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Ms Aydintasbas of the Turkish daily Milliyet on the lack of support from the Obama administration for the government of prime minister Erdogan in Turkey to bring down the Assad regime in Syria. She points out that the movement for democracy in Syria as part of the democracy movement in the Middle East is only a normalization of history. She sees democracy finding its normal place in the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere.

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Estimates of the exposure of European banks to Greece's sovereign debt shows BNP Paribas has 5.01 billion euros in exposure to Greek debt, Societe Generale 4.23 billion euros, Deutsche Bank 3.02 billion euros, and HSBC 1.94 billion euros, Credit Agricole 0.85 billion euros, Unicredit 0.80 billion euros, Santander 0.51 billion euros. The exposure of French, German, Italian and Spanish banks in Greece is a critical difficulty in resolving the crisis, as the banks are still in a fragile condition after the global financial crisis of 2008. With the debate on resolution of the crisis focusing on how a three way distribution of the burden should take place between austerity cuts, bondholder and creditors, and taxpayers in Germany and other EU countries, negotiations are finally taking place between each European government and the banks of that country. Three countries where such talks are taking place are Germany, France and the Netherlands. Finance ministry officials in Germany and France met with representatives of the banks and insurers in their country to arrange for the banks to voluntarily take losses on their holdings. The respective holdings of Greece's government debt according to the Bank for International Settlements are: French banks $14 billion, German banks $22.65 billion. Overall exposure to Greece is higher for French banks- at $56.7 billion for French banks and $33.97 billion for German banks. This opens the door to a Brady Plan type solution for the financial crisis in EU countries Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain....

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Lou Jiwei chairman of China Investment Corporation met with Treasury officials in Washington to give reassurances that China's sovereign wealth fund would invest as a portfolio investor and be a good citizen when it comes to investing in the USA. He reiterated the pledge by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that the Chinese government would not interfere in the operations of the fund, and that the fund would have its own corporate governance structure. He also met with officials of the IMF who are drawing up a code of "best practices" for sovereign wealth funds. Following the Chinese experience with the Unocal deal and the experience of Dubai in a deal to buy a company that manages USA ports, both deals falling apart on concerns in the media and Congress, the Chinese and the Persian Gulf sovereign funds have become more savy and aware of these concerns and tried to handle them better. They also point out that in the case of the financial institutions caught in the US mortgage securities crisis, it is these companies like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup that have come to them, to China, to Persian Gulf countries and to Singapore and other countries, asking them to invest for small stakes in the companies. Their line goes like this- if you have second thoughts about our investment we will invest elsewhere in other countries. Another facet of this is that these portfolio investments are spread out between many different countries sovereign wealth funds, and the possible influence is small in management decisions. China Investment Corporation has $200 billion in assets. Lou says that only a third would be invested to buy foreign assets, about $70 billion. The other two thirds would be used to support China's three large commercial bank balance sheets. ...

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This report looks at the high tech devices that help monitor seniors at elder care facilities and at home in Japan. Japan has a rapidly growing seniors population with three million expected to be over 90 by 2025, and over 65's expected to be one third of the population by then. The government's goal is to keep seniors in their home for as long as possible, and use information technology to support caregivers. Of 92 Japanese startups looking for valuations over $1 billion 25 are focused on health care, with backing not much from VC's (only $32 million in 3rd quarter 2018) but from large companies looking for growth businesses. Patient monitoring devices are getting funding from companies such as Sharp Corp, Canon and others. Devices check details including whether people are at risk of falling out of bed or taking too long to get back from the toilet. Healthcare for elderly in Japan will reach about $300 billion by 2025 and new advances are expected in monitoring seniors- including for such devices as DFree that help patients  know about how to monitor bladders, also used by caregivers to know when to take someone to the bathroom.  ...

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The story of Ronald Read of Brattleboro, Vermont, grabbed public attention as a gas station and J.C. Penney employee whose account holdings showed $8 million when he passed away recently. His largest holding - Wells Fargo bank. Investors are attracted to the higher dividends paid by Wells Fargo. With its focus on mortgage lending and less money tied up in trading, Wells Fargo has performed better than its peers. Increased regulatory scrutiny has increased costs for banks with a focus on trading. Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase also paid large fines to regulators. Wells Fargo has no legal settlements with the U.S. Justice Department. As the U.S. economy stages a recovery investors are attracted to Wells Fargo. With a decline in the shares of ICBC, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Wells Fargo now is the largest bank by market value in the world.

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Nelson Schwartz of the NYT looks at the town of Neenah, Wisconsin, a year after the election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania with 80,000 votes swinging the other way from blue to red handing the election to Mr. Trump. The pressures are still there with cheaper imports, paper mills about to close, and workers still struggling to keep the same lifestyle as their parents. Even with low unemployment of about 3% in Wisconsin, with the slow increase in wages and corporate pressures for profits, trade wars, the sense is that the problems of the American middle class are still just as deep.

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Indian companies and the speed and effective ways they do research offers a new model for western pharmaceutical companies and many of them are collaborating and setting up partnerships to discover and benefit from new drugs.

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China and India pass Mexico as immigration to the U.S. from Mexico declines rapidly, as a result of an improving Mexican economy, the 2008-2011 recession in the U.S. with sharp drop in jobs for construction, lower birthrates, and stricter U.S. law enforcement at the U.S. border with Mexico. Researchers using the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau found immigration from China increased to 147,000 from China, 129,000 from India, as it declined to 125,000 from Mexico, for 2013. This Survey counts a person as an immigrant for a particular year who says he was living abroad previously. Mexico shows a decline from 400,000 in 2000, with steady decline for every year after 2005. In 2000 India and China were at about 75,000, and did not cross the 100,000 mark till 2007. Other Asian countries are also at the top including S. Korea, Philippines and Japan. William Frey documents this surge in diversity in the U.S., -which is supplemented by now common intermarraige between young people from different countries of origin- in his book "Diversity Explosion."...

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Adly Mansour, a judge with the Supreme Constitutional Court in Egypt, is appointed by the military as president of Egypt. He was to take office as Chief Justice before the June 2013 protests in Egypt intervened to delay this. On July 3, 2013 he was sworn in as president before the Supreme Court. Mansour is one of two judges selected by president Morsi. He is a graduate of Cairo University, and studied public affairs and management in Paris before joining the judicial sytem in 1977. His decisions as judge went against both Mubarak and Morsi, showing his independent position as a judge on the Supreme Court. The judiciary is now taking an important role in Egypt similar to the role it has played in Pakistan, another Muslim country adopting democratic forms of governance after decades of coups and military rule since the 1950's. The larger Muslim countries in the Middle East, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Egypt are faced with the challenge of balancing the demands of modernization with tradition, the demands of educated urban population with the more devout Islamist rural population, and creating stable transitions in democratically elected government. Islamists such as president Erdogan in Turkey who described western democratic forms of government as a train to get to a destination have still to take in to account the need to incorporate opposing secular views in governance. In this sense Turkey is not the model for governance as it once appeared for Egypt, Pakistan Iran and other Muslim countries. A new consensus in society needs to develop that respects all aspects of democratic governance including respect for the role of the opposition in a democracy, the role of an independent impartial judiciary, and the role of independent media. This will take time to develop just as it took time to develop in Europe and North America....

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Microsoft's Satya Nadella got his start at age 24 at Bing search engine. He is now 56 years. During this period he worked with both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer who succeeded Gates at Microsoft. He is now remaking the Bing Search engine by using AI. This has happened since 2018 when he met Altman at the Sun Valley Tech conference in Idaho. He invested $1 billion in Altman's OpenAI, and has recently brought in Suleyman of Inflection who is a competitor of  Altman's OpenAI into Microsoft with the idea of setting up an internal AI business as well. To do this he has invested $10 billion in advanced AI chips that he has bought from chipmakers which have reduced the capital available for Microsoft's other businesses. This WSJ report by Dotan and Jin says Altman started his venture because he did not want to let AI to be led by Google silently developing its own version and doing leapfrog over competitors. A At this point in 2024 Google, Facebook and Amazon are building their own AI talent and making large investments in the chips that support AI. It is rapidly becoming an oligopoly of a few tech companies that makes deals among themselves for strategic advantage and protect themselves from public or government regulatory scrutiny. The controversy surrounding the firing and rehiring of Altman at OpenAI has brought new scrutiny from the FTC. The monopolistic behaviour of tech companies and their splitting the tech market among themselves as Google and Apple have done show the need for government action to prevent a repeat of this in AI. And to take action to break up existing monopolies in Search engines and in the Internet as Theodore Roosevelt did at the turn of the century for the oil business, breaking up Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Esso. Only when that happens can the true potential of the Internet be realized for Education, Health and other fields. Who can say that the iPad or iPhone or Google's Search engine has increased global literacy or American literacy? By freeing up these technologies- that belong to the people of America and the world- for education, health and other fields of human development mankind can advance once again. By regulating provide the ground rules for good use instead of the current danger of the Internet acting in ways to reduce public knowledge to levels that cannot sustain democratic process, and create stratified society where each group only sees what it has seen before and does not explore the world or knowledge in all its variety, all its ability to surprise us with new discoveries. ...

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About 200 coal plants closed in the U.S. since 2010. Another 40 will close in the years ahead. No new coal plants are being built. At the most the new EPA roll back of emissions rules will stave off closure for a bit longer for a few coal plants, reports Brad Plummer in NYT.

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In 2013 the Greece government of Antonis Samaras made a study of wartime costs incurred by Greece for damaged infrastructure during the Nazi occupation of Greece and Nazil loans forced on Greece between 1942-1944. The estimate exceeded 200 billion dollars. Die Linke, a socialist party in Germany in the European parliament allied to Syriza, also supports debt forgiveness.

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How the IMF conditionality has changed in the 2009 global economic crisis. The IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn of France, is aware how sensitive nations around the world have become to the word IMF. So much so that it has even suggested removing the word IMF from loans to get takers. The IMF conditons worsened the S. Korean financial crisis in 1998. See link to this. This time Kahn has advocated that the developed countries of Europe and the USA increase stimulus spending to 2% of GDP.And there are fewer calls for cutting spending in developing countries offered help by the IMF. Pakistan was asked to increase interest rates by 3% but actually increased them by 2% to fight inflation. But to get some idea how the IMF is viewed with suspicion and hostility in many countries one has to listen to comments made. The move for Pakistan was so unpopular in 2008 that Mohsin Khan a top IMF official says he met with agroup of generals to get their backing. Some IMF officials insistend on a 10% rate increase. Something like that would have led to riots in Pakistani cities. IMF loaned Pakistan $7.6 billion. When S. Korea said no to the IMF credit line, Lee Hyoung-ryoul, a Korean Finance Ministry official said that S. Koreans tremble and financial markets turn sensitive whenever they hear the word "IMF." This time Brazil, S. Korea and Mexico, were offered condition free credit lines. But it has found no takers from these three conuntries, so badly is the IMF viewed in developing countries. Even though it appears that Kahn, in the small club of western nation's officials and staff that form the governing body of the IMF, is trying to give the IMF a new image, its just so bad and the views of the old timers at the IMF on spending or interest rates so contrary to the needs of people in the developed and developing countries, that a new generation of people in finance and economics will be needed before real change is established. ...

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Job loss nubers for 2009 from the Labor Dept are- February 681,000, March 699,000, April 539,000 as govt payrolls expanded by 72,000. About 8.9 million people work parttime, adding in the people who have given up looking for a job, the underemployment rate is 15.8% in April 2009.

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Because technology spending has been more disciplined and focused on productivity and efficiency gains, the investment has been lower but more effective than in the 3 years leading to the last recession in 2001. At that time it was increasing 12.9% a year leading into the recesson and faced sharp cutbacks leading to a drop of 11% over the next 2 years 2001-2003. By contrast this time the tech spending went up by about 2.8% a year in the last 3 years, according to Gartner, and has delivered solid results at places like American Airlines. Technology spending is likely to hold up and continue moderate increase this year and next as the US enters a recession. At American a fuel efficiency drive starting 2005 including software to come up with best routes, flight paths and baggage loading has saved 96 million gallons a year. Note that spending on computer hardware and software is about half of all capital spending by business.

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The U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 decision against Aereo. Justice Breyer writing an 18 page opinion stated: "We conclude that Aereo is not just an equipment supplier." Adding that Aereo had a "overwhelming likeness" to cable companies which have to pay fees to retransmit broadcast programming. Breyer rejected Aereo's argument that it did not make copyright violations because of the technical makeup of its system, saying that "we do not see how the fact that Aereo transmits via personal copies of programs could make a difference."

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Stamouli and Walker of WSJ describe the last days of negotiations in June before Greece pulled out its negotiating team, and German chancellor Merkel decided to call off the bailout of Greece. The impasse was over pension cuts and vaue added taxes, yet the negotiations were still going over details when Tsipras pulled out Greece's negotiating team with the surprise announcement of a referendum on July 5, 2015. By saying the Syriza party would call for a "no" vote Tsipras alienated public opinion in Germany. Chancellor Merkel seeing the shift in domestic opinion favoring Greece's exit from the euro during the tense months of negotiations with the Syriza government and acrimonious charges, moved to call off a continued EU bailout of Greece.

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Under the rules for the European currency and the European Union there is no mechanism or process of fines or other sanctions to promote compliance to debt and deficit rules. In the case of Greece, an examination of budget reports shows that Greece never met the deficit rule of 3% for any year except 2006 and it has never been within 30 percentage points of the debt ceiling. Greece's statistics are faulty and deficit figures are continually being revised upwards. Several times the figures were quadruple what was initially reported in late 2009, for instance the deficit figure was 3.7% of GDP, then revised to 13% of GDP, setting off the current crisis for the Euro and the European Union. In 2001 Greece failed to reflect $2.2 billon in military expenses. According to Eurostat, the EU statistics authority this was 10 times what was saved from the derivatives swap arranged by Goldman Sachs to trim Greece's deficit. That transaction trimmed the deficit by one tenth of a percentage point.

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Andy Burnham of Greater Manchester on what Labour party needs right now in September 2025. Here is what he told Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC-  “I am concerned about the balance, and I think you know, we need to use the deputy leadership contest to discuss some of these things. In a time where the scale and the nature of the challenge we face is such as it is, you need everybody pulling together, all parts of the party pulling together. And that points to a party management style that is less factional and more pluralistic." “Labour MPs need to be, they need to listen to them more and respect them more. You know, they were the ones who, if you like, caused the change in terms of winter fuel and disability benefits. But you know, they shouldn’t be punished for that." “I think that’s what it needs, you know, we need to hear the voice of the party, the voice of the members, and then the voice of our communities behind that, particularly in the north of England, to counter that London centricity.” ...

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The iPhone 7 does not have any exceptional new features- just small improvements over iPhone 6 that were expected. This is what reviewers think. Over the years Apple set a high bar for its product innovations, now this is slowing and big changes are coming much slower. It is seen as a time when expectations for Apple may need to be reset. This is not unusual and does not mean this is a big problem for Apple, as the products still work very well, and all the products sync well,  says this reviewer.

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Veterans of the Iraq conflict see a decade of efforts in Iraq being undone in 2014 with increasing sectarian conflict and the spillover from the war in Syria.