas. "Este colapso tuvo un preludio. Por eso, la intensidad de lo que pasó es atenuada a lo largo de un período de tiempo más largo".

En general, los 54 economistas que participaron en la encuesta predicen que el PIB se contraerá a una tasa anualizada de 4,3% en el cuarto trimestre y 2,5% y 0,5% en los dos primeros trimestres de 2009, respectivamente. El cálculo preliminar del Departamento de Comercio sugirió una caída del PIB de 0,5% en el tercer trimestre. Los economistas fueron sondeados entre el 5 y el 8 de diciembre.

A lo largo del primer semestre de 2008, "lo único que impidió que la economía reflejara técnicamente una reducción del PIB fue el comercio", dijo Brian Bethune, economista de IHS Global Insight. "Aunque el crecimiento que veíamos era débil, era lo suficientemente fuerte para mantener a las fábricas relativamente ocupadas y absorber parte del shock de una economía local débil", añade. Ahora, sin embargo, Bethune señala que las exportaciones contribuirán muy poco.

Por si esto fuera poco, el final de la recesión probablemente no marcará el final del desempleo. En otras recesiones, la contracción del mercado laboral continuó durante muchos meses después de la declaración oficial del fin de la recesión. "El mercado laboral se ve muy mal y va a seguir así", dijo Allen Sinai de Decision Economics.

Muchos analistas mencionaron un esperado paquete de estímulo fiscal como la clave para sacar a EE.UU. de la recesión, pese a que los detalles siguen siendo poco claros.

La mayoría de los economistas consultados expresaron su confianza en el equipo económico de Obama. Casi la mitad de los participantes dijo que el nuevo equipo es significativamente mejor que el actual. Un cuarto opinó que el nuevo equipo es moderadamente mejor.

Tomado de la Agencia France Press/Vía Yahoo! Noticias

Costa do Sauipe, Brasil (AFP) - Los presidentes de los países latinoamericanos y caribeños se reúnen desde el lunes en Costa do Sauipe, próximo de la ciudad brasileña de Salvador, para dar un nuevo impulso a la integración con una serie de cumbres de diferentes bloques del continente.

El punto central de la agenda es la Cumbre de América Latina y el Caribe (CALC), una idea lanzada a principios de año por el presidente brasileño Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

"Será la primera vez que 33 países estaremos reunidos alrededor de una mesa, para discutir nuestros problemas a partir de una agenda y una perspectiva propia. Es una iniciativa inédita, para que podamos discutir la integración y el desarrollo", dijo el diplomático brasileño Paulo Roberto França.

Este grupo de países, por ejemplo, ya ha estado reunido en cumbres de la Organizacación de los Estados Americanos (OEA) o en Cumbres Iberoamericanas, pero por primera vez estarán juntos sin Estados Unidos, Canadá, España o Portugal en la misma sala de conferencias.

El diplomático insistió que no se tratará de una reunión de bloques o iniciativas integracionistas, aunque estarán presentes los países del Mercosur, Comunidad Andina, SICA y Caricom, así como las naciones que participan de la Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas (ALBA).

Sin embargo, la agenda prevista para la Cumbre América Latina y Caribe (CALC) se centra en las alternativas de integración, un asunto central en momentos en que la región enfrenta la incertidumbre por los efectos que tendrá la crisis financiera global.

El encuentro de Costa do Sauípe, dijo França, "no es una alternativa ni un contrapunto al ALCA (Area de Libre Comercio de las Américas), no es contra ningún proyecto de este tipo, ni contra ningún país. Tiene una agenda positiva que se propone profundizar el diálogo entre los países de la región".

A raíz de las diversas iniciativas de integración que ya existen, dijo França, "se verifica un diálogo en marcha sobre el tema. La idea es que en esta cumbre esos bloques e iniciativas puedan profundizar su conocimiento mutuo, porque es un tema central para todos los países de la región".

Como el formato de la reunión se ha mantenido bastante libre, "se espera que los presidentes puedan dialogar también sobre temas como crisis financiera y de energía, la situación creada por la crisis de los alimentos y también sobre los desafíos planteados por los cambios climáticos".

Por el momento, dijo França, las partes no han discutido cualquier posibilidad de institucionalizar la CALC. "Seguramente habrá discusiones sobre seguimiento de las conversaciones, pero por el momento no se han discutido opciones de convertir el foro en algo permanente", acotó.

Para el embajador de Colombia en Brasil, Tony Jozame, "se trata de un grupo importante de países que hablará sobre comercio, integración y relaciones políticas. Pienso que el mundo espera con expectativa conocer el nivel de diálogo alcanzado y las conclusiones de este encuentro".

Representantes de todos los países se reunieron recientemente en Zacatecas, México, para comenzar a discutir la Declaración de Salvador que se pretende emitir al fin de la Cumbre, aunque según el diplomático França "quedan aún algunos puntos para definir".

La presencia de tantos jefes de estado y de gobierno en el complejo de Costa do Sauípe permitirá también otras reuniones cumbre.

El Mercosur realizará su cumbre presidencial en la mañana del martes, y posteriormente será el turno de una cumbre de la Unión de Naciones Sudamericanas (Unasur). Al cierre de la reunión de la CALC habrá una cumbre extraordinaria del Grupo de Rio.

El evento también será la segunda etapa en el primer viaje internacional del presidente cubano Raúl Castro, desde que llegó al poder en substitución de su hermano mayor Fidel.

La presencia de Castro en Costa de Sauípe es aguardada con intensa expectativa, ya que crece en la región el consenso alrededor de la necesidad de reintegrar plenamente a la isla antillana a la comunidad latinoamericana.

Posteriormente a la Cumbre, Castro viajará a Brasilia para una visita oficial y será recibido en el Palacio de Planalto por el presidente Lula da Silva.

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A ver si no se enoja mi b2 Evolution. :)

by Josh Catone

Don’t look now, but your competition is up to things. What sort of things? That’s hard to say. It could be innocuous stuff you don’t have to worry about, but maybe they’re quietly launching a new product or service that is so awesome it will ruin your business! Or, perhaps they’re suffering through a bout of bad press that you should really be taking advantage of. The biggest problem is not that your competition is up to something, but that you don’t know about it. Thankfully, there’s this thing called the Internet, and by utilizing it you can keep track of your what your competitors are up to. Check out our list of 10 ways to watch your competitors below, and share other methods or tools that you use in the comments.

Watch: Ad Spending

SpyFu is a great, free utility that lets you check out how much your competitors are spending on keyword ads and for what keywords. You can also see how their ad spend changes over time. Conversely, SpyFu can tell you who is advertising on specific keywords, helping you to define your closest competitors.

Watch: Twitter

People talk on Twitter, and they’re probably talking about you and your competitors. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to keep tabs on what they’re saying. Twitter has a great real-time search feature that allows you to keep watch on keywords and find new tweets almost as they happen. Searches are available as RSS feeds so you can always be kept in the loop about what people are saying about your competition.

Watch: Blogs

In addition to Twitter, it’s a good idea to watch what people are saying on blogs too. Blog search engine Technorati is one of the best ways to do it. Technorati does a great job of finding new posts, almost as fast they’re put up, and you can refine searches by the quality of the blog. Searches can be had in RSS format.

Another good option is the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, which attempts to show, via threading, how conversations spread across the blogosphere. Alas, no RSS on that one.

Watch: Bookmarks

You should also keep tabs on bookmarks, because they’re a good way to find the news and blog coverage that is actually resonating with users. This is often the most important stuff — i.e., the stuff you need to be paying attention too. Thankfully, you can monitor tags on Delicious to see what items people are bookmarking about your competition. For example, here are the latest bookmarks about Apple. Each tag page has an RSS feed.

Watch: Forums

Using BoardTracker you can keep tabs on what people are saying about your competitors across 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. BoardTrack has a built in Alerts function, but you can set up your own custom alerts using RSS and the site’s search function. Just be sure to decrease the time period you’re searching so you’re only getting recent posts about your competitors.

Watch: Job Postings

Is your competition hiring? Often times, job postings can offer clues about future expansion plans that your competitors may be working on. Using a classifieds aggregator like Oodle, which tracks a large number of job sites, you can keep tabs on any expansion that your competitors may be hiring for. For example, Oodle tells me that Digg is hiring, and I can follow any changes via RSS.

Watch: New Hires

Similarly, LinkedIn will let you keep an eye on who was actually hired by your competitors. Did they just land some top engineering talent? Maybe a ruthless new sales guy that you need to watch out for? Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t offer RSS for their new hires section, so you’ll have to check manually.

Watch: Wikipedia

Another good page to spy on is your competitors’ Wikipedia entry. Using the “Revision history” tool, which has an RSS feed, you can be notified of any changes to their Wikipedia page. Did your competitor just attempt to scrub something from their history? Are they trying to alter their public image? Did they just push out a major new release or get bought out? Stay on top of it.

Watch: Keywords

Compete’s Search Analytics tools are invaluable when spying on your competitors. You can see how your site ranks compared to theirs on competing keywords, and you can see which keywords are sending them the most traffic. That can be very useful when planning how to spend your ad budget.

Watch: Their Web Site

Finally, you need to actually be watching your competition’s web site. Sometimes, though, changes are subtle. Beyond subscribing to their blog and press release feed, it will pay to set up some alerts on Versionista, which can detect changes on any site and then let you compare versions side by side. Did your competitor just change the wording of their about page? What did they change? Why? Is it something you should be aware of? Can you use it to gain a competitive edge? Versionista can help you keep on top of it.

What other tools do you use to keep track of your competitors? Let us know in the comments.

dirname - strip non-directory suffix from file name
y ya estas del otro lado.
basename - strip directory and suffix from filenames

Salu2

Look at the Pages that Link to Your Site and Their Relative “Link Value”

One of my favorite Yahoo APIs is the Site Explorer API. Site Explorer gives you an insight into one of the core pieces of metadata about your site: the number of inbound links on the web to each of your site’s pages. I’ve always wanted a more powerful interface for exploring that data — including the ability to see the top pages for a site, who’s linking to those pages, and how valuable (in link terms) each of the inbound links is.

The Page Inlink Analyzer provides a first stab at that interface. It gives you the top 35 or so pages for a site on the left, and for each inbound link you get a report of how many inbound links that page has (for the page itself and for its top-level domain) and how many times the page has been bookmarked in Delicous.

Site Explorer doesn’t provide grid-style information in this way. Its API just gives you a single page and its inlink data. The Page Inlink Analyzer takes the inlink data and does the research for you on each of the inlinks you’re looking at to give you insights about their relative value. Because each data point is a separate Site Explorer lookup, I’ve throttled the lookup process to be as civilized as possible with respect to the API’s backend. Be patient — the data does load eventually. Look down the left for information about pages on the current site; look on the right for inlinks to the current site and information about the inlinks.

This is a quick hack at this point and it has some bugs, but it’s a unique way of getting at the hidden insights that Site Explorer can express about your site and it’s place in the information web.

PHP5 troubleshooting:

* Is this custom code,
or if not, what is the name of the application?
* URL of the page(s) displaying the error message (any and all)
* Filename and line number:
Most PHP errors will include a filename and a line number; this is very helpful since the file with the error is not necessarily the same as the URL

Common errors and how to solve them

The following error messages are caused by conflicts with new functions and keywords in PHP5 (since these didn't exist in PHP4, it was perfectly legal to use them in code).

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ABSTRACT, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CATCH, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CLONE, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FINAL, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IMPLEMENTS, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_INTERFACE, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PRIVATE, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PROTECTED, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PUBLIC, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_THROW, expecting T_STRING
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_TRY, expecting T_STRING
These messages will all be followed by a filename and line number.

* Quick Fix: none
* Check for: an updated version of the application, if it's not one they wrote themselves.
* Permanent Fix: rename the function/variable/constant to something that won't conflict with PHP built-in functions. Suggestions: add username or application's name to the beginning of the function or variable (this must be done to every occurrence of the function or constant, not just the place where the error message occurs).

The following are caused by some PHP5 functions handling parameters differently than the PHP4 versions:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #1 is not an array

* Quick fix: Put casts in the array_merge call. Example:
$var = array_merge('testo', array(1,2,3,4));
becomes
$var = array_merge((array)$testo, array(1,2,3,4));
* Check for: an updated version of the application, if available.
* Permanent Fix: Track down all the code referring to array_merge and initialize variables to arrays before passing them in to array_merge. Example:

$data = array(1,2,3,4);
$result = mysql_query('SOME QUERY THAT RETURNS NO RESULTS');
$testo = mysql_fetch_row($result);
$newdata = array_merge($data, $testo);

The code above will throw an error in PHP5, because $testo is not an array. The proper fix for this is to ensure that $testo is always an array, like so:

$data = array(1,2,3,4);
$result = mysql_query('SOME QUERY THAT RETURNS NO RESULTS');
$testo = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if(!is_array($testo)) { $testo = array($testo); }
$newdata = array_merge($data, $testo);

The XSLT module is no longer available in PHP5; code that requires it may display errors like this:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function xslt_create()

* Quick Fix: none
* Check for: an updated version of the application, if available.
* Permanent Fix: rewrite the code to use the XSL module instead.

For more possibilities, see http://php.osuosl.org/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php

Find Files that are Modified Today (or Since Certain Time Ago) in Unix

To find all files that was modified since a specific time ago (i.e an hour ago, a day ago, 24 hours ago, a weeks ago and so on) in Unix environment, the find command will come in handy. The command syntax is:

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find . -mtime -1 -print

Flag -mtime -1 option tells find command to look for files modified in the last day (24 hours). Flag -print option will cause find command to print the files’ location. -print can be replaced with -ls if you want a directory-listing-type response.

To find all files modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in a particular specific directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -mtime -1 -print

The command is basically the same with the earlier command, just that now you no need to cd (change directory) to the directory you want to search.

To find all files with regular file types only, and modified in the last 24 hours (last full day) in current directory and its sub-directories:

find /directory_path -type f -mtime -1 -print

To find all files that are modified today only (since start of day only, i.e. 12 am), in current directory and its sub-directories:

touch -t `date +%m%d0000` /tmp/$$
find /tmefndr/oravl01 -type f -newer /tmp/$$
rm /tmp/$$

The first command can be modified to specify other date and time, so that the commands will return all files that have changed since that particular date and time.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/01/19/find-files-that-are-modified-today-or-since-certain-time-ago-in-unix/

In order to force a reinstall / recompile of Scalar::Util you must do:

cpan> force install Scalar::Util

Additionally Compress
Zlib had errors - The output of a install COmpress
Zlib shows what to do, however it may not catch your eye..

o conf make_install_arg UNINST=1
force install Compress::Zlib
o conf make_install_arg UNINST=0

I was able to fix this by:

locale -a
(if it complains just ignore it now)

Look for something that exists on your system, and then use it as follows:
mine has
en_US.utf8

vim /etc/defaults/locale
delete all the contents and add

LANG=en_US.utf8

Saved it and
locale -a
(you should not get an error now)

Using CPAN. Alternatively, you can use CPAN to install the modules:

From the root prompt on your server, invoke the CPAN shell:

# perl -MCPAN -e shell

Once the Perl interpreter has loaded (and been configured), you can install modules with: install MODULENAME.

The first thing you should do is upgrade your CPAN:

cpan> install Bundle::CPAN

Once it is completed, type:

cpan> reload cpan

Now, enter the following command to retrieve all of the required modules:

cpan> install DateTime

http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Tutorials

http://www.compuchannel.net/2008/11/11/metabolismo-tecnologico/

http://www.compuchannel.net/wp-content/archivos/2008/11/mapa-aceleracion_400.jpg
Los colores más vivos representan a los países más abiertos a la tecnología; con tonos grisáceos las naciones donde la adopción es menos fuerte.

Publicado: Noviembre 11th, 2008

Metabolismo tecnológico

Por Juan Carreón

Un mapa del mundo completamente diferente a los habituales es el que revela el “Índice de metabolismo tecnológico” de Intel*, en el que se muestra para cada nación su potencial de adaptabilidad a las nuevas tecnologías: telefonía móvil, computadoras e Internet.

Es sorpresivo, aunque no lo debería ser tanto, el hecho de que muestra una correlación negativa promedio entre la riqueza de las naciones y dicho índice, como es el caso de Estados Unidos que, a pesar de su elevado nivel de riqueza, tendría un bajo nivel de adaptabilidad tecnológica.

En cambio países pequeños como Jamaica, Dominica y Santa Lucía, en el Caribe, exhiben los mayores índices de adaptabilidad tecnológica con respecto de su nivel de desarrollo; algo parecido sucede con pequeñas naciones europeas tales como Serbia y Moldavia; o del Medio Oriente, como Israel y Jordania; o en Asia, como Filipinas, Vietnam y los Estados Federados de Micronesia, o gigantes como Mongolia.

En África los índices más elevados de adaptabilidad tecnológica corresponden a Sao Tome y Príncipe, Kenia y Mauritania.

El llamado índice de metabolismo tecnológico desarrollado por un equipo de investigadores dirigido por la doctora Dawn Nafus, antropóloga jefe de Intel, abarca desde un índice de aceleración tecnológica positiva de cinco, a uno de desaceleración tecnológica de menos cinco.

En el caso de América, el índice de metabolismo tecnológico significa índices de aceleración tecnológica:

de cinco para Jamaica, Dominica, St Lucía;

de cuatro para Antigua y Barbuda, Guyana, Brasil, Paraguay, Uruguay;

de tres para Belize, El Salvador, Perú, Chile;

de dos para Colombia, Ecuador;

de uno para Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Grenada, Argentina;

de cero para Canadá, México, Guatemala, Haití, Barbados, Guyana Francesa.

Y significa índices de desaceleración tecnológica:

de menos uno para Bahamas, Honduras, Venezuela, Guyana Francesa;

de menos dos para Estados Unidos, Panamá, República Dominicana, Isla Virgen, St. Kitt’s y Nevis, Aruba, Venezuela, Trinidad y Tobago, Suriname;

de menos tres para Cuba, Isla Caimán, Puerto Rico y las Antillas Holandesas;

de menos cuatro y cinco para ninguno (como si existe para algunos países de África).

Los vínculos ocultos

El cálculo de dichos índices ha sido como determinar los coeficientes de Gini para la tecnología y no sólo para la riqueza, afirma Naufus, quien llegó a esta novedosa interpretación tratando de comprender cómo es que países tan dispares como Corea y Estonia cuentan con índices de aceleración tecnológica semejantes.

¿Por qué los estonianos y surcoreanos son apasionados de los teléfonos celulares, las computadoras e Internet? Contestar dicha pregunta llevó al equipo coordinado por Nafus a investigar cuáles serían los vínculos ocultos entre la heterogénea constitución de dichas naciones y el que ostenten un índice similar (cuatro positivo) de adopción tecnológica.

En los casos de Corea del Sur y Estonia, el equipo de expertos encontró que ambos países poseen gobiernos dinámicos y redes sociales offline fuertes, así como una considerable afectación relativamente reciente de su memoria colectiva (el tránsito desde el comunismo y la Guerra de Corea), lo que implicaría que la agitación significa un factor decisivo en la adopción de tecnologías disruptivas, como fue también el caso de México con la Revolución a inicios del siglo XX.

Más allá de maduros y emergentes

Para esa investigadora, develar causas como las mencionadas representa que empresas como Intel busquen abrir nuevos mercados en ámbitos insospechados, al conocer qué países son más propensos a recibir y asimilar nuevas tecnologías, y no sólo limitarse a los mercados maduros y a los emergentes.

*http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/files/tmi_2007_global_map_13.pdf

Grandes petroleras donan fuertes sumas a la UNAM para luego reclutar alumnos

■ Sin embargo, “no tiene nada de malo; las universidades públicas producen recursos humanos”

Emir Olivares Alonso

Petroleras trasnacionales han otorgado importantes donativos a instituciones como la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) para la construcción de laboratorios o software especializado en el hidrocarburo; sin embargo, esa ayuda “no es por caridad, sino por interés”, debido a que con ello se han abierto puertas para que luego recluten jóvenes universitarios altamente capacitados en la industria.

“Tienen interés en nuestros estudiantes porque a futuro serán ellos su fuerza laboral”, aseguró el jefe de la División de Ingeniería en Ciencias de la Tierra de la Facultad de Ingeniería (FI) de la UNAM, Ricardo José Padilla y Sánchez.

En los años recientes compañías que dan servicios a Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) se han convertido, mediante convenios con la UNAM y el Instituto Politécnico Nacional, en las opciones de desarrollo laboral para estos profesionistas ante la escasez de oportunidades en la paraestatal.

La francesa Schlumberg y Halliburton –de capital estadunidense– son dos de las empresas que más donaciones a la facultad. El funcionario reconoció que esas trasnacionales han contribuido para equipo de cómputo especializado de varios laboratorios.

Conocer el equipo

Indicó que con esto las trasnacionales logran que los estudiantes universitarios en su formación académica conozcan el equipo particular de cada empresa para así utilizarlo cuando se contraten. Explicó que, por ejemplo, Schlumberg se especializa en registros de pozos, en tanto que Halliburton lo hace en la cimentación y estimulación de las fosas petroleras.

En 2003 la firma francesa reconoció a la UNAM como “universidad embajadora” y la calificó de una de las 40 mejores instituciones de educación superior en los países en los que la compañía tiene representación.

En ese contexto, la UNAM y Schlumberg iniciaron el Programa Embajador, que preveía donaciones para laboratorios de cómputo, becas para mujeres en el área tecnológica, patrocinios para internados, incremento de alumnos contratados por la compañía y aumento en la colaboración técnica.

“Nos dan buscando su beneficio; es un mero trato capitalista. Nos equipan con su software porque les conviene que cuando nuestros estudiantes egresen y trabajen en sus compañías conozcan y sepan usar sus equipos”, señaló Padilla.

Ese interés ha rendido frutos. Datos de la División de Ingeniería en Ciencias de la Tierra de la FI revelan que la mayoría de los egresados y titulados de esa casa de estudios son contratados por empresas privadas.

La información indica que de los 50 mil trabajadores de Pemex Exploración y Producción, sólo 10 mil (20 por ciento) son profesionistas, y de éstos, únicamente mil 500 son ingenieros geofísicos, geólogos y petroleros.

Esa cifra se queda corta con la cantidad de estudiantes egresados de esas tres carreras de ingeniería tan sólo por la UNAM, pues en los últimos 60 años se han titulado mil 858 ingenieros petroleros, 460 ingenieros geofísicos y mil 114 ingenieros geólogos, y, si se contara a los que terminaron la carrera sin titulación, la suma se triplicaría.

Israel Castro, jefe del Departamento de Explotación del Petróleo en la Coordinación de Ingeniería Petrolera de la FI, aseveró que las empresas privadas “están ávidas de personas altamente calificadas”, por lo que dan facilidades y hasta apoyos monetarios a los estudiantes universitarios del último semestre o recién egresados para que se titulen y posteriormente contratarlos.

Refirió que Pemex también cuenta con proyectos para que estudiantes universitarios realicen estancias en sus subsidiarias; sin embargo, a diferencia de las empresas privadas, donde la mayoría de los becarios obtienen plazas, en la paraestatal la contratación es más complicada.

El rezago de profesionistas en ingeniería petrolera, geológica y geofísica en Pemex fue objeto de discusión durante los debates sobre la reforma energética que celebró la UNAM hace cuatro meses.

Durante la mesa sobre Recursos humanos, investigación y tecnología en materia energética, el 23 de junio de 2008, Néstor Martínez Romero, profesor de la FI, indicó que en Estados Unidos existen 15 mil ingenieros petroleros, cifra muy superior a los especialistas correspondientes con los que cuenta Pemex Exploración y Producción.

El académico aseguró que en las décadas recientes en la paraestatal y en el país “se presentó un deterioro constante de las habilidades ingenieriles del personal, debido a la falta de políticas que incentivaran adecuadamente a los profesionistas y a las cada vez mayores demandas de tiempo para ejecutar la operación y la administración”.

Esta situación y la formación “de calidad” que el IPN y la UNAM dan a los egresados de las carreras relacionadas con el hidrocarburo han generado que las empresas privadas se interesen cada vez más por contratar a estos jóvenes.

Ambas instituciones “nos interesan porque son líderes a escala mundial en estas ingenierías”, consideró Sergio Centurión, gerente técnico de la empresa BJ Services, que entró en contacto recientemente con la UNAM y el Poli para el reclutamiento de profesionistas.

Para el jefe de la división de Ingeniería en Ciencias de la Tierra en la FI de la UNAM, José Padilla, el que los egresados de estas carreras se contraten en la industria privada “no tiene nada de malo. Uno de los objetivos de las universidades públicas es producir recursos humanos y ponerlos a disposición del país: si los jóvenes encuentran trabajo en esas compañías o en el gobierno, a las autoridades universitarias nos da mucho gusto”.

Trasnacionales, a la caza de jóvenes desdeñados aquí

Emir Olivares Alonso

Por años, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) dejó de contratar a ingenieros en ciencias de la tierra recién egresados de instituciones públicas de educación superior, hecho que ha favorecido que las trasnacionales relacionadas con la exploración y explotación de los hidrocarburos aprovechen la calidad profesional y especialización de estos estudiantes, en procesos de reclutamiento que se llevan a cabo en las propias escuelas.

Recientemente estas empresas se han dedicado a enrolar a estudiantes que terminaron –o están a punto de hacerlo– las carreras de ingeniería petrolera, geofísica o geología en instituciones como la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y el Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), debido “a la buena calidad de su formación”, y se han convertido en opción real de desarrollo para los egresados de estas especialidades, ante la falta de oportunidades en la paraestatal.

Directivos de la Facultad de Ingeniería (FI) de la UNAM reconocieron que empresas como Halliburton, Schlumberg, Tamsa y BJ Services, entre otras, realizan periódicamente visitas a la institución en búsqueda de alumnos con capacidad de colaborar en proyectos o estancias, muchas veces en otras ciudades e inclusive fuera del país.

Los ingenieros geofísicos desarrollan métodos y técnicas para explorar el planeta, encontrar recursos naturales y dar apoyo a la creación de infraestructura; un geólogo esta preparado para descubrir recursos minerales y localizar yacimientos de hidrocarburos, entre otras actividades, en tanto un petrolero programa, ejecuta y dirige los procesos de exploración de crudo, agua y energía geotérmica.

Ricardo José Padilla y Sánchez, jefe de la división de ingeniería en ciencias de la tierra de la FI, informó que en años recientes Pemex “no contrata” a los ingenieros especializados en producción petrolera debido a “las mafias” de la directiva sindical, que se encargan de vender o “apadrinar” las plazas nuevas para la paraestatal.

Falta de opciones

Explicó que un ejemplo se presentó hace varios años, cuando “el Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero, Tamaulipas, designó como padrino a Joaquín Hernández Galicia, La Quina, ex dirigente del sindicato petrolero, por lo que durante un tiempo Pemex sólo contrató egresados de esa institución. (La paraestatal) casi no capta universitarios; por eso nuestros muchachos buscan opciones en compañías privadas”.

Desde hace tiempo las transnacionales acuden varias veces al año a la FI y a escuelas del IPN, a fin de incorporar personal joven y bien capacitado con atractivos programas de becas o estancias. El proceso es rápido: los representantes de las empresas imparten conferencias al estudiantado para explicar los “beneficios y ventajas” que otorgan; escuchan dudas, preguntas y comentarios de los jóvenes; al final de la charla los entrevistan para “conocer su actitud, predisposición y capacidades” en las labores que desempeñarían, y posteriormente los citan en la compañía para la aplicación de pruebas.

Destaca Narro acceso al circuito de la computación

México, 12 Nov (Notimex).- En la actualidad estar fuera del circuito de la computación implica una forma adicional de analfabetismo y exclusión, consideró el rector de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), José Narro Robles.

En el marco de la inauguración del congreso "50 años de la Computación en México", Narro Robles estimó que en el territorio nacional existen seis millones de personas que no saben leer ni escribir.

"Debemos evitar que el día de mañana, las generaciones que encabezarán el cambio nos recriminen que además de no haber resuelto ese analfabetismo ancestral, les heredemos esa nueva exclusión", dijo.

Preguntó: "¿Por qué no podemos aspirar en México a convertirnos en agentes de primer nivel en la creación de la tecnología computacional y el desarrollo de nuevos productos y aplicaciones? ¿Dónde está la limitación? ¿Qué parte de la genética del mexicano inhibe esas posibilidades?"

En su opinión, es una cuestión que no pasa por la genética sino por la necesidad de contar con políticas públicas, concretas, específicas, bien diseñadas, por la apuesta de los recursos necesarios.

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1816

http://www.howtoforge.com/reverse-ssh-tunneling

Ama la tecnología y la domina

El “tecnógico” Obama

El Presidente electo de EU, de 47 años, hizo un uso de las nuevas tecnologías sin precedentes en la vida política estadounidense, indicó Rob Enderle, del Enderle Group en Silicon Valley.

Barack Obama debería llevar con él a la Casa Blanca su pasión por las tecnologías de la información, que supo utilizar durante toda la campaña electoral, y que lo convertirá en el primer “presidente de alta tecnología” al frente de Estados Unidos.

0bama, de 47 años, hizo un uso de las nuevas tecnologías sin precedentes en la vida política estadounidense. “Obama ama la tecnología y si la usa tan bien, es porque la domina”, indicó Rob Enderle, del Enderle Group en Silicon Valley. “Es lo que lo convierte en un presidente ‘de alta tecnología’”, añadió.

Un estudio difundido por el Center for Responsive Politics muestra que las empresas punta de Silicon Valley, al este de San Francisco, donaron cinco veces más dinero al demócrata durante la campaña que a su rival republicano John McCain.

Y aproximadamente 91% de los trabajadores de este templo californiano de la informática votaron por Obama.

“Silicon Valley invirtió fuertemente en Obama: millones de dólares”, explicó Enderle.

Durante la campaña presidencial Obama prometió, en una discusión organizada por el buscador Google en un campus californiano, defender la neutralidad de la red y proveer el acceso de banda ancha a internet a todo el país.

“Tenemos que garantizar un intercambio libre y gratuito de la información, y esto comienza con un internet abierto”, dijo Obama durante una conversación (chat) pública con el presidente de Google, Eric Schmidt.

Como otros directores de Silicon Valley, el presidente del grupo ofreció sus consejos durante la campaña a Obama, que prometió entre otros la creación de un puesto de “director informático” en su gobierno.

El futuro “director informático” podría ser Lawrence Lessig, fundador del Center for Internet and Society, Shane Robison de Hewlett Packard o Schmidt. “Podría ser hasta Al Gore”, estimó Enderle, pero “creo que Shane Robison sería el más calificado”.

Obama se comprometió a entablar un debate político sobre las tarifas de los operadores, ya que para el presidente electo entregar la red “a los que pujan más alto” desanimaría la innovación y firmaría la sentencia de muerte de las jóvenes empresas.

En su discusión con los “Googlers” (usuarios de Google), Obama indicó que sus prioridades en la Casa Blanca serán el desarrollo de energías limpias al servicio de sus conciudadanos, para instaurar por ejemplo expedientes médicos informatizados en el marco de la cobertura médica universal que preconiza.

El entonces candidato demócrata a la Casa Blanca, abogó por suavizar las leyes de inmigración para permitir a las empresas de internet importar ingenieros cuando no los encuentran en el país, pero también prometió mejorar la educación para que profesionales altamente cualificados “crezcan aquí mismo en Estados Unidos”.

La elección de “Obama es una buena noticia para las firmas de tecnología”, resumió Enderle.
Fuente: Reuters
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Etiquetas: Barack Obama, Google, Internet, Silicon Valley

El Universal
Ciudad de México
Jueves 06 de noviembre de 2008

En Facebook se pueden encontrar 12 grupos de discusión. El más extenso cuenta con 135 integrantes y los demás oscilan entre 13 y 54 participantes Abundan las suspicacias

Miembros de las actualmente famosas redes sociales como Hi5 y Facebook expresan su pesar por la muerte del secretario de Gobernación, Juan Camilo Mouriño, con la creación de grupos referentes al accidente en el que perdiera la vida el funcionario.

Específicamente en la red social denominada Facebook se pueden encontrar 12 de estos grupos. El más extenso cuenta con 135 integrantes y los demás grupos oscilan entre 54 y 13 participantes.

Grupos como "Descanse en paz Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo" - el más extenso en comentarios, cuenta con 127 opinones publicadas- y "Por los que extrañaremos a Juan Camilo Mouriño" envían comentarios expresando sus condolencias por el fallecimiento del secretario, considerado por muchos de los miembros, como "un mexicano digno de reconocer".

Por otra parte, participantes de grupos como "Por Los Q No Creemos Q Haya Sido Accidente La Muerte de Mouriño" comentan sobre la posibilidad latente de un atentado en contra del secretario de Gobernación "desde el momento mismo del supuesto accidente".

"Fue un atentado, es obvio. Aunque quizá nunca lo reconozca públicamente el Gobierno Federal para k el país no entre en crisis", asegura uno de los usuarios.

Comentarios como "Accidente Provocado" o "¡Nadie vio en realidad los restos mortales de Mouriño!", provocan polémica entre los usuarios de las distintas redes sociales ante el impacto provocado en las personas por el trágico incidente.

"Hay que ser realistas, el sr. generó muchas antipatías por su posición de yuppie de ultra derecha. Francamente, yo creo que fue demasiado casual", comentó Mel Kruspe.

Los miembros de estas redes sociales, conmovidos o simplemente impactados por el acontecimiento continúan recopilando cientos de comentarios en estos grupos de discusión, en donde los comentarios cuentan con varios matices que van de las condolencias a los reclamos pasando por las infaltables teorías de conspiración.

By Matt Blum EmailNovember 06, 2008 | 7:00:00 AMCategories: Famous GeekDads

Sealpresidentialcolor Barack Obama, soon to become the 44th President of the U.S.A., is many things: a statesman, a lawyer, an author, and an orator. It is also our opinion at GeekDad that, even without knowing him personally, we have enough evidence to demonstrate that he is a big geek. Even if you didn't want him to win the election, you have to admit that it would be awesome for him to not only be the first African-American President, but also the first geek President. Here, then, is our evidence:

1. Obama has pledged to create a cabinet-level Chief Technology Officer for the country. The U.S. CTO would be responsible for making broadband technology readily available to every U.S. citizen, and for fighting the telcos for net neutrality. While this is admirable for many reasons, it seems to us that nobody would make this a central point of his presidential campaign unless he were, on some level, a geek.

2. He is a big fan of Star Trek. He said himself: "I grew up on Star Trek. I believe in the final frontier." And, when Leonard Nimoy was the guest on NPR's "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" in September, he said that he had run into "one of the presidential candidates" and that that candidate had, upon seeing Nimoy, given him the Vulcan salute. He refused to name the candidate, but said he "was not John McCain." (Ed. Note: not to mention, he is the best example of the strength of IDIC we've seen in a long time)

Obamagoogle 3. He can talk techspeak when the occasion demands it. Almost a year ago, Obama visited Google and had a Q&A session with employees. CEO Eric Schmidt asked him what the most efficient way would be to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama smoothly responded "I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go." Now, yes, he was probably prepped for the question by his staff (since McCain had been asked a similar question at his Google Q&A weeks earlier), but that's OK—plenty of geeks BS their way through technical interview questions, right?

4. Obama has repeatedly spoken about using the Internet to make the White House more open and accessible to the public once he's President. This would include letting people enter comments on bills before he signs them, putting videos of some meetings online, and in general making the executive Superman_2 branch transparent. He's already shown in his campaign that he and his staff know how to use the Internet to extremely good purpose, including extensive use of SMS, Twitter, and even building an iPhone app. This would be another of the duties of the CTO mentioned in #1, but is significant enough we felt it was worthy of being considered a separate piece of evidence.

5. The photograph you see to the right, which can even be found on Obama's official Senate website. I don't think any explanation is necessary as to why this qualifies as evidence.

So, what do you think? Any further evidence? Any evidence against?

It must be pointed out, since this is GeekDad, that if indeed Barack Obama is a geek, he is a geek dad like us, since by now just about everyone knows about his two daughters. The coolness of having a geek dad President-Elect can scarcely be overstated.
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Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency
By Sarah Lai Stirland EmailNovember 04, 2008 | 12:25:24 AMCategories: Election '08

Obama_acceptance

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States Tuesday night, crowning an improbable two-year climb that owes much of its success to his command of the internet as a fundraising and organizing tool.

Obama won 52 percent of the nation's popular vote, a claimed a 338-163 advantage in electoral votes Wednesday morning, thanks to victories in several traditionally Republican states. The results are a stunning and hard-won victory for a candidate who began the race as a relative newcomer to the national political stage, and ended it as first African-American to win the White House.

"I was never the likeliest candidate for this office," Obama said in an acceptance speech in Chicago Tuesday night. "We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign ... was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause."

Both Obama and Republican rival John McCain relied on the net to bolster their campaigns. But Obama's online success dwarfed his opponent's, and proved key to his winning the presidency. Volunteers used Obama's website to organize a thousand phone-banking events in the last week of the race -- and 150,000 other campaign-related events over the course of the campaign. Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, myBarackObama.com chalked up some 1.5 million accounts. And Obama raised a record-breaking $600 million in contributions from more than three million people, many of whom donated through the web.

"He's run a campaign where he's used very modern tools, spoke to a new coalition, talked about new issues, and along the way, he's reinvented the way campaigns are run," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the nonprofit think-tank NDN, and a veteran of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. "Compared to our 1992 campaign, this is like a multi-national corporation versus a non-profit."

Ironically, it was McCain who first saw the internet's potential in a presidential race, running an experimental set of targeted banner ads during his doomed 1999 primary battle against George W. Bush. But eight years later, Obama finally teased out the net's full potential as an election tool.

The campaign's commitment to online organizing took shape during the primaries, when it hired online director Joe Rospars, a veteran of Howard Dean's web-heavy 2004 campaign, and lured Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com. Hughes was intrigued by the challenge. "We were going to be taking on some of the biggest names in politics," Hughes recalled in an interview last week.

As the presidential race heated up, the internet grew from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools. Obama's campaign carefully designed its web site to maximize group collaboration, while at the same time giving individual volunteers tasks they could follow on their own schedules.

The scale of Obama's campaign reached massive proportions. By Election Day, for example, it was asking its cadres of volunteers to make a million phone calls to get out the vote.

In addition to fostering grassroots supporters with its social networking tool, the Obama campaign contacted hard-to-reach young voters through text messages, collecting thousands of numbers at rallies and sending out texts at strategic moments to ask for volunteer help or remind recipients to vote.

The campaign also launched web pages and online action groups to fight the underground, e-mail whisper campaigns and robo-calls that surfaced in battleground states. In one effort, the campaign urged supporters to send out counterviral e-mails responding to false rumors about Obama's personal background and tax policies.

In fundraising, Obama followed in the footsteps of Howard Dean's 2004 bid by regularly soliciting small donations from a wide swath of voters, raising record amounts online by federal filing deadlines. He then used this money for more traditional campaigning — for example, flooding cable markets in strategic states with television advertising. Obama spent a record-shattering $293 million on TV ads between January 1, 2007, and October 29, 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence. McCain spent $132 million during the same period.

In many ways, the story of Obama's campaign was the story of his supporters, whose creativity and enthusiasm manifested through multitudes of websites and YouTube videos online. It even resulted in volunteer contributions like the innovative Obama '08 iPhone and iTouch application that enabled owners to mobilize their friends and contacts in battleground states through the Apple devices.

The campaign was constantly adding new features even to the end, and many hope that Obama will bring this approach with him to the White House. Obama almost has no choice as he faces the task of rebuilding Washington's credibility with voters, says David Stephenson, a consultant who advises governments on transparency.

"I'm not sure that Obama is an XML jockey," says Stephenson. "But he does have people advising him that realize how important this is."

Either way, Obama's rise to the presidency will be studied for years to come as the textbook example of a new kind of electioneering driven by people and technology, says Ralph Benko, a principal of the political consulting firm Capital City Partners, in Washington, D.C.

"It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source kind of ethos that infused this campaign," says Benko. "Clearly, there was a vision to this."

This article discusses the process of recovering deleted data from an ext3 partition, on a system running Linux, using a process called data carving. This basic technique is useful in any number of situations, such as recovering data that has been accidentally deleted by a user, information removed in an attempt to erase signs of a system intrusion that could be used to track the source, or data erased by an end-user attempting to cover up an acceptable use policy infraction.

This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of ext3 and the inner workings of filesystems. It is important to note that there is a certain amount of risk associated with this process. When performed improperly, the data you are attempting to recover, or other data stored on the system, could be permanently lost. While this technique is quite accurate most of the time, and very useful in any number of different situations, it is not "forensically sound" and will not hold up legally for use in court. Special software, hardware, and procedures -- or professional services -- are a must in situations when legal action is required.

The tools used in this article are freely available and can be downloaded from their respective websites.
The basic recovery process

In this section we will go step-by-step through the data recovery process and describe the tools, and their options, in detail. We start by listing a directory below.
[abe@abe-laptop test]$ ls -al
total 27
drwxrwxr-x 2 abe abe 4096 2008-03-29 17:48 .
drwx------ 71 abe abe 4096 2008-03-29 17:47 ..
-rwxr--r-- 1 abe abe 42736 2008-03-29 17:47 weimaraner1.jpg

In the listing above we can see that there is a file named weimaraner1.jpg in the test directory. This is a picture of my dog. I don't want to delete it. I like my dog.
[abe@abe-laptop test]$ rm -f *

Here we can see I am deleting it. Whoops! Sorry buddy. Let's gather some basic information about the system so we can begin the recovery process.
[abe@abe-laptop test]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 71G 14G 53G 21% /
/dev/sda1 99M 19M 76M 20% /boot
tmpfs 1007M 12K 1007M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1 887M 152M 735M 18% /media/PUBLIC

Here we see that the full path to the test directory (which is /home/abe/test) is part of the / filesystem, represented by the device file /dev/sda2.
[abe@abe-laptop test]$ su -
Password:
[root@abe-laptop ~]# debugfs /dev/sda2

Using su to gain root access, we can start the debugfs program giving it the target of /dev/sda2. The debugfs program is an interactive file system debugger that is installed by default with most common Linux distributions. This program is used to manually examine and change the state of a filesystem. In our situation, we're going to use this program to determine the inode which stored information about the deleted file and to what block group the deleted file belonged.
debugfs 1.40.4 (31-Dec-2007)
debugfs: cd /home/abe/test
debugfs: ls -d
1835327 (12) . 65538 (4084) .. <1835328> (4072) weimaraner1.jpg

After debugfs starts, we cd into /home/abe/test and run the ls -d command. This command shows us all deleted entries in the current directory. The output shows us that we have one deleted entry and that its inode number is 1835328 -- that is, the number between the angular brackets.
debugfs: imap <1835328>
Inode 1835328 is part of block group 56
located at block 1835019, offset 0x0f80

The next command we want to run is imap, giving it the inode number above so we can determine to which block group the file belonged. We see by the output that it belonged to block group 56.
debugfs: stats
[...lots of output...]
Blocks per group: 32768
[...lots of output...]
debugfs: q

Running the stats command will generate a lot of output. The only data we are interested in from this list, however, is the number of blocks per group. In this case, and most cases, it’s 32768. Now we have enough data to be able to determine the specific set of blocks in which the data resided. We're done with debugfs now, so we type q to quit.
[root@abe-laptop ~]# dls /dev/sda2 1835008-1867775 > /media/PUBLIC/block.dat

The next thing we need to do is pull all unallocated blocks from block group 56 so we can examine their content. The dls program, from The Sleuth Kit (TSK), allows us to do just that. We simply need to know the device file, a range of blocks, and have enough space in the appropriate place to output this data. Using the information above, we can calculate the block range by multiplying the block group number and the block group size and then multiplying the block group number plus one by the blocks per group minus one. In this case, the formula would look like this:
(56 x 32768) through ((56 + 1) x 32768 - 1)

This would give us a range of 1835008 through 1867775. It's very important that the destination of the output does not reside on the same partition as the data you're attempting to recover. What will most likely be a large amount of data being written to disk from the output of this command could potentially overwrite the data you are trying to recover (as the blocks which stored the data from the deleted file have already been marked unallocated). You want as little disk activity as possible on the partition you're working with. In this example, I'm using a USB thumb drive (located on /media/PUBLIC) as a location to store this data.
[root@abe-laptop ~]# mkdir /media/PUBLIC/output
[root@abe-laptop ~]# foremost -dv -t jpg -i /media/PUBLIC/block.dat -o /media/PUBLIC/output/

Next we need to attempt to extract this data from the unallocated blocks we extracted with the dls command above. To do this, we are going to use Foremost. This program is used to recover files based on header information, footer information, and internal data structures. This is the process, mentioned earlier, called data carving. First we are going to create a directory to store the foremost output (again, this should be on a separate partition). Next we are going to run the foremost command giving it the file type of jpg (which is an internally recognized type - more on custom types below), the input file, and the output directory. The output from this command is listed below.
Foremost version 1.5.3 by Jesse Kornblum, Kris Kendall, and Nick Mikus
Audit File

Foremost started at Sat Mar 29 18:02:29 2008
Invocation: foremost -dv -t jpg -i /media/PUBLIC/block.dat -o /media/PUBLIC/output/
Output directory: /media/PUBLIC/output
Configuration file: /usr/local/etc/foremost.conf
Processing: /media/PUBLIC/block.dat
|------------------------------------------------------------------
File: /media/PUBLIC/block.dat
Start: Sat Mar 29 18:02:29 2008
Length: 110 MB (115941376 bytes)

Num Name (bs=512) Size File Offset Comment

0: 00033272.jpg 26 KB 17035264
1: 00033328.jpg 184 KB 17063936
2: 00033704.jpg 58 KB 17256448
3: 00033824.jpg 62 KB 17317888

[...]

*46: 00210136.jpg 2 KB 107589632
47: 00210144.jpg 3 KB 107593728
48: 00210392.jpg 6 KB 107720704
*
Finish: Sat Mar 29 18:02:29 2008

49 FILES EXTRACTED

jpg:= 49
------------------------------------------------------------------

Foremost finished at Sat Mar 29 18:02:29 2008
[root@abe-laptop ~]#

As we can see, Foremost found forty-nine previously deleted jpg files (this output is also saved in a file named audit.txt in the root of the specified output directory). How do we know which is the file we are trying to recover? We could, as is most commonly done, open all of these files and see their contents. Another option is to simply compare file sizes. We know from our directory listing above that the jpg file we are looking for is 41k in size. There's only one file that foremost extracted into the output directory that's 41k, and indeed, 00114144.jpg is the file we are attempting to recover. Comparing size only works, of course, if you "know your data". Integrity checking programs such as Tripwire play a big role in a recovery operation as you can identify the recovered data without ever inspecting the content, as well as verify its integrity. This becomes quite useful if the information you're attempting to recover is confidential and you are not authorized to view the data.
Defining custom types in Foremost

As of Foremost v1.5.3, the internally supported data types that the program will recover without custom rules are jpg, gif, png, bmp, avi, exe, mpg, wav, riff, wmv, mov, pdf, ole, doc, zip, rar, htm, and cpp. If you need to recover data beyond these built-in data types, you will need to define custom types in Foremost's configuration file (foremost.conf).

An entry that defines a type in the foremost configuration file (as explained in the documentation at the beginning of foremost.conf or in the manpage) consists of several columns: extension, case sensitivity, maximum size, header and footer (optional), and special keywords (optional). As an example that most should be familiar with, here is the entry for an html file:

We see here that the file extension is htm (NONE can be specified if no file extension should be used during the output of extracted data), the header and footer are not case sensitive, the maximum file size is 50k bytes (which means that 50k bytes after the header will be recovered if no footer is specified or 50k bytes will be recovered if that amount of data is recovered before the defined footer is detected), the recovered file should start with "html" (header) and end with " / html" (footer).

The ASCII keyword can also be used when attempting to recover ASCII files. Specifying this keyword at the end of an entry will tell Foremost to extract all ASCII printable characters before and after the keyword defined. An example of this would be a type to recover a perl script. If, for example, you need to recover a perl script that you know included Crypt::CBC, you could use the following type definition:
pl y 100000 Crypt::CBC Crypt::CBC ASCII

Note that Crypt::CBC is listed in both the header and footer fields. This is done so that Foremost will recognize this as the string to search around when the ASCII keyword is used. A more general type to find perl scripts could be defined as follows:
pl n 100000 #!/usr/bin/perl #!/usr/bin/perl ASCII

When attempting to recover files that are not ASCII, hexadecimal and octal notation can be used by specifying \x[0-f][0-f] or \[0-3][0-7][0-7], respectively. Below is an example of hexadecimal notation describing the header and footers of a gif file:
gif y 155000000 \x47\x49\x46\x38\x37\x61 \x00\x3b

As you may have realized by now, Foremost is a very powerful tool. Learn its intricacies and it can be a wonderfully flexible tool in data recovery and computer security forensic operations. Read the Foremost man page or consult the configuration file for a complete guide to creating custom data types.
ext2 vs ext3 Data Recover

You may be asking yourself why this process is so much more difficult with ext3 than it is with ext2? This question is answered by one of the ext3 developers in the Linux ext3 FAQ:

Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?

Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.

Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.

The process, as described in this article, is the "grep" that Andreas is referring to. Hopefully, as ext3 is developed further, some effort will be put in to making this process easier and more reliable.
Conclusion

While going through this process may be necessary to recover information lost in any number of situations, it’s not a process you want to go through on a Monday morning to recover your organization's payroll data after an administrator fat-fingers an rm command. The single most important piece of information you should take away from this article, in that vein, is to keep current, tested backups of business critical data that reside on the systems you manage. Regardless of the reason for its use, the process covered in this article is something that every system administrator and security analyst should have in their toolbelt.

Features - October 13, 2008
The "New" New Media Campaign: Will the Networked Generation Rock the Vote--Or Wreck It?
By Steve McGookin

Just as the phenomenon of political blogging broke through to the mainstream with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's groundbreaking bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, this election cycle marks the first presidential campaign of the YouTube era.

And just as the Internet "invented Howard Dean" by tapping into youthful enthusiasm and creative fund-raising techniques, the current campaigns have taken those building blocks and constructed the next level of functionality.

A recent Pew study contrasted the content of the two candidates' online presences, noting that "as of September 9, Obama had 510,799 MySpace 'friends' (compared to McCain's 87,652) and more than 1.7 million Facebook pals (compared to 309,591 for McCain). The Obama camp also had twice as many videos posted on his official YouTube channel than McCain."

In particular, though, Obama has engaged with potential supporters on a scale Dean could only have imagined. In the process, he has amassed a network of mostly young volunteers, bloggers and small donors, enabling him to raise the most money ever of any presidential candidate, and leading the Republican National Committee (RNC) to cry foul over suspected "illegal and foreign donors".

In an increasingly interconnected world, however, technology allows—indeed encourages—politics to spread beyond geographic borders. Whether domestic rules can keep up is a separate discussion.

In a new book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & The Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais advance the notion that what we are witnessing with this election is nothing less than a generational realignment, prompted by an explosion in online social networking and technological capability among an emerging generation of citizens—the so-called Millennials—who combine a personal optimism with a lack of faith in the current political system to adequately address society's ills.

In their book, Winograd and Hais talk about the importance for politicians of harnessing (or at least attempting to harness) successive technological waves: "While it is true that each time a new form of communications technology has appeared, the first candidate to figure out how to maximize its impact in campaigns has triumphed, it is also true that the ultimate winner of the campaign technology arms race has not always been the first to use the medium well," they write. "Sometimes the party that has suffered defeat from the initial use of the technology has learned from that experience and gone on to master the technology, using it to help regain power."

There are of course pitfalls. For every viral video sensation that has helped one candidate tap a groove of cool over another, there can also be a disconnected lapse, committed forever to video, or even a simple lack of understanding of how the unblinking eye in the end can even decide who gets to be a candidate and who doesn't. Events believed long consigned to history can be embarrassingly resuscitated years later. And although the campaigns and 527 advocacy groups are using Web-only ads to generate buzz with online audiences and the press, YouTube is sizzling with resurgent political satire that embraces those candidates able to use mainstream shows like NBC's Saturday Night Live or Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as vehicles for communicating political messages to win hearts and minds.

As Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder and publisher of the influential left-wing blog Daily Kos (whose "Orange to Blue" fund-raising effort is an example of the power of connected reach) said in a recent interview: "Clearly the most effective online activism is the stuff that jumps offline or jumps into the traditional media. When you're trying to change society, you need to change people's opinions or you need to influence the gatekeepers. You either convince the gatekeepers to change their behavior or you build enough popular support that they have no choice but to change their behavior or you can bypass them."

And whereas there have been some recent advances in the study of media bias perhaps even the concept itself may soon be irrelevant. Might mainstream corporate media become even less central to a political discourse increasingly dominated, as Cass Sunstein argues, by an ideological "echo chamber"?

"When it comes to the Internet," he writes, "we demand the right to reinforce our own beliefs without embracing the responsibility to challenge them."

In that context, and in a society as politically polarized as the U.S. has been during this election cycle, there is a clear disconnect when roughly eight in 10 people believe the country is on the wrong track, yet the candidates are seemingly running neck and neck.

By the same token, though, it seems not unreasonable to speculate that the inevitable end product of the freedom facilitated by open-source politics is that a campaign becomes more than just selling the candidate and a rigid policy platform, rather it is taken out of the direct control of party or strategists and at least in some way returned to the people whose participation and commitment gives it meaning.

Since the middle of the 20th Century, when the Federal Reserve started compiling this measurement of non-borrowed bank deposit reserves there has been little short term deviation from its normal levels. Long Story short - Bank reserves, other than those achieved through loans (usually FED funds market, or discount window) have evaporated.

Choose the YUI components you want to use on your page; beneath the button toolbars, the text area will update with the sorted dependency list required to power your desired components. By default, we'll use aggregrate (rollup) files where possible and serve the files from yui.yahooapis.com. You can allow rollups and/or set your own base URL path if you choose. The Combine All JS Files option, on by default, generates a URL for your JavaScript files that combines them all into a single file, reducing HTTP requests.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/hosting/?grids#configure

AJAX provides Web developers with plenty of opportunities to enhance the user experience and improve the performance of their websites. There are countless ways that AJAX can be used, and fortunately there are plenty of good and useful AJAX tutorials out there to help you with your own implementation.

This post serves as a collection of useful tutorials on working with AJAX in a wide variety of ways. You’ll find tutorials on working with forms, building shopping carts, creating chat features, working with log-ins and usernames and much more.

For more on AJAX see:

* 80+ AJAX Solutions for Professional Coding
* 60 More AJAX and JavaScript Solutions for Professional Coding
* 40+ Tooltips Scripts with AJAX, JavaScript and CSS
* Tutorials Round-Up: AJAX, CSS, PHP and More

CORPORATE IT

Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

# IT's global “cloud”
# The evolution of data centres
# Software as a service
# Connecting to the cloud
# The economics of the cloud
# The long nimbus
# Computers without borders

October 2008

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.

If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders.

Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."

So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. And if you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.

But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is better before taking the leap? If you're starting a restaurant, maybe, but not if you're working on technology. Technology progresses more or less independently of the stock market. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. Microsoft's first product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair. That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if Gates and Allen had decided to wait a few years, it would have been too late.

Of course, the idea you have now won't be the last you have. There are always new ideas. But if you have a specific idea you want to act on, act now.

That doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched. It's not necessarily a problem if customers feel pinched: you may even be able to benefit from it, by making things that save money. Startups often make things cheaper, so in that respect they're better positioned to prosper in a recession than big companies.

Investors are more of a problem. Startups generally need to raise some amount of external funding, and investors tend to be less willing to invest in bad times. They shouldn't be. Everyone knows you're supposed to buy when times are bad and sell when times are good. But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking it's time to buy. You have to be a contrarian to be correct, and by definition only a minority of investors can be.

So just as investors in 1999 were tripping over one another trying to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be reluctant to invest even in good ones.

You'll have to adapt to this. But that's nothing new: startups always have to adapt to the whims of investors. Ask any founder in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch the face they make. Last year you had to be prepared to explain how your startup was viral. Next year you'll have to explain how it's recession-proof.

(Those are both good things to be. The mistake investors make is not the criteria they use but that they always tend to focus on one to the exclusion of the rest.)

Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible. For years I've been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. Fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup, and a recession will if anything make it cheaper still.

If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a cockroach even than to keep your job. Customers may drop off individually if they can no longer afford you, but you're not going to lose them all at once; markets don't "reduce headcount."

What if you quit your job to start a startup that fails, and you can't find another? That could be a problem if you work in sales or marketing. In those fields it can take months to find a new job in a bad economy. But hackers seem to be more liquid. Good hackers can always get some kind of job. It might not be your dream job, but you're not going to starve.

Another advantage of bad times is that there's less competition. Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. If everyone else is cowering in a corner, you may have a whole car to yourself.

You're an investor too. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that they were the first investors in Google. And like any investor you should buy when times are bad.

Were you nodding in agreement, thinking "stupid investors" a few paragraphs ago when I was talking about how investors are reluctant to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the time they should rationally be most willing to buy? Well, founders aren't much better. When times get bad, hackers go to grad school. And no doubt that will happen this time too. In fact, what makes the preceding paragraph true is that most readers won't believe it—at least to the extent of acting on it.

So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It's hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn't matter much either way. It's the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.

México será el país que crecerá menos en AL en los años 2008 y 2009, y pronostica que el PIB de este año será de 2.1% y 1.8% para el próximo, debido a la menor aportación económica que harán los migrantes.

La recuperación de la economía mundial iniciará hasta la segunda parte del año 2009 y será mucho más gradual que la registrada en anteriores procesos de reactivación.

Es lo que consigna el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) en su Panorama económico regional para el Hemisferio Oeste, al que pertenece México.

Refiere que el principal riesgo para las economías de América es la reducción de los precios de las materias primas, que detalla, han sido determinantes en los últimos dos años para impulsar la actividad regional y afianzar la posición fiscal.

En el análisis, enfatiza que México será el país que crecerá menos en América Latina en los años 2008 y 2009, y pronostica que el PIB de este año será de 2.1% y 1.8% para el próximo.

Advierte que las principales tensiones que sufrirá la administración de Calderón en materia económica vendrán de la menor aportación económica que harán los migrantes mexicanos a sus familias, vía remesas; la volatilidad en el precio del petróleo, la crisis de liquidez del mercado mundial y la recesión de Estados Unidos.

En el documento, dedica una nota a explicar el efecto de la situación económica de EU sobre América Latina y enfatiza que “a diferencia de las recesiones anteriores, ahora el consumo y la inversión interna están sufriendo una desaceleración”.
Lo que agudiza el riesgo de que se retrase la recuperación de la economía estadounidense.
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by Daniel W. Drezner

10.21.2008

Over the weekend, the Bush administration announced that it intended to organize a global summit to tackle the global financial crisis. This in and of itself would be unremarkable, except that this wasn’t originally Bush’s idea. He decided to suggest it at the urging of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

The contrast with a decade ago is sharp. Ten years ago, when the Asian financial crisis was in full bloom, both Europe and Japan proposed some tweaks to global governance. Japan floated the idea of an Asian Monetary Fund, and France suggested the creation of an Economic Security Council. And the United States politely ignored both suggestions. When an American president with a penchant for unilateralism starts following the lead of the French, you know that times have changed. Has the crisis revealed a shift in the economic balance of power?

When capital becomes scarce, the countries that are sitting on large reserves could be seen as having all the leverage. In a new Council on Foreign Relations report, Brad Setser argues that increasing external indebtedness will give America’s creditors increasing leverage over U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, a key reason for the timing of the Treasury Department’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was pressure from the sovereign holders of their debt. And the New York Times’ Keith Bradsher reported on Monday that Washington was tolerating China’s continued efforts to prevent the yuan from appreciating because, “with the United States heavily dependent on China to buy the Treasury bonds needed to finance a bailout of the American financial system, the Bush administration has stopped criticizing China’s trade and currency policies.”

The financial crisis has also led to some strange bedfellows—or at least some serious flirting between polar opposites. As Iceland tottered on the brink of bankruptcy, it started to court Russia as a source of emergency funding. Pakistan’s new democratic president shuttled to China in order to seek a $4 billion injection of capital. Are these entreaties the harbinger of a shift in financial power?

There’s enough panic to go around right now without worrying about a radical shift in financial power. The past few weeks have certainly revealed that financial interdependence forces the United States to listen to its creditors. However, this interdependence cuts both ways. Because of its slowing growth, China has no choice but to continue purchasing dollar-denominated debt in order to goose its export earnings. As for Russia, $500 billion in reserves has not prevented the crash of its own equity markets.

Indeed, despite their entreaties to Moscow and Beijing, Iceland and Pakistan have been rebuffed. These countries have had little choice but to go to the International Monetary Fund for emergency financing.

This does not mean that shifts in financial power are not occurring. Lost amid the financial chaos of the past six weeks was the revelation that China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange used a $300 million purchase of government bonds and a $150 million grant to Costa Rica in return for that country’s decision to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan after sixty-three years and recognize the People’s Republic of China.

Being able to offer big carrots to small countries is a very handy tool in great-power foreign policy. And the current crisis suggests that the United States is not the only country that can proffer such carrots.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a senior editor at The National Interest.

Publicado por The Wall Street Journal, EEUU

Beijin.- La boyante economía de China se está enfriando más rápido de lo que la mayoría de los analistas había previsto, desinflando las esperanzas de que la demanda del país podría ayudar a mantener activa la economía mundial en momentos en que el mundo desarrollado atraviesa una crisis financiera.

La oficina de estadísticas de China informó el lunes que el crecimiento económico se desaceleró a 9% en el tercer trimestre con respecto a idéntico lapso del año previo, luego de un avance de 10,1% en el segundo trimestre y de 10,6% en el primero. China acumula una expansión promedio de 9,9% en lo que va del año y es probable que anote su primer año de crecimiento por debajo del 10% desde 2002.

"La crisis financiera global ya ha asestado un severo golpe a la confianza de los inversionistas y los consumidores en muchos países del mundo, y China no es la excepción", dijo Li Xiaochao, portavoz de la Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas.

China ya ha recortado las tasas de interés dos veces desde septiembre y es probable que las cifras recientes, que estuvieron por debajo de las expectativas, aceleren la ofensiva gubernamental para mantener la expansión. Muchos economistas predicen que el crecimiento podría llegar a 8% el próximo año, la menor tasa para China desde la crisis asiática.

Los grandes beneficiados del tórrido crecimiento de China — como los fabricantes alemanes de herramientas, los productores japoneses de maquinaria de construcción y los proveedores latinoamericanos de materias primas— han acusado el golpe. Los precios de las materias primas, por ejemplo, han caído verticalmente en las últimas semanas mientras los mercados toman nota de una menor expansión en China y una menor demanda de países ricos como Estados Unidos y Japón.

El enfriamiento demuestra como, a pesar del espectacular crecimiento de los últimos años, China no ha conseguido la escala necesaria para actuar como el motor principal de la economía global. El país ocupa la posición número 100 entre todos los países en términos de ingreso per cápita y representa un 6% de la economía global, con base en las tasas cambiarias del mercado. Tras ajustar su producción por la paridad de poder adquisitivo, la medida preferida de muchos economistas, China sólo equivale al 10% de la economía global. "Pueden ser un motor de cierta manera, pero lo que suceda en el 90% restante va a importar más", dice Nicholas Lardy del Instituto Peterson de Economía Internacional, de Washington. Y aunque su sistema financiero sigue estando mayormente aislando de la crisis crediticia, China tiene problemas propios. "Todo está marchando por mal camino en cuanto a mantener el crecimiento", dice Lardy.

Las exportaciones se debilitan rápidamente a medida que cae la demanda de grandes clientes como EE.UU. y Europa. Eso ocurre en los precisos momentos en que la caída del mercado inmobiliario amenaza con arrastrar aún más el crecimiento chino. Aunque el gasto en infraestructura sigue en auge y el consumo se ha mantenido alto, es probable que la economía experimente una desaceleración generalizada. La debilidad de las cifras de agosto se atribuyó a los cierres de industrias con motivo de los Juegos Olímpicos de Beijing, pero la persistente desaceleración de la producción en septiembre sugiere que el debilitamiento fue más amplio.

No hay que perder de vista que el crecimiento chino sigue siendo extraordinariamente alto y es probable que lo siga siendo. No obstante, la demanda doméstica china sencillamente no es lo suficientemente grande como para sustituir el gigantesco papel que juega EE.UU. Aunque los 1.300 millones de chinos consumieron cerca de US$1,2 billones (millón de millones) el año pasado, los 300 millones de estadounidenses consumieron US$9,7 billones. China sigue siendo un gran exportador. Entre enero y septiembre, exportó US$181.000 millones más de lo que importó. "Las cuentas no dan", dice Stephen Roach, presidente de Morgan Stanley en Asia. "China todavía es un país relativamente pobre. Tal vez podrá amortiguar un poco el golpe, pero no mucho".

Para los productores de los bienes que china necesita —principalmente materias primas y maquinaria para construir sus casas y fábricas— el auge chino ha sido bienvenido. Alemania, por ejemplo, ha retenido su corona como el mayor exportador del mundo gracias, en parte, a la venta de equipos industriales a China.

Según las estadísticas de la industria alemana de comercio, las exportaciones a China de maquinaria y partes subieron 20% en los primeros siete meses del año, con respecto al mismo período del año anterior. Eso transforma a China en el segundo mercado para la maquinaria alemana, detrás de EE.UU. "China tiene su propia dinámica", reconoce Olaf Wortmann, economista de la asociación de ingeniería VDMA, quien cree que el crecimiento de las exportaciones a China puede mantenerse en alrededor de 10% pese a la desaceleración.

Esa es una buena noticia, dado el bajón en todo el mundo. La demanda china, sin embargo, tiene sus límites. El país es un gran comprador de equipos industriales alemanes, pero no de otros productos. En total, China es apenas el undécimo mercado para las exportaciones de Alemania, absorbiendo un modesto 3% de los 969.000 millones de euros que Alemania exportó el año pasado. Eso no es suficiente para impulsar la economía germana, cuyo crecimiento está cayendo por debajo del 2% este año y probablemente será cero el año que viene.

Puesto que los ganadores del boom de China han estado desproporcionadamente ligados a los ciclos de construcción e inversión, la actual caída del mercado inmobiliario ha causado más daño en esos sectores. A medida que caen las ventas de viviendas y los constructores reducen nuevos proyectos, la demanda de acero, cemento y cobre que se utiliza en los nuevos edificios se ha debilitado.

La desaceleración está forzando a los países vecinos a hacer ajustes. El fabricante japonés de químicos Tosoh Corp. ha reducido la producción de policloruro de vinilo —el material de construcción de plástico conocido como PVC, por sus siglas en inglés— un 15% desde septiembre. Fue el primer recorte de Tosoh en 10 años, el que la compañía atribuyó al gran declive en la demanda de China.

Li, el vocero de la oficina de estadísticas, espera que la crisis financiera internacional disminuya el flujo de inversión extranjera y las exportaciones, dos motores del crecimiento de los últimos años.

La inflación, en todo caso, cayó de 8,7% en febrero a 4,6% en septiembre. Eso ha permitido al gobierno concentrarse en estimular el crecimiento. Se espera que pronto se anuncien nuevas medidas.

By Pavs on October 19th, 2008

This may be the single most important US Presidential election in our lifetime. While there are other very pressing and more important issues to help you make a decision in choosing a candidate; I think it is important to look at where each candidate stands in terms of technology, which most of the readers in this site is passionate about. It would be better if we could have their views on open source more specifically, unfortunately no such information exists to the best of my knowledge.

John McCain on Technology:

- Ban Internet Taxes: “We must make a farsighted, robust, and fervent commitment to innovation and new technologies to sustain our global competitiveness, meet our national security challenges.“

- Answering a question on whether he would “police the Internet culturally, such as for predators & pornography”. His answer: “Absolutely not, but I also want to point out this Internet child pornography is a terrible evil. It’s got to be addressed. And everybody knows the way you stop it is go after the money.“

- Answering a question on whether he “Uses Internet to read news & to get donations”. His Answer was: “Not nearly as well as I should. My wife Cindy is a whiz. And when I want to find out what’s on CNN, or The NY Times, or other communist periodicals, I always go to it. But the phenomenal thing about the Internet [is that] we’ve gotten like $7 million in contributions over the Internet. It’s been marvelous. $7 million, because they want reform, they want the government back.“

- Should we spend government funds to address the “digital divide?” His answer: “No, I wouldn’t do it directly, but there’s lots of ways that you can encourage corporations who, in their own self-interest, would want to provide — would receive tax benefits, would receive credit, and many other ways for being involved in the schools and upgrading the quality of the equipment that they have, the quality of the students, and thereby providing a much-needed, well-trained work force.“

- Introduced bill for “No government control over computer encryption” in 1999:

*
Legalize development, sale, and use of encryption.
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Prohibits government from requiring an encryption key (solution) or other computer access.
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Prohibits the government from adopting any standard that establishes an encryption standard for use by businesses other than for federal computer systems.
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Prohibits restricting the export of encryption products.

To highlight John McCain’s campaign promises on technology:

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Encourage investment in innovation
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Develop a skilled work force
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Champion open and fair trade
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Reform intellectual property protection
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Keep the Internet and entrepreneurs free of unnecessary regulation
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Ensure a fully connected citizenry

Sources: 1 -2

Barack Obama on Technology:

- On research funding in technology, “We can’t just focus on preserving existing industries. We have to be in the business of encouraging new ones–and that means science, research and technology. For two centuries, America led the world in innovation. But this Administration’s hostility to science has taken a toll. At a time when technology is shaping our future, we devote a smaller and smaller share of our national resources to Research and Development. I’ll double federal funding for basic research, and make the R&D tax credit permanent.“

- Talking on Broadband in heart of inner cities and rural towns, “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let’s set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let’s recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability. Let’s make college more affordable, and let’s invest in scientific research, and let’s lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America.“

- Obama co-sponsored ensuring net neutrality: No corporate-tiered Internet (Jan 9, 2007).

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Broadband service providers shall not interfere with the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access or offer any lawful content via the Internet;
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Only prioritize content or services based on the type of content or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization.

- Obama sponsored website for competitive federal awards: A bill to strengthen transparency and accountability in Federal spending. Key elements of the bill includes:

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Recipient performance transparency.
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A unique award identifier that identifies each individual award vehicle.
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The date that the financial award was made.
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The agency and department as well as subagencies and suboffices that have authorized the Federal award.

- On creating “Google for government“, he said, “I worked with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans, who John already mentioned, to set up what we call Google for Government, which says that we are going to list every dollar of federal spending to make sure that the taxpayer can take a look and see who, in fact, is promoting some of these spending projects that John’s been railing about.“
To highlight Barack Obama’s campaign promises on technology:

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Ensure an open Internet.
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Create a transparent and connected democracy.
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Encourage a modern communications infrastructure.
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Prepare all of our children for a 21st century economy.
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Improve America’s competitiveness.
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Employ science and technology to solve our nation’s most pressing problems.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/10/universal-design-pattern.html

by Reihan Salam
North America's Other Election

Canada has weathered the global economic crisis with noteworthy grace. Last month, its economy created over 100,000 new jobs, more than in any month in decades. Wages keep growing, and Canada's banking sector is, according to the World Economic Forum, "the soundest in the world." So it shouldn't be surprising that last week, Canadians returned Stephen Harper's Conservatives to power and granted them 19 new seats in Parliament. Harper called the election because he thought he could win it. But the five-week campaign featured wild oscillations—and offered a few glimpses of Canada's fragmented future.

Early on, the Conservatives looked like they might win a majority by expanding their share of the vote in francophone Quebec. The wooing of Quebec's so-called soft nationalists has been at the heart of Conservative electoral strategy since the party's birth in 2003, when the Progressive Conservatives merged with the western-centered Canadian Alliance. Before the early 1990s, Quebec voters who wanted autonomy from Ottawa tended to vote for the Progressive Conservatives. Those who embraced a strong federal government backed the Liberals. But the constitutional crisis of the early 1990s forced a polarization of Quebec's electorate: either you were for a united Canada or against it, which meant that you were either for the federalist Liberals, or for the separatist Bloc Québécois. The politics of the middle way were dead, and the fortunes of the conservative parties in Quebec died with it.

The failure and exhaustion of Quebec's sovereignty movement presented an opportunity for a return of the middle way, and Harper shrewdly seized it. In 2006, the Conservatives won 10 seats in Quebec, far more than anyone had anticipated. Since then, Harper has explicitly referred to Quebec nationhood, and he has sought to raise its profile in international bodies like UNESCO, a clear gesture in the direction of soft nationalists. The Conservatives have also channeled considerable resources to the province. All the same, the Conservatives failed to increase their seat total. Quebec voters still turned to the Bloc Quebecois en masse, even though enthusiasm for Quebec sovereignty remains low.

The Canadian media have pointed to the Conservative government's decision to cut arts funding as well as a number of harsh anti-crime measures as the reason for their dismal showing. But there was much more to it. First, Canada's war in Afghanistan has killed nearly 100 Canadians and is deeply unpopular in Quebec. By pledging to withdraw Canadian forces in 2011, Harper built a consensus with the Liberals and neutralized the issue in most of the country—but not in Quebec. The Bloc wants Canadian troops out of Afghanistan now. Also, the New Democratic Party, which has struggled for decades to displace the Liberals as Canada's party of the left, ran very effective anti-Harper advertisements in Quebec in the hopes of building a beachhead there. But the ads redounded to the benefit of the Bloc instead, both because there was no real prospect of major NDP victories in Quebec and because Quebec voters tend to be, frankly speaking, very tribal.

Quebec aside, there were a few other aspects of Canada's federal election that have resonance for those of us following the American political scene. In Ontario and British Columbia, the Conservatives performed extremely well, thanks in part to a below-the-radar ethnic outreach effort. Whereas the Conservatives had been all but shut out of Canada's biggest metropolitan areas in the last election, the party won a number of unexpected victories in the suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver, and came close in several more seats. Asian Canadians, and in particular Chinese, Filipino, and Korean voters, chose the Conservatives by wide margins across the country, a trend that bodes well for the party's future. (This is in marked contrast to the U.S. Republican Party's failure to break out beyond its increasingly narrow ethnic base, a failure that will likely tilt states like Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia into the Democratic column.) More significant was the shift of middle-class married women in Ontario and British Columbia into the Conservative column, doubtless a response to Harper's very effective tax-credit pandering. Like Bush's Republican Party, the Conservatives have expanded their coalition by appealing to working class voters, but they've mainly done it by using targeted tax policies, like the Clinton-era Democrats.

In the middle of the campaign, Harper and other leading Conservatives created a panic within the party with a series of hamfisted remarks. And although the financial crisis hasn't hit Canada directly, it has certainly created anxiety. Briefly, the Liberals and New Democrats seemed capable of forming a coalition on the strength of Harper's failure to feel the pain of Canada's middle-class families. But on the 14th, the day after Canadian Thanksgiving, those middle-class families turned to Harper as a safe pair of hands. It didn't help that the central feature of the Liberal domestic policy, a carbon tax, was essentially demagogued to death by Conservative candidates across the country. It is easy to imagine Republicans doing the same to a sweeping Democratic environmental plan.

Right now, Liberals see their meager showing—just 26 percent of the vote, one of the worst outcomes in the history of the party—as a serious reversal. At the same time, the Liberals won't be held responsible for the wrenching economic conditions to come. Assuming there is a severe downturn, the Conservative government will be forced into a budget deficit, a serious taboo in Canadian federal politics. The Liberals will eventually find a leader more appealing and charismatic than Stéphane Dion, and when they do, the party will surely make a comeback, not least because the 7 percent won by the flavor-of-the-month Green Party will dwindle to zero.

At the moment, left-leaning Canadians are suffering from a severe case of Obama envy. The Liberals are desperate for a Trudeau-like figure who can present a dashing, cosmopolitan face to the wider world. Stephane Dion is not that man. Michael Ignatieff, the celebrated intellectual and human rights activist and Liberal MP, just might be. After a disappointing and somewhat clumsy start, Ignatieff has proved a fast learner and a keen campaigner. He will, however, having a hard time fending off his old friend and classmate Bob Rae, the former NDP premier of Ontario who has inherited much of Jean Chrétien's old political machine.

All this is to say that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have an unenviable task of governing ahead of them, and possibly a tough election as well. This minority government bears an eerie resemblance to Joe Clark's Progressive Conservative win in 1979, when for just ten months he led a large minority government that had minimal Quebec representation. Clark mistakenly believed that he had a strong mandate, and he united the fractious opposition parties against him. Stephen Harper may well do the same.

Reihan Salam is an Atlantic associate editor and the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008).

Social melting pots foster technological innovation

* 14 October 2008
* NewScientist.com news service

BIG cities are the most vibrant centres of innovation - and it's all down to the mathematics of networking.

People in bigger cities are known to be more innovative than those in smaller ones: the figures show that a doubling in the size of a city generally leads to a more than proportionate rise in the number of patents or inventors associated with it.

Now Samuel Arbesman and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have developed computer models of social networking which show that the sheer size of larger cities generates disproportionately more connections between people with very different personalities and backgrounds. Such bonds tend to foster innovation as they link people with complementary skills, they say.

Octubre 2008. Número 156
Por IGNACIO RAMONET

Portada nº 156 - octubre de 2008Los terremotos que sacudieron las Bolsas durante el pasado "septiembre negro" han precipitado el fin de una era del capitalismo. La arquitectura financiera internacional se ha tambaleado. Y el riesgo sistémico permanece. Nada volverá a ser como antes. Regresa el Estado.

El desplome de Wall Street es comparable, en la esfera financiera, a lo que representó, en el ámbito geopolítico, la caída del muro de Berlín. Un cambio de mundo y un giro copernicano. Lo afirma Paul Samuelson, premio Nobel de Economía: "Esta debacle es para el capitalismo lo que la caída de la URSS fue para el comunismo". Se termina el periodo abierto en 1981 con la fórmula de Ronald Reagan: "El Estado no es la solución, es el problema". Durante treinta años, los fundamentalistas del mercado repitieron que éste siempre tenía razón, que la globalización era sinónimo de felicidad, y que el capitalismo financiero edificaba el paraíso terrenal para todos. Se equivocaron.

La "edad de oro" de Wall Street se ha acabado. Y también una etapa de exuberancia y despilfarro representada por una aristocracia de banqueros de inversión, "amos del universo" denunciados por Tom Wolfe en La Hoguera de las vanidades (1987). Poseídos por una lógica de rentabilidad a corto plazo. Por la búsqueda de beneficios exorbitantes. Dispuestos a todo para sacar ganancias: ventas a corto abusivas, manipulaciones, invención de instrumentos opacos, titulización de activos, contratos de cobertura de riesgos, hedge funds... La fiebre del provecho fácil se contagió a todo el planeta. Los mercados se sobrecalentaron, alimentados por un exceso de financiación que facilitó el alza de los precios.

La globalización condujo la economía mundial a tomar la forma de una economía de papel, virtual, inmaterial. La esfera financiera llegó a representar más de 250 billones de euros, o sea seis veces el montante de la riqueza real mundial. Y de golpe, esa gigantesca "burbuja" ha reventado.

El desastre es de dimensiones apocalípticas. Más de 200.000 millones de euros se han esfumado. La banca de inversión ha sido borrada del mapa. Las cinco mayores entidades se han desmoronado: Lehman Brothers en bancarrota; Bear Stearns comprado, con la ayuda de la Reserva Federal (Fed), por Morgan Chase; Merril Lynch adquirido por Bank of America; y los dos últimos, Goldman Sachs y Morgan Stanley (en parte comprado por el japonés Mitsubishi UFJ), reconvertidos en simples bancos comerciales.
Toda la cadena de funcionamiento del aparato financiero se ha colapsado. No sólo la banca de inversión, sino los bancos centrales, los sistemas de regulación, los bancos comerciales, las cajas de ahorros, las compañías de seguros, las agencias de calificación de riesgos (Standard&Poors, Moody's, Fitch) y hasta las auditoras contables (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, PwC).

El naufragio no puede sorprender a nadie. El escándalo de las "hipotecas basura" (subprime) era sabido de todos. Igual que el exceso de liquidez orientado a la especulación, y la explosión delirante de los precios de la vivienda. Todo esto ha sido denunciado -en estas columnas- desde hace tiempo. Sin que nadie se inmutase. Porque el crimen beneficiaba a muchos. Y se siguió afirmando que la empresa privada y el mercado lo arreglaban todo.

La Administración del Presidente George W. Bush ha tenido que renegar de ese principio y recurrir, masivamente, a la intervención del Estado. Las principales entidades de crédito inmobiliario, Fannie Mae y Freddie Mac, han sido nacionalizadas. También lo ha sido el American International Group (AIG), la mayor compañía de seguros del mundo. Y el Secretario del Tesoro, Henry Paulson (ex presidente de la banca Goldman Sachs...) ha propuesto un plan de rescate de las acciones "tóxicas" procedentes de las "hipotecas basura" por un valor de unos 500.000 millones de euros, que también adelantará el Estado, o sea los contribuyentes.

Prueba del fracaso del sistema, estas intervenciones del Estado -las mayores, en volumen, de la historia económica- demuestran que los mercados no son capaces de regularse por sí mismos. Se han autodestruido por su propia voracidad. Además, se confirma una ley del cinismo neoliberal: se privatizan los beneficios pero se socializan las pérdidas. Se hace pagar a los pobres las excentricidades irracionales de los banqueros, y se les amenaza, en caso de que se nieguen a pagar, con empobrecerlos aún más.

Las autoridades norteamericanas acuden al rescate de los banksters ("banquero gangster") a expensas de los ciudadanos. Hace unos meses, el presidente Bush se negó a firmar una ley que ofrecía una cobertura médica a nueve millones de niños pobres por un coste de 4.000 millones de euros. Lo consideró un gasto inútil. Ahora, para salvar a los rufianes de Wall Street nada le parece suficiente. Socialismo para los ricos, y capitalismo salvaje para los pobres.

Este desastre ocurre en un momento de vacío teórico de las izquierdas. Las cuales no tienen "plan B" para sacar provecho del descalabro. En particular las de Europa, agarrotadas por el choque de la crisis. Cuando sería tiempo de refundación y de audacia.
¿Cuánto durará la crisis? "Veinte años si tenemos suerte, o menos de diez si las autoridades actúan con mano firme", vaticina el editorialista neoliberal Martin Wolf (1). Si existiese una lógica política, este contexto debería favorecer la elección del demócrata Barack Obama (si no es asesinado) a la presidencia de Estados Unidos el 4 de noviembre próximo. Es probable que, como Franklin D. Roosevelt en 1930, el joven Presidente lance un nuevo "New Deal" basado en un neokeynesianismo que confirmará el retorno del Estado en la esfera económica. Y aportará por fin mayor justicia social a los ciudadanos. Se irá hacia un nuevo Bretton Woods. La etapa más salvaje e irracional de la globalización neoliberal habrá terminado.

Notas:
(1) Financial Times , Londres, 23 de septiembre de 2008.

Stephen S. Roach
Chairman, Morgan Stanley Asia

For the second time in seven years, the bursting of a major-asset bubble has inflicted great damage on world financial markets. In both cases--the equity bubble in 2000 and the credit bubble in 2007--central banks were asleep at the switch. The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization. Central banks have failed to provide a stable underpinning to world financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent global economy.

The current post-bubble shakeout is hardly an isolated development. Basking in the warm glow of a successful battle against inflation, central banks decided that easy money was the world's just reward. That set in motion a chain of events that has allowed one bubble to beget another--from equities to housing to credit.

When the bubble burst in early 2000, the optimists said not to worry. After all, Internet stocks accounted for only about 6% of total U.S. equity-market capitalization at the end of 1999. Unfortunately, the broad S&P 500 index tumbled some 49% over the ensuing 2 1/2 years, and an overextended corporate America led the U.S. and global economy into recession.

Similarly, today's optimists are preaching the same gospel: Why worry, they say, if subprime is only about 10% of total U.S. securitized mortgage debt? Yet the unwinding of the far broader credit cycle gives good reason for concern--especially for overextended American consumers and a U.S.-centric global economy. Central banks have now been forced into making emergency liquidity injections, leaving little doubt of the mounting risks of another financial crisis. The jury is out on whether these efforts will succeed in stemming the rout in still overvalued credit markets. Is this any way to run a modern-day world economy? The answer is an unequivocal "no."

It is high time for monetary authorities to adopt new procedures--namely, taking the state of asset markets into explicit consideration when framing policy options. As the increasing prevalence of bubbles indicates, a failure to recognize the interplay between the state of asset markets and the real economy is an egregious policy error.

That doesn't mean central banks should target asset markets. It does mean, however, that they need to break their one-dimensional fixation on CPI-based inflation and also give careful consideration to the extremes of asset values. This is not that difficult a task. When housing markets go to excess, when subprime borrowers join the fray, or when corporate credit becomes freely available at ridiculously low "spreads," central banks should run tighter monetary policies than a narrow inflation target would dictate.

The current financial crisis is a wake-up call for modern-day central banking. The world can't afford to lurch from one bubble to another. The cost of neglect is an ever-mounting systemic risk that could pose a grave threat to an increasingly integrated global economy. It could also spur the imprudent intervention of politicians, undermining the all-important political independence of central banks. The art and science of central banking is in desperate need of a major overhaul--before it's too late.

El Universal

Domingo 19 de octubre de 2008

La crisis, generada ahora en las naciones desarrolladas, ya provocó un daño severo en los países de América Latina, pese a los ajustes que éstos han aplicado en sus políticas macroeconómicas durante varios años, a causa de los problemas financieros que han vivido.

Ahora en la región se observa una fuerte contracción del crédito hacia empresas y familia, baja en el consumo, caída de las principales monedas frente al dólar ante la salida de capitales de los mercados emergentes y un desplome en las bolsas de valores. Aún falta la pérdida del empleo.

Los gobiernos del continente se han visto obligados a tomar medidas para protegerse del lento crecimiento en los países del norte.

Así, Chile optó por inyectar recursos a las pequeñas y medianas empresas, además de a exportadores, para paliar los efectos que tendrán las bajas en el consumo.

Además, el Estado usará sus reservas para darle liquidez al sistema bancario y asegurar la disponibilidad de crédito.

En Brasil, el gobierno también eligió aumentar sus fondos para financiar a exportadores y tomó varias acciones coordinadas para asegurar el precio del dólar.

El paquete de estímulos ya llega a 206 mil millones de reales (unos 9 mil millones de dólares). Hace pocos días, el Banco Central recibió autorización para intervenir en bancos que tengan problemas de liquidez.

En Argentina, el gobierno de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner aseguró en diferentes tonos que el desastre en la banca no afectarían al país porque la economía está aislada del sistema financiero internacional.

Pero en fecha reciente el gobierno negoció una modificación legal que le permitirá usar las reservas internacionales del Banco Central para pagar deuda pública, lo que ahora está prohibido.

En México, se espera un fuerte gasto en infraestructura para impulsar el crecimiento del mercado interno.

'Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich.'
By BRIAN M. CARNEY
New York

On Aug. 9, 2007, central banks around the world first intervened to stanch what has become a massive credit crunch.

Since then, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have taken a series of increasingly drastic emergency actions to get lending flowing again. The central bank has lent out hundreds of billions of dollars, accepted collateral that in the past it would never have touched, and opened direct lending to institutions that have never had that privilege. The Treasury has deployed billions more. And yet, "Nothing," Anna Schwartz says, "seems to have quieted the fears of either the investors in the securities markets or the lenders and would-be borrowers in the credit market."
[The Weekend Interview] Randy Jones

The credit markets remain frozen, the stock market continues to get hammered, and deep recession now seems a certainty -- if not a reality already.

Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She's not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, "A Monetary History of the United States" (1963). It's the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.

Since 1941, Ms. Schwartz has reported for work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where we met Thursday morning for an interview. She is currently using a wheelchair after a recent fall and laments her "many infirmities," but those are all physical; her mind is as sharp as ever. She speaks with passion and just a hint of resignation about the current financial situation. And looking at how the authorities have handled it so far, she doesn't like what she sees.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page "Monetary History" "the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history." Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again.

To understand why, one first has to understand the nature of the current "credit market disturbance," as Ms. Schwartz delicately calls it. We now hear almost every day that banks will not lend to each other, or will do so only at punitive interest rates. Credit spreads -- the difference between what it costs the government to borrow and what private-sector borrowers must pay -- are at historic highs.

This is not due to a lack of money available to lend, Ms. Schwartz says, but to a lack of faith in the ability of borrowers to repay their debts. "The Fed," she argues, "has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."

So even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue."

In the 1930s, as Ms. Schwartz and Mr. Friedman argued in "A Monetary History," the country and the Federal Reserve were faced with a liquidity crisis in the banking sector. As banks failed, depositors became alarmed that they'd lose their money if their bank, too, failed. So bank runs began, and these became self-reinforcing: "If the borrowers hadn't withdrawn cash, they [the banks] would have been in good shape. But the Fed just sat by and did nothing, so bank after bank failed. And that only motivated depositors to withdraw funds from banks that were not in distress," deepening the crisis and causing still more failures.

But "that's not what's going on in the market now," Ms. Schwartz says. Today, the banks have a problem on the asset side of their ledgers -- "all these exotic securities that the market does not know how to value."

"Why are they 'toxic'?" Ms. Schwartz asks. "They're toxic because you cannot sell them, you don't know what they're worth, your balance sheet is not credible and the whole market freezes up. We don't know whom to lend to because we don't know who is sound. So if you could get rid of them, that would be an improvement." The only way to "get rid of them" is to sell them, which is why Ms. Schwartz thought that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's original proposal to buy these assets from the banks was "a step in the right direction."

The problem with that idea was, and is, how to price "toxic" assets that nobody wants. And lurking beneath that problem is another, stickier problem: If they are priced at current market levels, selling them would be a recipe for instant insolvency at many institutions. The fears that are locking up the credit markets would be realized, and a number of banks would probably fail.

Ms. Schwartz won't say so, but this is the dirty little secret that led Secretary Paulson to shift from buying bank assets to recapitalizing them directly, as the Treasury did this week. But in doing so, he's shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down."

Rather, "firms that made wrong decisions should fail," she says bluntly. "You shouldn't rescue them. And once that's established as a principle, I think the market recognizes that it makes sense. Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich." The trouble is, "that's not the way the world has been going in recent years."

Instead, we've been hearing for most of the past year about "systemic risk" -- the notion that allowing one firm to fail will cause a cascade that will take down otherwise healthy companies in its wake.

Ms. Schwartz doesn't buy it. "It's very easy when you're a market participant," she notes with a smile, "to claim that you shouldn't shut down a firm that's in really bad straits because everybody else who has lent to it will be injured. Well, if they lent to a firm that they knew was pretty rocky, that's their responsibility. And if they have to be denied repayment of their loans, well, they wished it on themselves. The [government] doesn't have to save them, just as it didn't save the stockholders and the employees of Bear Stearns. Why should they be worried about the creditors? Creditors are no more worthy of being rescued than ordinary people, who are really innocent of what's been going on."

It takes real guts to let a large, powerful institution go down. But the alternative -- the current credit freeze -- is worse, Ms. Schwartz argues.

"I think if you have some principles and know what you're doing, the market responds. They see that you have some structure to your actions, that it isn't just ad hoc -- you'll do this today but you'll do something different tomorrow. And the market respects people in supervisory positions who seem to be on top of what's going on. So I think if you're tough about firms that have invested unwisely, the market won't blame you. They'll say, 'Well, yeah, it's your fault. You did this. Nobody else told you to do it. Why should we be saving you at this point if you're stuck with assets you can't sell and liabilities you can't pay off?'" But when the authorities finally got around to letting Lehman Brothers fail, it had saved so many others already that the markets didn't know how to react. Instead of looking principled, the authorities looked erratic and inconstant.

How did we get into this mess in the first place? As in the 1920s, the current "disturbance" started with a "mania." But manias always have a cause. "If you investigate individually the manias that the market has so dubbed over the years, in every case, it was expansive monetary policy that generated the boom in an asset.

"The particular asset varied from one boom to another. But the basic underlying propagator was too-easy monetary policy and too-low interest rates that induced ordinary people to say, well, it's so cheap to acquire whatever is the object of desire in an asset boom, and go ahead and acquire that object. And then of course if monetary policy tightens, the boom collapses."

The house-price boom began with the very low interest rates in the early years of this decade under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

"Now, Alan Greenspan has issued an epilogue to his memoir, 'Time of Turbulence,' and it's about what's going on in the credit market," Ms. Schwartz says. "And he says, 'Well, it's true that monetary policy was expansive. But there was nothing that a central bank could do in those circumstances. The market would have been very much displeased, if the Fed had tightened and crushed the boom. They would have felt that it wasn't just the boom in the assets that was being terminated.'" In other words, Mr. Greenspan "absolves himself. There was no way you could really terminate the boom because you'd be doing collateral damage to areas of the economy that you don't really want to damage."

Ms Schwartz adds, gently, "I don't think that that's an adequate kind of response to those who argue that absent accommodative monetary policy, you would not have had this asset-price boom." Policies based on such thinking only lead to a more damaging bust when the mania ends, as they all do. "In general, it's easier for a central bank to be accommodative, to be loose, to be promoting conditions that make everybody feel that things are going well."

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, of all people, should understand this, Ms. Schwartz says. In 2002, Mr. Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve Board governor, said in a speech in honor of Mr. Friedman's 90th birthday, "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

"This was [his] claim to be worthy of running the Fed," she says. He was "familiar with history. He knew what had been done." But perhaps this is actually Mr. Bernanke's biggest problem. Today's crisis isn't a replay of the problem in the 1930s, but our central bankers have responded by using the tools they should have used then. They are fighting the last war. The result, she argues, has been failure. "I don't see that they've achieved what they should have been trying to achieve. So my verdict on this present Fed leadership is that they have not really done their job."

Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Tomado de El Nacional.com, Venezuela

Nueva York, 24 de septiembre(AP).-
El presidente estadounidense George W. Bush y los mandatarios de los países latinoamericanos que tienen tratados de libre comercio con Estados Unidos hicieron el miércoles un llamado al Congreso de este país para que apruebe pactos similares con Colombia y Panamá.

"Hemos hablado de fortalecer y reformar las instituciones financieras unilaterales y de seguir trabajando para que países como Colombia y Panamá, que quieren un tratado de libre comercio, tengan acceso a él'', declaró la presidenta chilena Michelle Bachelet tras un encuentro entre Bush y sus colegas latinoamericanos.

Agregó que "para Chile, el tratado ha sido extraodinariamente positivo y exitoso''.

Bush destacó que desde que se firmó el acuerdo con Chile, el comercio entre los dos países "aumentó más de un 180%''.

"Hemos compartido estas experiencias. También hemos señalado la necesidad de mantener una economía abierta y de evitar el proteccionismo, que en los países pequeños produce un efecto negativo'', señaló Bachelet. "Estamos trabajando los cancilleres y los presidentes en un acuerdo de apoyo para que el Congreso pueda aprobar el tratado con Colombia y Panamá''.

Uribe, quien participó en la reunión, dijo que hay tres obstáculos ideológicos para que se aprueben más tratados de libre comercio en Estados Unidos, donde hay bastante resistencia a esos pactos, en parte porque se piensa que puede facilitar el traslado de plazas de trabajo al exterior o generar una disminución de los salarios.

El presidente colombiano dijo que, por el contrario, "el tratado es una fuente legal de protección de los derechos de los trabajadores''.

Los otros dos obstáculos, indicó, son el impacto en la pequeña empresa y en el medio ambiente.

Uribe sostuvo que los tratados
"estimulan la intención de crear un ambiente de prosperidad que favorece a la pequeña empresa'' y contienen "provisiones para proteger el medio ambiente''.

Señaló que se asegurarían, por ejemplo, de que la producción de biocombustibles no afecte la selva, exigiendo una producción limpia y sostenible.

Bush declaró que "es importante que el pueblo de Estados Unidos entienda que las exportaciones son un beneficio para los trabajadores''.

"Estos tratados son algo positivo. Nos encaminan hacia la prosperidad'', dijo el mandatario estadounidense en un breve discurso en la Sociedad de las Américas a primera hora de la mañana. Afirmó que son acuerdos "justos''.

"La mitad del crecimiento que tuvimos el año pasado'', manifestó Bush, "fue resultado del comercio. Nos favorece seguir abriendo mercados, particularmente en nuestro propio vecindario''.

En el encuentro a puertas cerradas participaron también los presidentes de México (Felipe Calderón), Guatemala (Alvaro Colom), República Dominicana (Leonel Fernández), Costa Rica (Oscar Arias), El Salvador (Tony Saca), Panamá (Martín Torrijos) y Honduras (Manuel Zelaya).

Con excepción de Colombia y Panamá, todos esos países tienen tratados de libre comercio con Estados Unidos, ya sea bilaterales o como parte de un bloque regional.

Tomado de Yahoo! Noticias

Londres (AP) - Seis bancos centrales, incluyendo la Reserva Federal de Estados Unidos, el Banco Central Europeo y el Banco de Inglaterra, le dieron el miércoles un respiro conjunto a los mercados al recortar de forma coordinada sus respectivas tasas de interés, en un intento por recuperar la confianza en el golpeado sistema financiero del mundo.

La medida logró, al menos de inmediato, frenar la caída de los mercados alrededor del planeta, los cuales repuntaron luego de abrir con caídas.

Se trató de la primera reducción coordinada de tasas desde los atentados terroristas de septiembre del 2001 en Estados Unidos.

Los seis bancos centrales recortaron sus tasas en medio punto porcentual, una medida drástica que busca mandar un mensaje de acción decidida y fuerte para restaurar la confianza, así como para prevenir que la crisis crediticia siga deteriorándose y contaminando al resto de la economía mundial, mientras las compañías enfrentan problemas para conseguir créditos para sus necesidades de corto y largo plazos.

Los bancos están temerosos de prestarse entre sí _ a través de documentos comerciales de corto plazo sin garantía _ por miedo de que no recuperen su dinero.

El banco central estadounidense _ la Reserva Federal _ redujo el miércoles su tasa clave de interés en medio punto porcentual para dejarla en 1,5% y sostener así a la vapuleada economía estadounidense.

La acción significa la reanudación de la campaña del banco central de reducción de tasas, que se había interrumpido en junio debido a las preocupaciones de que esos recortes empeorarían la inflación. Desde entonces, sin embargo, las condiciones económicas y financieras se han deteriorado peligrosamente, obligando a la Fed a cambiar de dirección.

El hecho de que la Fed no pudiera aguardar para tomar una decisión hasta su reunión programada para el 28 y 29 de octubre, subrayó la urgencia de la situación.

"El ritmo de la actividad económica ha bajado notablemente en los meses recientes", dijo la Fed en un comunicado.

"Es más, es probable que la intensificación de la turbulencia del mercado financiero ejerza un refrenamiento adicional en el gasto, en parte reduciendo aún más la capacidad de familias y negocios de obtener crédito", indicó el texto del presidente de la Fed, Ben Bernanke, y sus colegas.

Minutos antes de la apertura oficial, en el intercambio electrónico, el índice de futuros Dow Jones repuntó en respuesta al recorte de tasa de emergencia ordenado por la Reserva Federal. El barómetro subía 102 puntos (1,05%) a 9.640 unidades.

A su vez, el índice de futuros del Standard & Poor's 500 subía 27,60 puntos (2,74%) a 1.032,30 puntos, mientras el Nasdaq 100 a futuro subía 31,75 puntos (2,38%) a 1.368,25.

La Fed actuó claramente ante el temor de una zambullida global en las bolsas de valores. Antes de que la medida de la Fed, Wall Street extendía su desplome, así como los mercados asiáticos y europeos.

En Europa, que también fue golpeada fuertemente por la crisis financiera, el Banco de Inglaterra recortó el miércoles su tasa en medio punto porcentual para dejarla en 4,5%, mientras que el Banco Central Europeo también redujo su tasa en medio punto para dejarla en 3,75%.

Otros bancos centrales que también participaron en la medida coordinada fueron los de Canadá, Suecia y Suiza. China también recortó su tasa, pero no se unió al comunicado en grupo que acompañó a la decisión.

US: Bailing Out a Boat Full of Holes
Taken from Inter Press Service News Agency

Boston, Oct 8 (IPS) - The U.S. Treasury's bonanza from Congress to hand out 700 billion dollars to Wall Street is not what the country needs to right its shaky economy, many independent experts say.

"Despite the bailout, it's clear the economy is going into a deep recession," Robert E. Scott, senior international economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told IPS.

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Tuesday that the U.S. economy is headed downward, hours after The Fed unveiled a programme to buy short-term debt in an effort to stimulate lending among businesses.

The Fed's action followed a drop in the Dow Jones industrial average on Monday to below 10,000 for the first time since 2004, and reports of plunging markets around the world, with markets in Brazil and Russia especially hard hit. Developing nations are bracing for harder times to come.

Banks around the world invested in the same troubled U.S. mortgage products that are deemed largely responsible for the downturn in the U.S. economy.

In Europe, European Union finance ministers on Tuesday urged European nations to coordinate their economic stimulus efforts but did not propose an EU bailout. Ireland and Germany went it alone, and drew up their own stimulus plans.

"This bailout of the financial sector is not doing enough to help the real economy," Scott said.

On Oct. 3, the U.S. Congress approved 700 billion dollars for U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spend as he sees fit, mostly on Wall Street firms reeling from their bad mortgage deals.

After initial failure in the U.S. House, Paulson, who crafted the controversial bailout plan, eventually convinced the U.S. Congress to approve it. U.S. citizens from coast to coast expressed opposition to the plan, and swamped lawmakers with phone calls.

In the end, Congress, nervous about the economy and cowed by swarms of lobbyists from the nation's banks businesses and financial institutions, ignored their constituents and passed the plan. The final House vote was 263 to 171.

About 150 billion dollars in extra spending was added to the bill to woo more lawmakers to vote for it, mostly in the form of tax breaks and programmes for lawmakers' home districts.

According to reports from lawmakers, many citizens had expressed concern about the size of the bailout, the fact that it is directed at Wall Street firms, and that Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, a company with a financial stake in the bailout, would oversee the programme.

On Monday, Paulson announced that he had picked Neel Kashkari to run the bailout programme. Kashkari is a 35-year-old assistant treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs colleague, with about six years of total work experience since graduating from the Wharton School of Economics.

Lead lawmakers said last week that taxpayers needn't worry about mishandling of the funds, which will be doled out in 350-billion-dollar chunks, with some oversight by Congress and agencies.

"The bright light of accountability will protect the taxpayers. We are addressing the real pain experienced by Mr. and Mrs. Jones on Main Street," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said just moments before the final vote.

Lawmakers also vowed tougher regulation of the financial and banking industry to prevent future abuses similar to those in the mortgage and trading industry, widely believed responsible for the current global and U.S. economic crisis.

"It would be a betrayal if we were to stop here. We have to perform serious reform, comparable to the New Deal, with a new set of regulations for all of the financial industry," said Barney Frank, the chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich warned that the plan is a mistake, as he cast his vote against it.

"This bill represents an utter failure of the democratic process," Kucinich said. "It represents the triumph of special interest over the triumph of the public interest," he said.

"We could have recognised the power of government to prime the pump of the economy to get money flowing through out society by creating jobs, health care and major investments in green energy," he said.

Many economists continue to sound warnings that the bailout was misguided and that the U.S. government needs to take more action.

Timothy Canova, professor of international economic law at Chapman University School of Law, said nationwide there are 10,000 foreclosures a week. More can be expected without additional help from the government.

"The bailout is directed at the top of the pyramid, it doesn't do much to help the foreclosure waves at the bottom. It keeps pulling down the financial structure," he warned.

The nation needs a moratorium on further foreclosures and new bankruptcy rules that will protect homeowners," Canova said.

"This is an imperfect solution," Scott added. "Most effective would be to inject capital into commercial banks, as they did during the Great Depression."

Overall, the government needs to invest up to 900 billion dollars to stimulate the economy. If it spent the money on shoring up the country's crumbling infrastructure and schools, that would create jobs. States, like Massachusetts and California that are reeling from the economic slowdown, need help from the federal government, too, he said.

"We also must help homeowners, and help them refinance their mortgages," Scott said. The government could create something similar to the homeowner's loan corporation that saved many homes from foreclosure during the depression. The programme would allow homeowners to obtain low-interest loans.

"This would keep people in their homes and cut down on foreclosures," he said.

That would be good news to Emily Rosenbaum, executive director of Coalition for a Better Acre, a non-profit that aims to improve neighbourhoods in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, poorer communities that are often the first stop for new immigrants.

The organisation aids people facing foreclosure, presently running at 40-50 per month for the region.

"The number of foreclosures jumped last year three-fold. In 2006, there were 93 foreclosures, and in 2007, there were 293. This year we don't know the numbers yet but we are expecting another doubling," she said.

Foreclosures can send a neighbourhood into a "downward spiral", she added.

"Having boarded-up houses on a street, and vacated buildings attracts crime and vagrancy," Rosenbaum said. "We don't know what the effect of the actions in Washington will be. For some time, this has been a challenging environment."

Tomado de la Agencia Inter Press Service

Santiago, 16 oct (IPS) - Sólo algunos países de América del Sur respondieron este año al Llamado Mundial a la Acción contra la Pobreza (GCAP), cuyo lema de campaña es "Levántate y actúa". Las organizaciones sociales vinculadas a esta red global esgrimen diversas razones para explicar su aparente apatía.

Se planificaron actividades en Argentina, Chile, Colombia y Perú, básicamente circunscritas al Día Internacional para la Erradicación de la Pobreza, que se celebra cada 17 de octubre. En Brasil, Uruguay y Venezuela no se planificaron actos.

El Llamado (GCAP, por sus siglas en inglés) es una coalición de cientos de organizaciones que surgió en el Foro Social Mundial de 2005, realizado en la sureña ciudad brasileña de Porto Alegre. Luego se asoció a la Campaña del Milenio de las Naciones Unidas.

Los países del mundo se comprometieron en 2000 a cumplir en 2015 los ocho Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (ODM), que entrañan compromisos en materia de pobreza, salud, educación, igualdad de género, ambiente, desarrollo sustentable y comercio internacional.

Pero en América Latina el GCAP nunca ha logrado la repercusión de regiones como Europa y África, pese a que 35 por ciento de la población latinoamericana, 190 millones de personas, están sumidas en la pobreza, según datos de la Comisión Económica para América Latina (Cepal) de 2007.

Más aún, este año la Cepal informó que el brote inflacionario provocado por la carestía de los alimentos y la energía puede haber elevado la cantidad de pobres a 200 millones de personas. Esto sin contar los efectos de la crisis financiera en curso, que impactará en el crecimiento económico, la generación de empleo y el financiamiento de programas sociales.

Este año, en Argentina se programó un solo acto con periodistas para este jueves. El no gubernamental Foro Ciudadano de Participación por la Justicia y los Derechos Humanos (FOCO) invitó a reporteros a un desayuno para "hablar sobre el problema de la pobreza, a fin de que difundan ese material al día siguiente", explicó a IPS una de sus integrantes, Cecilia Pon.

En Chile y Perú, las actividades se centraron en la desigualdad y en la crisis financiera. La Asociación Chilena de Organismos no Gubernamentales, Acción, y el mapuche Consejo de Todas las Tierras, programaron un acto de carácter político-cultural en la capitalina Plaza de la Constitución para este viernes. Se esperaba una concurrencia de no más de 600 personas.

Además de dar a conocer públicamente sus demandas, los activistas invitaron a los candidatos a alcaldes y concejales de la Región Metropolitana de Santiago, que se medirán en los comicios del 26 de este mes, a suscribir públicamente ese petitorio.

De igual forma, entregaron una carta a la Asociación de Bancos e Instituciones Financieras de Chile, exhortando a sus miembros a actuar con responsabilidad. Les piden frenar la entrega indiscriminada de créditos de consumo y cumplir los llamados
"Principios de Ecuador", firmados recientemente por el sector.

En Perú, el miércoles se efectuó un foro público donde se analizó la forma en que el recorte presupuestal ejecutado en los municipios, como medida preventiva ante la crisis internacional, afectará la seguridad alimentaria de los más pobres.

Este jueves, se manifestó la Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas, Artesanas, Indígenas, Nativas y Asalariadas, se inició una feria de agrodiversidad y comercio justo y se presentó el libro "La política de deuda en el Perú", que aborda los retos de la crisis financiera ante las desigualdades del país.

Este viernes se desarrollará una mesa redonda con especialistas y organizaciones sociales sobre la lucha contra la pobreza y el contexto internacional.

"Lo que deben garantizar los gobiernos es que la crisis no afecte la inversión social. Los presupuestos destinados a salud, vivienda y educación y los diversos programas de ayuda no deben ser recortados como sucede actualmente", señaló a IPS el economista Héctor Béjar, coordinador del GCAP-Perú, principal orador de la mesa redonda.

En Colombia, se programaron acciones educativas y culturales en colegios públicos y privados, como charlas de maestros, conciertos de música rock y obras de títeres, con mensajes dirigidos hacia el problema de la pobreza y la crisis alimentaria.

También se aprovechó una actividad popular que se realiza todas las semanas en una calle de Bogotá para sumar a la ciudadanía en la reflexión. La coalición organizadora contó con el apoyo del Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD).

Tanto en Brasil como en Uruguay la falta de financiamiento fue la razón esgrimida para justificar la ausencia de manifestaciones. Los donantes de los proyectos brasileños aprobaron recursos "hace dos semanas", sin posibilidad de liberarlos antes del 17, explicó a IPS Jair Barbosa, asesor de comunicación del no gubernamental Instituto de Estudios Socioeconómicos, con sede en Brasilia, que ejerce la secretaría del GCAP en ese país.

No obstante, Barbosa reconoce que en Brasil siempre ha habido escasa movilización en torno al GCAP por "resistencias" de las propias organizaciones, que consideran que ya están combatiendo la pobreza en sus actividades cotidianas, tanto defendiendo los derechos de las mujeres y de los negros como luchando por ciertas políticas públicas.

Ante esto, la apuesta de Brasil fue asociar la campaña a otras organizaciones y redes afines y sumarse a sus acciones, como una marcha dedicada a Zumbi dos Palmares, héroe del movimiento afrodescendiente, el 20 de Noviembre, Día Nacional de la Conciencia Negra.

En Uruguay, las actividades también han sido siempre aisladas. En 2006 y 2007 la única organización que se movilizó fue la no gubernamental Comisión Nacional de Seguimiento: Mujeres por Democracia, Equidad y Ciudadanía (CNS Mujeres), coalición que este año "no contaba con fondos específicos para la campaña", se informó. En Venezuela no hubo manifestaciones asociadas al GCAP.

"Es un tema organizativo y de cómo se centra la agenda de las organizaciones no gubernamentales y los movimientos sociales en el país", señaló a IPS Marino Alvarado, coordinador de la no gubernamental humanitaria Provea.

La fría respuesta de América Latina se explica por la identificación del GCAP con los ODM, aseguró a IPS Álvaro Ramis, presidente de la chilena Acción.

La primera de las ocho metas del mileno propone reducir a la mitad la proporción de pobres e indigentes en 2015, tomando como referencia los indicadores de 1990.

"Los ODM se han transformado en una agenda que no representa necesariamente la visión de las organizaciones latinoamericanas", sostuvo Ramis. A su juicio, son "menos ambiciosos" que las aspiraciones de cambio de la región.

Para el activista, las organizaciones del Norte vinculadas al GCAP postulan una solución "asistencialista" al problema de la pobreza, mientras que las de la región buscan cambiar los modelos de desarrollo, superar las desigualdades sociales, acabar con la dependencia comercial de los países y transformar las instituciones financieras internacionales.

En este marco, las organizaciones de la región estarían más preocupadas de las profundas reformas que se están llevando a cabo en algunos de sus países, por ejemplo, en el plano constitucional.

"Hemos tratado de impulsar estos debates en el consejo global del GCAP, pero todavía de manera insuficiente. Sin embargo, creemos que es posible hacer alianzas interregionales. En la última reunión tuvimos mucha afinidad con la posición asiática, de India, de Indonesia, no así con África", indicó Ramis.

Para el experto de la Cepal, Juan Carlos Feres, lo propuesto por Ramis equivale a una mirada superficial de los ODM, según dijo a IPS.

Feres recordó que a los países de la región no les ha sido fácil cumplir todos los ODM, aunque éstos parezcan "poco ambiciosos". También sostuvo que las metas del milenio "no se consiguen por mera administración, sino que demandan transformaciones profundas" en el orden político, económico, social y cultural de los países. "Detrás de los ODM no hay ingenuidad", dijo.

En abril de 2009, la chilena Acción asumirá la secretaría latinoamericana del GCAP, que ahora está en manos de organizaciones de El Salvador. Desde ese puesto, se pretende ampliar la mirada del movimiento, concluyó Ramis.

Tomado de Yahoo! Noticias

Washington, 17 oct (EFE).- El presidente de EE.UU., George W. Bush, dijo hoy que el programa de rescate financiero tardará algún tiempo en restablecer el flujo del crédito y prometió que el Gobierno no ejercerá control sobre los bancos.

En un discurso ante la Cámara de Comercio antes de la apertura de la Bolsa en Nueva York, Bush pidió paciencia a los mercados para que surta efecto el programa de 700.000 millones de dólares, que dijo es "lo suficientemente grande y audaz" para funcionar.

"Estas acciones tardarán un tiempo en tener su impacto completo", dijo Bush. "Los mercados de crédito tardaron un tiempo en helarse y va a pasar algún tiempo para que se descongelen".

El presidente afirmó que la compra prevista de acciones de los bancos por parte del Gobierno no significa una nacionalización de esas entidades.

"La intervención del Gobierno no es una toma de control, no pretende debilitar el libre mercado, sino fortalecerlo", afirmó.

Bush dedicó gran parte de su discurso a justificar la intervención pública, que calificó como "el último recurso".

"Yo me opondría a estas medidas en circunstancias normales, pero éstas no son circunstancias normales", señaló.

Bush dijo que el Departamento del Tesoro no entrará en los consejos directivos de los bancos o los dirigirá. "Si el Gobierno no hubiera actuado, el agujero en nuestro sistema financiero habría crecido aún más", afirmó.

El presidente señaló que en estos momentos de crisis Estados Unidos debe "evitar la falsa tentación del aislamiento económico".

En ese sentido, urgió una vez más al Congreso a aprobar "este año" los tratados de libre comercio alcanzados con Colombia, Panamá y Corea del Sur.

Tomado de Univision. com

Washington 17 de octubre(AP) - El caos reinante en los mercados financieros globales podría revivir al Fondo Monetario Internacional, el apagafuegos de las finanzas mundiales, que amenaza con adquirir renovada prominencia mediante la concesión de préstamos y el desarrollo de sistemas de alerta que permitan prevenir nuevas crisis.

Decidido a darle un papel más importante a esta organización de 185 naciones, su presidente, el francés Dominique Strauss-Kahn, se propone hacer que los recursos y los conocimientos del FMI desempeñan un papel protagónico en la economía mundial.

Asegura que está listo para iniciar una reforma a fondo.

Las grandes potencias comprometieron 3 billones de dólares para rescatar la economía, pero países como Islandia, Hungría y Ucrania, que enfrentan problemas fiscales particularmente graves, han dicho que probablemente recurran al FMI para salir del pozo.

En los últimos años el FMI ha perdido prominencia. Muchos países habituados a recibir préstamos suyos buscaron fondos en los mercados de capital y acumularon reservas para no tener que ir a mendigar al FMI.

Además, China y otras naciones ricas han estado ofreciendo préstamos a países en desarrollo, sobre todo africanos, sin condiciones.

El FMI, creado luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se convirtió en una rueda de auxilio de la comunidad internacional en la década de 1990, ofreciendo préstamos a naciones necesitadas e imponiendo estrictas recetas económicas a sus gobiernos.

El presidente egipcio Hosni Mubarak dijo en una ocasión que FMI eran las siglas del Fondo de Miseria Internacional.

El FMI y su pariente, el Banco Mundial, se encuentran uno frente al otro en Washington, a tres cuadras de la Casa Blanca. Son conocidos como las instituciones creadas por el acuerdo de Bretton Woods de hace 65 años, que fijó un nuevo rumbo para la economía mundial. Varios líderes europeos han dicho que es necesario elaborar un acuerdo similar, marcando nuevas pautas.

En un indicio de que el FMI puede estar recuperando prominencia, el primer ministro húngaro Ferenc Gyurcsany dijo a mediados de octubre que estaba en contacto permanente con ese organismo, el cual estaba listo para asistir a Hungría en caso de necesidad y para ayudar a estabilizar la economía mundial.

Strauss-Kahn confirmó que el FMI mantiene estrechos contactos con los húngaros y está dispuesto a analizar "una posible asistencia financiera" y a "responder rápidamente" a cualquier solicitud formal.

Strauss-Kahn indicó que en lo que va del año el FMI había concedido préstamos por 17.000 millones de dólares, comparado con los 110.000 millones que repartió en el 2003.

El abrupto descenso en los ingresos del FMI en concepto de intereses generó un déficit de 400 millones de dólares, heredado por Strauss-Kahn cuando asumió en noviembre pasado. El francés eliminó 400 puestos de trabajo e hizo otros cambios para aliviar las finanzas del organismo, el cual, según dijo, tiene ahora "cientos de millones de dólares" para prestar.

Agregó que acortará a dos semanas el período de tramitación de un préstamo, eliminará muchas de los severos requisitos y se dará prioridad a la respuesta rápida a las crisis.

Edwin Truman, del Peterson Institute for International Economics y ex funcionario de la secretaría del Tesoro estadounidense, pronosticó que el FMI "concederá muchos más préstamos" en el futuro, "pero resta por verse si serán de la magnitud de los de Asia" en la década del 90.

Algunos políticos creen que el FMI no se limitará a conceder préstamos.

El primer ministro británico Gordon Brown recomendó que se reconstruya el organismo para que ayude a resolver mejor los problemas financieros mundiales. Funcionarios estadounidenses han dicho en numerosas ocasiones que el FMI debe ser sometido a profundas reformas para conservar su legitimidad y su importancia.

"El FMI debe ser reestructurado para poder satisfacer las necesidades del mundo moderno. Necesitamos un sistema de alertas para la economía mundial", declaró Brown.

Agregó que en la actualidad se pueden movilizar millones de dólares en un segundo, apretando una tecla, pero que en esta economía global "solo tenemos regulaciones y métodos de supervisión nacionales y regionales".

"Si queremos resolver los problemas financieros globales, hay que buscar mejores métodos", acotó.

Truman opinó que, si bien es positivo el que Brown y otros líderes promuevan un papel más prominente para el FMI en la economía mundial, "no se lo puede transformar en un regulador, en la policía" de las finanzas.

Strauss-Kahn dijo que el comité decisorio del FMI considera que "el fondo es una institución única para un momento como éste, con miembros de todo el mundo, experiencia en cuestiones macroeconómicas y la misión de promover la estabilidad financiera internacional".

Añadió que el comité decidió analizar las lecciones que dejó esta crisis y hacer recomendaciones sobre cómo recuperar la confianza y la estabilidad.

"Nos pidieron actuar de inmediato, y es lo que estamos haciendo", declaró.

KurzweilAI.net, Oct. 16, 2008

Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) has launched h+, a stylish, web-based quarterly magazine that focuses on transhumanism, covering the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging and overcoming human limitations.

Bad bets
Oct 16th 2008 | SÃO PAULO

Currency worries in Brazil and Mexico

UNTIL the past fortnight, a crise, as Brazilians call it, had largely bypassed Latin America. No longer. In the week that began on October 6th the Brazilian real and the Mexican peso both plunged sickeningly (see chart), as did stockmarkets. This week saw modest recoveries. But confidence in the region’s new-found stability has taken a knock.

That is because the currency movements were sudden and violent. They prompted both countries’ central banks to intervene. Mexico’s had to spend 10% of its reserves in just a few hours to prop up the peso. Some foreign investors began selling Latin American assets to cover losses at home. But once it started, the currency slide seemed to provoke a collective nervous twitch that led many to seek safety in the dollar. This followed years in which Mexico had worked to create confidence in the stability of the free-floating peso. “Unfortunately you cannot just unlearn a reflex developed over decades of financial crises,” says Damian Fraser of UBS, an investment bank. The peso’s slide was exacerbated by the unwinding of derivatives contracts that had been profitable while the currency was steady. Comercial Mexicana, a big retailer, lost $4 billion on derivatives contracts and filed for protection from creditors on October 9th.

Something similar happened in Brazil. Because Brazil’s exports include a wide variety of raw materials, the real has recently come to be seen by investors as a proxy for global economic growth. When both began to fall, this triggered losses on derivatives, just as in Mexico. Grupo Votorantim, an industrial conglomerate and big exporter, used derivatives for hedging. It made profits of some 2 billion reais ($924m at the latest rate) over the past few years as the real appreciated. But earlier this month the real fell below the band specified in the contracts, triggering penalty clauses. On October 10th the company announced that it had spent 2.2 billion reais to rid itself of the troublesome contracts.

One theory is that the exchange-rate movements were so abrupt because currency dealers find it hard to raise credit, just like everyone else, and that this has cut the volume of transactions. Be that as it may, the currency turmoil will have economic effects. Until recently Brazilians worried that a rapidly strengthening real was making their exports uncompetitive. Now they have the opposite concern. Weaker currencies will mean higher inflation, because imports are more expensive.

Central bankers in both Brazil and Mexico have worked hard to establish their credibility as inflation fighters. Both have raised interest rates over the past year. Now they may have to do so again just as the gathering world recession, and the concomitant fall in commodity prices, is slowing their economies—or else abandon their inflation targets.

Until last month, most forecasters expected next year to see growth of 4.5% in Brazil and 3% in Mexico. They have since lopped about one and a half percentage points off both those figures. Even so, that points not to a bust but a slowdown. In the case of Brazil, that is healthy, since the economy cannot satisfy domestic demand (rising at 8% this year) without higher inflation, reckons Arminio Fraga, a fund manager and former central-bank president.

Even before the currency plunge, companies in both countries had started to feel the credit squeeze. Banks had stopped renewing credit lines for trade finance. Brazil’s central bank has stepped in to provide financing to exporters.

Both countries have recent experience of financial panics. As a result, their banking systems are solid and quite conservatively run. And at least this time currency weakness should not have knock-on effects on public finances, nor raise fears about the ability of governments to service their debts. That is because nowadays both governments can borrow in their own currencies. The lasting question from this bout of currency instability is how long that will remain the case.

Here we go again
Oct 16th 2008 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

The world’s financial meltdown stirs uneasy memories across Asia

ASIAN stockmarkets were among the most exuberant of the celebrants who briefly rejoiced at the massive financial interventions by American and European governments. In relief that global finance seemed to have survived its near-death experience, Hong Kong’s equities climbed more than 10% on October 13th. Next day, Tokyo’s soared a record 14%. But as elsewhere, these rallies proved an interlude in the sharp downward lurch. On October 16th Tokyo’s Nikkei index slumped 11%. Relief that catastrophe seemed to have been averted was no substitute for economic confidence. A region itself buffeted by financial crisis in 1997-98 has not forgotten that economic pain long outlasts financial-market rout.

That earlier crisis started with local worries about Thailand’s widening current-account deficit and a property bubble in Bangkok. It astonished the world with the speed and extent of the contagion that spread to other Asian countries, and emerging markets elsewhere, such as Russia and Brazil. This month’s panic had spread even further in Asia, shaking countries that by and large sailed through the late 1990s such as India and Australia.

On October 14th Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister, cited “the economic equivalent of a rolling national-security crisis” and announced that his government would guarantee all deposits in Australian banks and other savings institutions for three years. He followed this with a spending stimulus worth A$10.4 billion ($7 billion), much of it directed at people likely to spend the money rather than hoard it: first-time homebuyers, the poor and pensioners. On October 14th Hong Kong issued a blanket guarantee of all bank deposits, with the aim of preventing the kind of capital flight that wrought havoc with the territory’s capital markets during the 1997-98 crisis. Its monetary authority also announced a new facility for providing capital to the territory’s banks, even though they look robust enough. But it was in the countries worst affected last time—Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea—that the echoes seemed most eerie.

In many ways, the region is far better placed to withstand the present shock. Its banks are stronger, its currency regimes less rigid, its foreign-exchange reserves bigger. On the other hand, a decade of accelerated globalisation has seen every country integrated even more closely into the world economy. None can hope to be immune from a global slowdown. The region may not face the sort of meltdown experienced at the end of the 1990s. But prospects for growth look much bleaker than they did even a fortnight ago. Exports to rich countries still matter, albeit less than they did. And so does trade finance, which lubricates Asia’s trading machinery. Ships are sitting empty in big Asian ports, their cargoes piled up on the dockside because no bank will guarantee them. Despite strong balance sheets, Asian banks may need more capital if they are to make up for a shortage of Western trade credit.

Facing such worries, anger at the apparent hypocrisy of governments in America and Europe has been muted. Asian leaders have complained that they were blamed for bringing the last crisis on themselves, with their misguided exchange-rate policies, opaque financial systems, profligate spending and corrupt politics. The bail-outs by the IMF demanded fiscal austerity at a time of economic hardship. But, since international institutions offered the only financial lifeline, most Asian governments were forced to suck up IMF orthodoxies.

True to form, Mahathir Mohamad, a former Malaysian prime minister, who was among the West’s harshest critics a decade ago, has not resisted gloating. On his blog, he recalls how “the Americans” said Asian companies should have been allowed to go under, but now Americans are preparing bail-outs and nationalisation for their own firms.

China, too, which survived the last crisis fairly unscathed thanks to capital controls and a state-run banking system, has indulged in a bit of point-scoring. Its refusal to allow a faster appreciation of the yuan has been blamed by some for helping build up the huge global financial imbalances that now seem to be unwinding so fast. From China’s perspective, the meltdown vindicates the cautious pace of its liberalisation. But its officials have tried not to sound too smug. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the region, they know it is too early to declare victory. Chinese journalists say the official media have been ordered to tone down or avoid reports about the economic impact on China. As during the earlier crisis China is trying to appear helpful. On October 8th it timed its latest interest-rate cut (of 0.27 percentage points) to coincide with concerted rate-cutting by other central banks. With its massive foreign-exchange reserves, China, like Japan, the other big Asian creditor nation, has too big a financial stake in the global system to feel anything other than anxiety at the possibility of an implosion.

Marking markets

So across Asia, governments have taken measures to allay disquiet (see article). In China the stockmarket has lost two-thirds of its value since last October; the property market is wobbling and growth is slowing. These trends all predated the latest panic. But the government has had to go further to shore up confidence. It tried to revive the stockmarket by abolishing a tax on share-buying and investing in the market itself. Japan, despite the giddy plunge of the stockmarket from October 8th-10th and the bankruptcy of a middling life insurer, Yamato Life, is confident that its financial system, recapitalised at massive public expense a decade ago, is robust enough to survive the latest shocks.

Japan’s money markets have gummed up far less than those in America and Europe. Even so, at a time when its economy is almost certainly in recession, the authorities are taking few risks. Backed by $1 trillion of reserves, the Bank of Japan has promised unlimited dollar funds to the markets. And the government has announced measures to support regional banks. It has also promised not to sell its remaining shares in the country’s biggest banks for the time being, and eased conditions for companies to own shares in each other as a way to support the stockmarket.

This year South Korea’s won has sunk more than any other Asian currency. The country’s current account, in surplus for many years, has slid into deficit. Banks have made a high number of loans in proportion to their deposits. Households are deep in debt and so are many smaller companies (many in dollars). In a radio address on October 13th President Lee Myung-bak insisted that the banks were sound and pointed out that the currency was backed by far larger foreign reserves than it was a decade ago. He begged South Koreans to cut down on foreign spending and energy use, and to increase spending at home.

In India, the closeted banking system is not heavily exposed to the financial crisis. Its most adventurous bank—ICICI—is the only one so far to cause jitters. Long lionised for financial sophistication, the bank is now associated with Western financial sophistry. After its share price halved in a month, it had to send text messages to its depositors reassuring them that their money was safe. Statements of support from the Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank, and the rating agencies have helped restore confidence.

Indonesia’s government intervened more drastically, halting share trading for three days after sharp falls in share prices and the rupiah. When the stockmarket reopened on October 13th, the government strengthened its guarantee of bank deposits to deter a run on banks.

Reasons for gloom

In the less panicky mood that prevailed this week, such measures appeared to have bolstered confidence. They did little, however, to ease two longer-term worries.

The first concerns countries that are embroiled in political upheaval and which may be ill-placed to cope with the economic storms to come. The second is how severe those storms are going to be.

Thailand, riven by conflict between the elected government and powerful protesters (see article) is especially vulnerable. But Malaysia, whose prime minister says he will step down, also has its political worries. In the Philippines, the latest in a series of doomed but distracting attempts to impeach the president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, is gathering steam.

Even if these dangers can be skirted, the region is going to experience a sharp slowdown, though perhaps only Japan and Singapore are already in recession. In China, the slowing of the economy, caused mainly by a fall in net exports, could become a serious worry in the months ahead. Most economists expect GDP growth to fall only to 8-9% next year (from 10.1% in the second quarter of this year and 12.6% a year earlier)—hardly a grinding halt. Most Chinese economists are confident that if the slowdown is sharper, the government can still spend its way out of trouble. But an article last month in a magazine published by a government think-tank warned that a severe slowdown could present China with the kind of social turbulence that ravaged Indonesia in 1998.

China’s growth is increasingly important for the region. This month Australia ’s Mr Rudd rang the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to ask about projections for China’s growth, and whether its strong demand for Australia’s minerals was likely to continue. On getting an upbeat answer, Mr Rudd concluded that China was now “critical for Australia’s continued economic performance”. It is also the biggest trading partner for Japan and India. But, according to the Asian Development Bank, 60% of Asia’s exports (not including Japan’s) still go to America, the European Union and Japan. A decline of one percentage point in America’s growth rate, the bank calculates, knocks 0.3 percentage points off Asia’s. That may be optimistic.

To date, one constant since the 1997-98 crisis has been the absence of a co-ordinated regional response. Out of that crisis, a self-help initiative among the region’s central banks known as the “Chiang Mai initiative” was launched. But it seems designed to fight the last war—a concerted attack on a country’s currency—rather than today’s wider financial malaise.

Coincidentally, Asia’s leaders will be meeting counterparts from Europe in Beijing on October 24th for the biennial “Asia-Europe” meeting, ASEM. The Philippines’ Mrs Arroyo has in vain suggested holding a crisis summit of the Asian countries on its margins. She also boasted this week of an agreement to set up a fund to buy toxic debts from banks in South-East Asia, China, South Korea and Japan. But the World Bank, the alleged source of some of the money, and the other countries involved, could not recall such an agreement. So she managed only to heighten the impression of ill-co-ordinated floundering. At least China, the host of the ASEM talk-shop, has overcome its initial reluctance to put impending financial collapse on the agenda. It seems to have realised that it would seem odd indeed if Asian leaders spent much time talking about anything else.

Oct 16th 2008

History has to be rewritten after the market’s recent falls

AT THE end of 1964 the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 874.1. Seventeen years later, despite rapid inflation, the average had inched forward only to 875. It was the kind of grinding bear market that drove investors to despair. Near its end, Business Week famously proclaimed “The Death of Equities”.

It is beginning to look as if we are in the middle of another of those great phases, what commentators call a secular, as opposed to a cyclical, bear market. Broadly speaking, the 20th century can be divided into six phases; bear markets from 1901-21, 1929-49 and 1965-82 and bull runs from 1921-29, 1949-65 and 1982-2000.

Those unlucky enough to live through the bear markets saw their savings turn to dust. Equities were shunned in favour of alternatives such as government bonds (in the first half of the century) and property and commodities (in the inflationary second half). In the bull markets, investors made their fortunes, generally driving shares up to excessive valuations.

When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, share valuations were at ridiculously high levels. In his book, “Irrational Exuberance”, Robert Shiller calculated the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio over history. This measure, which takes an average of profits over the previous ten years and adjusts for inflation, is superior to the traditional p/e ratio because profits are highly volatile. In January 2000 the cyclically adjusted p/e on the S&P 500 was 44.3; the previous peak, just before the crash of 1929, was 32.6.

That suggested markets had a long way to fall. And share prices did indeed suffer a long period of decline. In Britain, for example, the FTSE 100 index more than halved between December 1999 and March 2003. At that point, however, the effect of lower interest rates, booming corporate profits and more attractive valuations kicked in. Equities began a four-year bull run that saw the MSCI world index more than double between March 2003 and June of last year.

During that time, it would have seemed ridiculous to ask whether investors were in the middle of a long bear market. But with global equities falling by 41% this year (including the spectacular gyrations of this week), the question is now much more pertinent. The Dow was trading below 9,000 on October 15th, a level it first passed in 1997. In other words, investors who bought stocks more than a decade ago have no capital gains to show for it, only dividends (and yields have been low throughout).

Why does this matter? The existence of a bear market does not preclude the possibility of fantastic returns over shorter periods. Indeed, one striking point about the Dow’s 936-point gain on October 13th was that it climbed more in that one day than it did in the first 85 years of its existence (it was founded in 1896). Two of the very best years in American stockmarket history were 1933 and 1935, right in the middle of the Depression.

But bear markets behave rather like Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon strip. Just when Charlie Brown is persuaded to attempt to kick the football, she snatches it away. Just when investors are persuaded the bottom of a bear market has been reached, share prices slump once more. The Dow closed above 1,000 in 1972, only to fall to 616 by the end of 1974. A rally in 1975 took the average to 852, but it then gained only a net 23 points over the next six years.

Equity markets have again reached a stage where valuations look attractive in historic terms. In America, continental Europe and Britain the dividend yield is higher than short-term interest rates, a rare occurrence in the past half-century. A net 43% of fund managers interviewed by Merrill Lynch for a survey published on October 15th thought that equities were undervalued. That was the highest level in a decade.

However, those managers were not snapping up bargains. A net 49% of them had a higher-than-normal weighting in cash, a record figure. That kind of paralysis is typical of a prolonged bear market.

Even if managers feel that a complete economic catastrophe has been avoided by the bank bail-outs, they are worried about the prospects for recession, and the potential effect on company profits. (Pepsi, a core consumer-goods group, gave a disappointing outlook on October 14th.) They might be proved right in five years’ time by buying now, but they fear being proved wrong (and losing their jobs) before Christmas.

Snapping investors out of their bear-market mentality takes a lot of work. The shortest of the 20th-century phases was 17 years. With luck, time will move faster in the 21st century.

Link by link
Oct 16th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The crash has been blamed on cheap money, Asian savings and greedy bankers. For many people, deregulation is the prime suspect

THE autumn of 2008 marks the end of an era. After a generation of standing ever further back from the business of finance, governments have been forced to step in to rescue banking systems and the markets. In America, the bulwark of free enterprise, and in Britain, the pioneer of privatisation, financial firms have had to accept rescue and part-ownership by the state. As well as partial nationalisation, the price will doubtless be stricter regulation of the financial industry. To invert Karl Marx, investment bankers may have nothing to gain but their chains.

The idea that the markets have ever been completely unregulated is a myth: just ask any firm that has to deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in America or its British equivalent, the Financial Services Authority (FSA). And cheap money and Asian savings also played a starring role in the credit boom. But the intellectual tide of the past 30 years has unquestionably been in favour of the primacy of markets and against regulation. Why was that so?

Each step on the long deregulatory road seemed wise at the time and was usually the answer to some flaw in the system. The Anglo-Saxon economies may have led the way but continental Europe and Japan eventually followed (after a lot of grumbling) in their path.

It all began with floating currencies. In 1971 Richard Nixon sought to solve the mounting crisis of a large trade deficit and a costly war in Vietnam by suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold. In effect, that put an end to the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates which had been created at the end of the second world war. Under Bretton Woods, capital could not flow freely from one country to another because of exchange controls. As one example, Britons heading abroad on their annual holidays in the late 1960s could take just £50 (then $120) with them. Investing abroad was expensive, so pension funds kept their money at home.

Once currencies could float, the world changed. Companies with costs in one currency and revenues in another needed to hedge exchange-rate risk. In 1972 a former lawyer named Leo Melamed was clever enough to see a business in this and launched currency futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Futures in commodities had existed for more than a century, enabling farmers to insure themselves against lower crop prices. But Mr Melamed saw that financial futures would one day be far larger than the commodities market. Today’s complex derivatives are direct descendants of those early currency trades.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Chicago was also the centre of free-market economics. Led by Milton Friedman, its professors argued that Keynesian economics, with its emphasis on government intervention, had failed and that markets would be better at allocating capital than bureaucrats. After the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the Chicago school found a willing audience in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who were elected at the turn of the decade. The duo believed that freer markets would bring economic gains and that they would solidify popular support for the conservative cause. A nation of property-owners would be resistant to higher taxes and to left-wing attacks on business. Liberalised markets made it easier for homebuyers to get mortgages as credit controls were abandoned and more lenders entered the home-loan market.

Another consequence of a system of floating exchange rates was that capital controls were not strictly necessary. Continental European governments still feared the destabilising effect of hot money flows and created the European Monetary System in response. But Reagan and Mrs (now Lady) Thatcher took the plunge and abolished controls. The initial effects were mixed, with sharp appreciations of the dollar and pound causing problems for the two countries’ exporters and exacerbating the recession of the early 1980s.

But the result was that institutions, such as insurance companies and pension funds, could move money across borders. In Britain that presented a challenge to the stockbrokers and marketmakers (known as jobbers) who had controlled share trading. Big investors complained that the brokers charged too much under an anti-competitive system of fixed commissions. At the same time, big international fund-managers found that the tiny jobbing firms had too little capital to handle their trades.

The Big Bang of 1986 abolished the distinction between brokers and jobbers and allowed foreign firms, with more capital, into the market. These firms could deal more cheaply and in greater size. New York had introduced a similar reform in 1975; in America’s more developed domestic market, institutional investors had had the clout to demand the change long before their British counterparts.

These reforms had further consequences. By slashing commissions, they contributed to the long-term decline of broking as a source of revenue. The effect was disguised for a while by a higher volume of transactions. But the broker-dealers increasingly had to commit their own capital to deals. In turn, this made trading on their own account a potentially attractive source of revenue.

Over time, that changed the structure of the industry. Investment (or merchant) banks had traditionally been slim businesses, living off the wits of their employees and their ability to earn fees from advice. But the need for capital led them either to abandon their partnership structure and raise money on the stockmarket or to join up with commercial banks. In turn, that required the dilution and eventually, in 1999, the abolition of the old Glass-Steagall act, devised in the Depression to separate American commercial and investment banking.

Commercial banks were keen to move the other way. The plain business of corporate lending was highly competitive and retail banking required expensive branch networks. But strong balance-sheets gave commercial banks the chance to muscle investment banks out of the underwriting of securities. Investment banks responded by getting bigger.

Expansion and diversification took place against a remarkably favourable background. After the Federal Reserve, then chaired by Paul Volcker, broke the back of inflation in the early 1980s, asset prices (property, bonds, shares) rose for much of the next two decades. Trading in, or lending against, such assets was very profitable. And during the “Great Moderation” recessions were short, limiting the damage done to banks’ balance-sheets by bad debts. As the financial industry prospered, its share of the American stockmarket climbed from 5.2% in 1980 to 23.5% last year (see chart 1).

Risky business

As banks’ businesses became broader, they also became more complex. With the help of academics, financiers started to unpick the various components of risk and trade them separately.

Again, Chicago played its part. Option contracts were known in ancient history but the 1970s saw an explosion in their use. Two academics who had studied, or taught, at the University of Chicago, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, developed a theory of option pricing. And the Chicago Board Options Exchange was set up in 1973 as a forum for trading.

Whereas futures contracts lock in the participants to buy or sell an asset, an option is more like insurance. The buyer pays a premium for the right to exercise his option should prices move in a set direction. If prices do not move that way, the option lapses and the buyer only loses the premium. The Black-Scholes formula shows that an option’s value depends on the volatility of the underlying assets. The more the price moves, the more likely the option is to be exercised. Calculating that volatility was made a lot easier by the growing power of computers.

The next great development in risk management was the swap. Bond markets had been domestic, with buyers focusing on issuers from their home markets. That created the potential for arbitrage, issuing bonds in one currency and swapping them for another, creating lower interest rates for both borrowers.

It was a short step from currency swaps to interest-rate swaps. Borrowers on floating (variable) rates could swap with those on a fixed rate. This allowed company finance directors (and speculators) to change their risk exposure depending on their view of where rates would go. Rather than pay each other’s interest costs directly, the payments would be netted out.

The final stage emerged only in the past decade. A credit-default swap (CDS) allows investors to separate the risk of interest-rate movements from the risk that a borrower will not repay. For a premium, one party to a CDS can insure against default. From almost nothing just a few years ago, CDSs grew at an explosive rate until recently (see chart 2).

Futures, options and swaps all have the same characteristic: a small initial position can lead to a much larger exposure. Futures contracts are bought with only a small deposit or margin; option sellers have to cover buyers’ losses, which may be many times the value of the premium; the net exposure of a swap counterparty may be smaller but the gross position will be huge, a problem if the counterparty defaults.

This made it hard for regulators to keep track of a firm’s exposure. For years, therefore, they concentrated on improving the infrastructure of the market, making sure that deals were well documented or settled through a central clearing house (something yet to be achieved for CDSs).

The biggest hiccup in the growth of the derivatives markets came after the 1987 stockmarket crash, when a technique known as portfolio insurance took a lot of the blame. This involved investors selling stock-index futures to protect themselves from falls in the value of their portfolios. The problem was that the two markets acted on each other; as the futures price fell, so did the cash value of shares, forcing institutions to sell more futures and so on. That prompted the American authorities to introduce “circuit breakers”, limiting the use of portfolio insurance at difficult times.

Derivatives caused more embarrassment in the 1990s as naive local authorities, such as Orange County in California, and corporate treasury departments lost fortunes in contracts they did not understand. But gradually the authorities learnt to love these markets; Frankfurt, for example, competed hard to win trading in German government-bond futures away from London. The theory was that, by allowing business and investors to spread risk, both markets and economies would become more robust.

Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed from 1987 to 2006, was in the vanguard of this view. In his book, “The Age of Turbulence” (2007), he welcomed the growth of CDSs, arguing: “Being able to profit from the loan transaction but transfer credit risk is a boon to banks and other financial intermediaries which, in order to make an adequate rate of return on equity, have to heavily leverage their balance sheets by accepting deposit obligations and/or incurring debt. A market vehicle for transferring risk away from these highly leveraged loan originators can be critical for economic stability, especially in a global environment.”

Securitisation, which has been at the centre of the current crisis, is another child of the 1970s. It involves bundling loans into packages that are then sold to outside investors. The first big market was for American mortgages. When homeowners pay their monthly payments, these are collected by the servicing agent and passed through to investors as interest payments on their bonds.

Again, this business was encouraged by the authorities as a means of spreading risk. Everybody appeared to win. Banks earned fees for originating loans without the burden of holding them on their balance-sheets (which would have restricted their ability to lend to others). Investors got assets that yielded more than government bonds and represented claims on a diversified group of borrowers. No wonder securitisation grew so fast (see chart 3).

These asset-backed securities became ever more complex. Securitisation eventually gave rise to collateralised debt obligations, sophisticated instruments that bundled together packages of different bonds and then sliced them into tranches according to investors’ appetite for risk. The opacity of these products has caused no end of trouble in the past 18 months.

More fundamentally, securitisation opened a new route to growth for banks. No longer were commercial banks dependent on the slow, costly business of attracting retail deposits. Securitisation allowed them to borrow in the markets. Few imagined that the markets would not be open at all times. In 2007 Northern Rock, a British mortgage lender, was the first spectacular casualty of this false assumption; many more banks have been caught out in 2008.

Asleep at the wheel?

While all this was happening, regulators were not wholly passive. They had to deal with crises such as the failures of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which dominated the junk-bond market, and Baring Brothers, a British bank brought low by a rogue trader. But these were regarded as individual instances of mismanagement or fraud, rather than as evidence of a systemic problem. Even the American savings-and-loan crisis, an early deregulation disaster, was tidied up with the help of a bail-out plan and easy monetary policy, and dismissed as an aberration.

Rather than question the principle of deregulation, some governments redesigned their regulatory structures. Britain devised the FSA in 1997 (even taking away banking regulation from the Bank of England) in a conscious attempt to create a single supervisory body. In America the SEC shares authority with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, state insurance commissioners and so on.

The authorities did make a more fundamental attempt to regulate the banks with the Basel accord. The first version of this, in 1988, established minimum capital standards. Banks have always been a weak link in the financial system because of the mismatch between their assets and liabilities. The assets are usually long-term loans to companies and consumers. The liabilities are deposits by consumers and investors that can be withdrawn overnight. A bank run is hard to resist, since a bank cannot realise its assets quickly; worse still, doing so—by calling in loans—may cause economic havoc by prompting bankruptcies and job losses.

The Basel accord was designed to deal with a different problem: that big borrowers might default. It required banks to set aside capital against such contingencies. Because this is expensive, banks looked for ways around the rules by shifting assets off their balance-sheets. Securitisation was one method. The structured investment vehicles that held many subprime-mortgage assets were another. And a third was to cut the risk of borrowers defaulting, using CDSs with insurers like American International Group. When the markets collapsed, these assets threatened to come back onto the balance-sheets, a prime cause of today’s problems.
Illustration by Brett Ryder
Illustration by Brett Ryder

It would be a mistake to argue that, had politicians rather than bankers been in charge, policy would have been more prudent. Indeed, politicians encouraged banks to make riskier loans. This was particularly true in America, where a series of measures, starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, required banks to meet the credit needs of the “entire community”. In practice, this was social policy: it meant more lending to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored giants of the mortgage market, were encouraged to guarantee a wider range of loans in the 1990s.

The share of Americans who owned their homes rose steadily. But more buyers meant higher prices, making loans even less affordable to the poor and requiring even slacker lending standards. The seeds of the subprime crisis were sown, and the new techniques of securitisation allowed banks to make these loans and then offload them quickly.

Initially, the growth of homeownership was seen as a benign effect of deregulation, as was the ability of consumers to borrow on their credit cards, a habit they took to enthusiastically. The authorities largely welcomed this boost to consumer demand. In the 1970s and 1980s, they might have worried about the effect on inflation or the trade deficit. But technological change in the 1990s, and the impact of China and India in the 2000s, kept headline inflation down, while liberalised capital markets and Asian savings made external deficits easy to finance.

In addition, those countries with big financial centres were delighted to have them because of the tax revenues they yielded. That hardly encouraged them to look too closely at the financial industry. Nor did it hurt that political parties in both America and Britain received a lot of contributions from financiers.

Liberalisation happened for many reasons. Often, regulators were simply trying to catch up with the real world—for instance, the rapid development of offshore markets. In addition, deregulation provided things that voters wanted, such as cheap loans. Each financial innovation that came along became the object of speculation that was fuelled by cheap money. Bankers and traders were always one step ahead of the regulators. That is a lesson the latter will have to learn next time.

Amid the crisis of 2008, it is easy to forget that liberalisation had good consequences as well: by making it easier for households and businesses to get credit, deregulation contributed to economic growth. Deregulation may not have been the main cause of the rise in living standards over the last 30 years, but it helped more than it harmed. Will the new, regulated world be as benign?

Tomado de The Wall Street Journal, EEUU

Washington, 16 de octubre.-Los temores a que Estados Unidos caiga en una profunda recesión provocaron la mayor caída del Promedio Industrial Dow Jones en 21 años, que coincidió con un descenso de las ventas minoristas y las ganancias de los bancos y el debilitamiento de la demanda de materias primas.

Las últimas cifras sugieren que EE.UU. se dispone a entrar en su mayor recesión desde inicios de los años 80. Tal noticia, junto a la reanudación de los problemas en los mercados de crédito, desencadenó una ola de ventas en los mercados que prácticamente borró de un plumazo el gigantesco avance del lunes.

El Promedio Industrial Dow Jones perdió 733 puntos, un 7,9%, para quedar en 8.577,91 unidades en medio de los temores a una recesión y las dudas acerca de las perspectivas del sistema financiero. El declive del miércoles representa el mayor descenso del Dow desde octubre de 1987 y su segunda mayor caída por puntos de la historia. El indicador acumula un declive de 21% en lo que va del mes y de casi 40% desde su máximo de hace un año.

Otros mercados acompañaron su derrumbe. El Índice Compuesto Nasdaq, por ejemplo, cedió 150,68 puntos, un 9,03%, para ubicarse en 907,84 unidades. El miércoles, los inversionistas perdieron US$1,1 billón (millón de millones) en valor de mercado, la segunda vez en la historia que pierden más de US$1 billón en una jornada.

Los inversionistas en renta fija volvieron a refugiarse en los instrumentos más seguros, como los bonos del Tesoro estadounidense a dos años, cuyo rendimiento bajó a 1,6%. El del bono del Tesoro a 10 años subió levemente para quedar en 4%.

El presidente de la Reserva Federal, Ben Bernanke, advirtió en un discurso pronunciado en Nueva York que la economía estadounidense enfrenta momentos muy difíciles. "La estabilización de los mercados financieros es un primer paso, pero... una recuperación más amplia de la economía no ocurrirá de la noche a la mañana", aseveró. "En última instancia, la trayectoria de la actividad económica más allá de los próximos trimestres dependerá en gran medida de hasta qué punto los mercados financieros y crediticios vuelvan a un funcionamiento más normal".

Bernanke dejó sutilmente la puerta abierta para nuevos recortes en las tasas de interés al comentar que las presiones inflacionarias han cedido a raíz de la caída en los precios de las materias primas y las menores expectativas de inflación.

El impacto de nuevos recortes de tasas, sin embargo, está en duda. Los inversionistas están demandando grandes diferencias, conocidos como spreads, sobre las tasas de interés de referencia para realizar préstamos a empresas y consumidores. Mientras los spreads sigan siendo amplios, los beneficios de las reducciones en las tasas se diluyen. Una de las prioridades de las autoridades es aliviar los temores que se han apoderado de los mercados financieros. Eso estimularía la disposición de las entidades financieras a prestar a spreads más bajos.

Mientras tanto, aumentan los indicios de que EE.UU. sufrirá una recesión mucho más cruda que las de 2001 y 1990-91. Los despidos, que comenzaron a principios de año, se empezaron a acelerar el mes pasado, incluso antes de que azotara la crisis financiera.

El Departamento de Comercio anunció que las ventas minoristas bajaron 1,2% el mes pasado, un declive mucho más pronunciado que en julio y agosto. Las cifras confirman que EE.UU. ya se estaba debilitando antes de que la crisis de los mercados entrara en una fase crítica. El consumo, que representa más del 70% de la economía estadounidense, probablemente registrará caídas sin precedentes en el tercer y cuarto trimestre.

Los problemas de EE.UU. están afectando a la economía mundial, cuyas débiles perspectivas han hecho caer los precios de las materias primas. El crudo, sin ir más lejos, perdió un 5,1% en Nueva York para quedar en US$74,54 el barril, su cierre más bajo en lo que va del año.

Mientras tanto, los persistentes problemas en los mercados crediticios probablemente golpearán con fuerza a los bancos en los próximos meses. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. y Wells Fargo & Co., dos de los bancos más saludables del país, dijeron el miércoles que sus operaciones de banca de consumo experimentarán un deterioro que podría durar meses. J.P. Morgan, uno de los principales emisores de tarjetas de crédito, informó que los préstamos que tuvo que pasar a pérdida equivalieron a un 5% de su cartera de tarjetas de crédito, comparado con el 3,64% del tercer trimestre de 2007. El banco prevé que la cifra crezca a 6% para inicios del año entrante y a 7% para finales de 2009.

Muchos economistas revisaron a la baja sus estimaciones. La consultora Macroeconomic Advisers redujo su estimación y proyecta un descenso de 0,3% en el PIB durante el tercer trimestre."El consumidor estadounidense está en serios aprietos. El crecimiento de los salarios se evapora, el crédito es escaso o no se consigue, los precios de las viviendas siguen cayendo... y los costos de los alimentos y la energía se quedan con una importante porción de sus presupuestos", dice Joshua Shapiro, economista jefe de la firma de consultoría MFR Inc.

"Sin importar lo que haga el gobierno para rescatar el sistema financiero, se nos viene una recesión liderada por el consumo y promete ser grave".

Oficina de Prensa y Difusión del SELA

Caracas, 16 de octubre de 2008.- El 30 de octubre del presente año se realizará en la sede de la Secretaría Permanente del Sistema Económico Latinoamericano y del Caribe (SELA) la Reunión Regional “Los desafíos del adverso entorno económico internacional para América Latina y el Caribe” con el objetivo de realizar un análisis desde la perspectiva latinoamericana y caribeña acerca de la actual crisis financiera internacional y sus probables implicaciones para la región.

La Agenda de esta importante reunión, inicialmente prevista para hacer una valoración de los resultados de la Conferencia de Alto Nivel de la FAO sobre Seguridad Alimentaria, pretende debatir posibles respuestas de América Latina y el Caribe para enfrentar los desafíos derivados de la aguda crisis financiera internacional.

Según la Secretaría Permanente del SELA los probables efectos de la actual crisis internacional sobre las naciones latinoamericanas y caribeñas pudieran impactar distintos sectores y por ende tener implicaciones muy importantes - tanto a corto como a mediano plazo - para la dinámica económica y social de nuestra región.

De acuerdo a este organismo de alcance latinoamericano y caribeño con sede en Caracas, todo indica que se producirá una reducción perceptible en el ritmo de crecimiento económico de la región, lo cual se asociará a la esperada caída de la demanda externa de bienes y servicios producidos por Latinoamérica y el Caribe con la consiguiente reducción de los ingresos por exportaciones.

Igualmente, la muy probable reducción del acceso al financiamiento internacional y de las remesas enviadas por los migrantes latinoamericanos y caribeños, disminuirá la disponibilidad de recursos de la región. A ello habría que añadir una previsible reducción de los ingresos por turismo internacional, lo cual restringiría aún más las condiciones financieras en que se tendrían que reproducir las economías de América Latina y el Caribe.

En la primera sesión de la reunión convocada por el SELA para el próximo 30 de octubre, se hará una presentación del análisis y las propuestas elaboradas por la Secretaría Permanente sobre la crisis financiera internacional y las posibles respuestas de América Latina y el Caribe, la cual culminará con un debate entre los representantes de los 26 Estados miembros del organismo.

En su segunda sesión, la reunión contempla realizar un análisis desde la perspectiva regional de los resultados y principales conclusiones de la Reunión de Alto Nivel convocada por la FAO sobre Seguridad Alimentaria, la cual se desarrolló en la sede de ese organismo multilateral en Roma entre el 3 y el 5 de junio de 2008.

A este respecto, la reunión regional se propone contrastar tanto el diagnóstico como las decisiones adoptadas en la Conferencia de la FAO en Roma con las discusiones y propuestas realizadas en el marco de la Reunión Regional de Alto Nivel sobre el tema que organizó el SELA el pasado 30 de mayo .

Durante el desarrollo de esta segunda sesión, se presentará el documento titulado “El alza del precio de los alimentos: Seguimiento a la Conferencia Mundial de Alto Nivel sobre Seguridad Alimentaria, realizada por la FAO, en Roma, entre el 3 y 5 de junio del presente año”, elaborado por la Secretaría Permanente del SELA.

En el transcurso de esta sesión, se discutirán las perspectiva s de algunos organismos multilaterales y regionales, a partir de la intervención del representante del Director General de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Agricultura y la Alimentación (FAO, del representante de la Directora General del Programa Mundial de Alimentos de la ONU (PMA) y de un representante de la Secretaria Ejecutiva de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL).

El propósito final de este importante encuentro al que ha convocado el SELA es lograr un consenso sobre posibles acciones a desarrollar por los gobiernos de América Latina y el Caribe - y los organismos subregionales y regionales - para enfrentar eficientemente los desafíos económicos y sociales derivados de la actual crisis financiera internacional y garantizar la seguridad alimentaria en los países de la región.

José Carreño
El Universal

Jueves 16 de octubre de 2008

jose.carreno@eluniversal.com.mx

Para la mayoría de los mexicanos el presidente ideal de Estados Unidos sería el demócrata Barak Obama, que surgió en la escena política hace apenas cuatro años, por encima del republicano John McCain, que lleva 20 años en contactos con México.

La muy favorable imagen de Obama, que es un virtual desconocido, contrasta con el negativismo hacia McCain, que sin embargo es, de los dos, el que realmente conoce México y tiene, y ha tenido, contacto con los mexicanos.

Al margen de quién gane y sus sentimientos hacia América Latina en general y México en particular, su visión de la relación estará teñida también por conveniencias políticas de momento y la composición del Congreso, no sólo en la relación de demócratas y republicanos sino de grupos de entre esas bancadas.

Pero los dos bandos serían problemáticos, por razones en algunos casos diferentes.

De acuerdo con las declaraciones previas y los idearios de campaña, los demócratas serían más problemáticos para México por su visión del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte y la idea de que favorece a canadienses y mexicanos por encima de los intereses de los estadounidenses.

Obama y su compañero de fórmula, Joseph Biden, creen que pueden hacerlo mas favorable a su país o corregir sus defectos mediante la imposición de nuevas condiciones de respeto y acatamiento de leyes laborales y del medio ambiente.

La reforma migratoria

Del otro lado McCain, que copatrocinó con el demócrata Ted Kennedy una importante pero fracasada propuesta de reforma migratoria integral, casi perdió la posibilidad de ser candidato debido a su postura en favor de regularizar a los inmigrantes indocumentados en Estados Unidos.

Desde entonces realizó lo que algunos consideran como casi un giro de 180 grados para hacer énfasis en la necesidad de seguridad fronteriza.

La compañera de fórmula de McCain, Sarah Palin, sólo puede alegar en su favor haber visto la frontera de Canadá con Alaska y las costas asiáticas de Rusia. Más allá, silencio.

En términos reales, sin embargo, no se puede decir que uno vaya a ser más o menos problemático que otro.

Mientras McCain, nacido en la desaparecida “zona del canal” de Panamá, ha tenido un largo vínculo con partes de la región y como senador por Arizona una larga relación con temas mexicanos, Obama tiene apenas idea de América Latina, y lo más cerca que ha estado de México es un vistazo a través del Río Grande hace unos meses.

Pero al mismo tiempo, con sus antecedentes como organizador comunitario en Chicago, donde hay minoría latina y en especial su componente mexicano tiene una influencia considerable, Obama puede alegar otra aproximación a los contactos con México y Latinoamérica.

La composición del Congreso será determinante para las relaciones y si como se prevé los demócratas logran un control absoluto, es de esperarse que haya predominio de las voces por la renegociación del TLCAN y tal vez por un nuevo debate migratorio que incorpore temas de seguridad fronteriza.

Asegura que el gran reto hacia adelante está en resolver en qué manos quedará la propiedad del sistema de pagos de cada país.

El plan de rescate implantado en México durante 1995 no es un ejemplo para el mundo, pues de haber sido así “sufriría la pérdida de toda una década”, afirmó el ex presidente Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Durante su discurso ante estudiantes del St Antony’s College de la Universidad de Oxford, Salinas de Gortari dijo que la historia de la crisis mexicana parece que no se repetirá, “pues los países industrializados no muestran estar dispuestos a cometer desastres similares a los errores que empezaron en diciembre de 1994”.

Aseguró que en México las autoridades “han tomado las decisiones adecuadas”, ya que al lanzar un programa de estímulos al crecimiento y mantener la estabilidad económica, “han evitado la repetición de los errores de 1995”.

“Resulta sorprendente que haya voces dentro de nuestro país que proponen que las autoridades de las naciones desarrolladas adopten un paquete de decisiones similar al introducido en México frente a la crisis de 1995”, añadió el ex mandatario.

En ese sentido, hizo un recuento de todos los errores cometidos en ese año, los cuales “nos dejaron el peor de los mundos”; es decir, con “una deuda monumental adicional de 20 por ciento del PIB que todavía hoy siguen pagando los mexicanos. Con la economía estancada a pesar del petróleo y las remesas, (pero además) con el sistema de pagos de México en manos de los extranjeros y durante una década el país sin financiamiento para su desarrollo”.

Al decir que la etapa de la nacionalización de los bancos será temporal comentó que “el gran reto hacia adelante está en resolver quiénes serán los propietarios finales de los bancos. En qué manos quedará la propiedad del sistema bancario, es decir, del sistema de pagos de cada país”.

Reconoció que ahora los países “tienen que salvar sus bancos y evitar una recesión, frente al reto de las presiones inflacionarias que permanecen y el riesgo de la explosión del déficit fiscal”.

Al respecto, Salinas de Gortari recordó que “los bancos dejaron de prestar y ya no eran propiedad de los mexicanos, (pues) el gobierno entregó la propiedad del sistema de pagos del país a los extranjeros. Por eso, hoy el tema principal es respecto a quiénes serán los dueños finales de los bancos que han sido rescatados en los países desarrollados”.

Añadió que si hoy esas naciones, “en lugar de obligar a los bancos a prestar a las empresas, adoptaran el paquete de 1995, el crédito se colapsaría”.

Al recordar la fuga masiva de capitales por la consulta hecha a los empresarios en 1994, Salinas reconoció las “acciones coordinadas para proteger a los ahorradores”.

Dijo que “si hoy, en lugar de bajar las tasas de interés, hubieran actuado como en 1995, las quiebras de ahorradores y empresas serían masivas”; si no se hubieran reducido las carteras tóxicas, explotarían las quiebras; si hoy no se hubiera promovido un paquete de apoyo para ser recuperado, el costo del rescate explotaría; y finalmente, si no se hubiera lanzado un paquete de estímulo al crecimiento económico, la recesión sería inevitable.

Claves

Según el ex presidente...

• Lo que ha ocurrido es la quiebra de la etapa del capital especulativo que dominó la economía mundial durante la década pasada.

• Ante la quiebra del capital especulativo, no resurge el capitalismo de Estado. Se trata en realidad del Estado subsidiando al capitalismo.

• La migración producto de la política adoptada en 1995 permitió que el costo de la construcción de viviendas en EU fuera reducido.

Richard Dooling

15 October 2008

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street.

Years ago, Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction” — an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

In a 1981 documentary called “The Day After Trinity,” Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing.

“I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (“quants”) and masters of “algo trading” probably felt the same irresistible lure of “illimitable power” when they discovered “evolutionary algorithms” that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

What does that mean? You’ll never know. Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavour to explain these mysterious, “toxic” financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Buffett and the computers who created them.

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers.

How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of “Darwin Among the Machines,” a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay — “Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?” — begins with a history of “stock,” originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates. When funds were transferred, the stick was split into identical halves — with one side going to the depositor and the other to the party safeguarding the money — and represented proof positive that gold had been deposited somewhere to back it up. That was good enough for 600 years, until we decided that we needed more speed and efficiency.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. “The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”

Only computers can understand and derive a correlation structure from observed collateralised debt obligation tranche spreads. Which leads us to the next question: Just how much of the world’s financial stability now lies in the “hands” of computerised trading algorithms?Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

“But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would wilfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto. Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.

Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can’t help building machines, even if we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom. As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — “derive” — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

When Treasury Secretary Paulson came to Congress seeking an emergency loan, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, a Democrat still living on his family homestead, asked him: “I’m a dirt farmer. Why do we have one week to determine that $700 billion has to be appropriated or this country’s financial system goes down the pipes?”

“Well, sir,” Paulson could well have responded, “the computers have demanded it.”

Richard Dooling is the author of “Rapture for the Geeks: When A.I. Outsmarts IQ.” This article first appeared in IHT

There are many available tools to help make web development projects quicker and more productive. Aside from a handy text editor or WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, you can find plenty of tools and utilities that can greatly increase development speed, reduce debugging and testing time, and improve quality of the output. The tools described below are a variety of utilities, optimizers, testing, and debugging tools aimed towards helping developers create websites more efficiently.
1. CSS Grid Builder

CSS Grid Builder - Screenshot

CSS Grid Builder is an online GUI for customizing the YUI Grids CSS - a lightweight CSS framework developed by Yahoo! that comes with over 1000 page layout combinations. The CSS Grid Builder allows you to rapidly generate a CSS-based, web-standards compliant page layout in a matter of minutes (or even seconds). Once you’ve got the page layout the way you want it, all you have to do is press "Show Code" and it generates the HTML for you.

You don’t even have to host the CSS file on your web server (saving you some bandwidth and maintenance hassles), the generated code links to the appropriate stylesheet found on Yahoo!’s Developer Network API.
2. CSS Sprite Generator

CSS Sprite Generator - Screen shot

Using CSS sprites is an excellent way to improve web page performance by reducing the number of HTTP requests needed for rendering images, but it can take a lot of planning, measuring, and coding if done manually.

CSS Sprite Generator allows you to upload all of your images (you have to place them in a .zip file first) and it will combine the uploaded images into a single sprite and also generate the CSS for you.
3. Blueprint: A CSS Framework

Blueprint - Screenshot

Blueprint reduces the amount of CSS code you have to write by including common styles that developers typically use such CSS reset and page layouts. A demonstration of a web page that uses Blueprint can be found here.
4. CSSTidy

CSSTidy is an open source application that parses, fixes, and optimizes CSS code to reduce file size and also to standardize CSS code formatting automatically. It also finds and removes redundant styles and properties. You can adjust CSSTidy’s settings to your preferred compression level but even the default setting can often give you 30% compression according to the creators of CSSTidy. Check out the "before and after" examples to get a feel for how CSSTidy works.
5. logicss: CSS Framework

logicss - screenshot

logicss is a collection of CSS files and PHP utilities aimed at reducing web development time. It allows developers to create customizable fixed, elastic, or fluid (liquid) layout grids. Check out the preview of their CSS code generation tool.
6. ___layouts

layouts - screenshot

___layouts is a very simple