Global Paradigms

Business Times - 07 Aug 2009 Did regulations cause current crisis? Some economists contend government intrusion into capitalism, and not capitalism, is to blame for the financial mess By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE intellectual starting point for much of the conventional wisdom regarding the origins of the current financial crisis is that it was brought about by capitalism gone wrong and that it combined with the failure of the US government to prevent it through effective regulation of the financial system. Not surprisingly, most of the policy prescriptions advanced by economic pundits and embraced by lawmakers and officials have called on the government to take forceful steps to discipline the free and wild market system that is supposedly responsible for the mess we are in. But a contrarian view that points to the government and its regulatory agencies as prime agents of this economic mess has been promoted by free market-oriented research institutions and magazines. Tha...

Business Times - 04 Aug 2009 Time running out for Obama Slide in opinion polls is making it difficult for him to win support on key legislation in health reform and climate change By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT HE was elected as US president in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s and at a time when America was fighting two unpopular and very costly wars in the Greater Middle East. Now after occupying the White House for the last six months, US President Barack Obama should be benefiting from an upward political momentum. After all, the economic news seems to suggest that the policies adopted by his administration, including a massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, are creating the conditions for an apparent if slow recovery. Hence the GDP contracted at an annual rate of one per cent, which reflects a significantly slower decline than the past two quarters - of 6.4 per cent - and better than expected by most economists who had predicte...

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/waiting_for_obama Waiting for Obama By Leon Hadar Posted: July 29, 2009 IT IS A FAMILIAR STORY: Israel and its global patron had a strong and unshakable relationship. Few could remember a time when the bond between the two countries was not close. And key to the partnership was the two countries’ close cooperation in containing the threat of radical Middle Eastern regimes and movements. Following years of political turbulence and economic troubles, however, an historic election produced a major electoral realignment in the patron state. A freshly elected and very popular president took dramatic steps to transform his nation’s foreign policy, especially towards the Middle East. He withdrew military forces from an occupied Arab country and went to great lengths to improve ties with other countries in the region. In the face of this historic change, Israel grew increasingly worried about whether the new president would continue maintain...

Business Times - 29 Jul 2009 G-2 summit: what each wants from the other US wants China to keep financing its massive debt; China wants to see its US holdings safe By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AS FOREIGN policy experts debate the nature of the evolving international system in the aftermath of the Cold War era's bipolar structure and against the backdrop of growing challenges to American unipolarism, some pundits have been promoting the concept of an emerging Sino-American duopoly in global affairs - a Group of Two (G-2). In such a scheme, the two global military and economic powers - the US and the People's Republic of China - could manage their complex and multifaceted relationship that is bound to be a major factor in determining the fate of the world in the 21st century. Chinese and American officials have rejected the notion that their governments are interested in forming such a global duopoly that would exclude other global players and allow them to impose their ...

Business Times - 28 Jul 2009 Bernanke: a matter of credibility With anti-Fed sentiment growing, investors are waiting for Obama to decide if he wants Bernanke to continue at the Fed By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FOR more than a year now, the US central bank has been pumping a huge amount of money into the economy - expanding its loans in the form of currency swaps with foreign central banks and directing lending to US banks - in order to get it moving again. And there are some signs that this policy is generating the conditions for an economic recovery. Indeed, reflecting a bullish moment on Wall Street, better-than-expected corporate results and housing sales propelled stocks last Thursday, left the Dow and S&P 500 at more than eight-month highs and the Nasdaq at a more than nine-month high (although stocks slumped after that on Friday, as unsatisfactory quarterly results from Microsoft, Amazon.com and American Express gave investors a reason to draw back after the Thursd...

Business Times - 23 Jul 2009 Time for cool Obama to get real hot, tough and dirty By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT HE has been described as cool, calm and collected; so poised and so composed. He has the grace of Fred Astaire and the refinement of Cary Grant, the most elegant man to occupy the White House since 'Jack' Kennedy. He is the 'No-Drama' Barack Obama, who eats right, exercises regularly and shoots hoops in between ridding the world of a few Somali pirates. Remember when the Commander-in-Chief's skills were put to the test when he was doing an interview with CNBC television and a pesky fly started buzzing around, interrupting the proceedings, and zeroing in on the president? Without missing a beat, Mr Obama, revealing his impressive hand-eye coordination and employing the reflexes of a ninja warrior, waited for it to land on the back of his left hand, and pow! . . . down came his right hand on the fly, handily dispatching the pest to a better world. B...

Business Times - 14 Jul 2009 Obama losing support over economic policies His popularity is falling even among independents and voters who helped him win election By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US PRESIDENT Barack Obama returns to Washington this week from a week-long global tour that had taken him to Moscow (where he tried to repair US relationship with Russia) and to Italy (where he attended a summit of leaders of the world's major economies). Then he went to Ghana, in sub-Saharan Africa, the continent where his Kenyan father was born, and where he was welcomed by enthusiastic crowds, 'as if his arrival were a long-awaited homecoming', as The New York Times put it. But unfortunately for Mr Obama, he was not going to be greeted with the same degree of warmth on his arrival in Washington. The political honeymoon with Congress, the media and the American people that the new president seemed to be enjoying since his inauguration is clearly over. Obamania may still be a...

Ignore the chickenhawks pushing for an Iran coup By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT MUCH has been said and written in recent days about the way the demonstrators in Tehran have been utilising new kinds of 'social media' to challenge the Iranian theocratic regime. Protestors blog, post to Facebook, and most intriguing, coordinate their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. On Twitter, young Iranians and their supporters post reports and links to photos from demonstrations along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country. So will this revolution be twitted? Perhaps. But in any case, with all the attention focused on Tehran's Twitter Revolutionaries, we shouldn't forget the other impressive group of revolutionaries that has emerged in Washington just as the media started reporting on allegations about a rigged Iranian presidential election and angry protesters were gathering in Teheran. I'm referring here to the many brave US lawmakers...

Business Times - 24 Jun 2009 Obama using political wealth for health reform The President is intent on getting the healthcare legislation passed by Congress this year By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT'S beginning to feel as though the American political system is reverting to an election campaign mode. Is President Barack Obama running for re-election? That was at least the impression of journalists who were covering Mr Obama's announcement on Monday that he was going to use all the weapons in his political arsenal to win the coming fight in Congress and around the country over his plan to reform the nation's ailing healthcare system. It was clearly one of the major opening shots in what are expected to be long and costly political and legislative battles over health care. 'Yes we can,' Mr Obama told reporters at the White House as he discussed the decision by the drug companies to put a price ceiling on prescription drug coverage for the elderly that is off...

Business Times - 20 Jun 2009 Mountain crisis, mouse reform The financial restructuring plan unveiled by Obama is high on rhetoric but low on solid proposals to prevent future catastrophes in the financial system By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DURING the height of the current financial crisis, at a time when the perception on Wall Street and in Washington had been that the sky was falling and that, at a minimum, the American economy and the entire capitalist system were about to collapse, the hope among progressive Democratic lawmakers and activists - and the fear among bankers and hedge fund investors - was that newly elected President Barack Obama would lead a crusade to change the way business was done on Wall Street. After all, it was Mr Obama who had warned during the election campaign last October that Americans were 'living beyond their means, from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street'. In fact, pundits speculated that after the falling of financi...

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=103223# Thank God Obama favors the 'old' Mideast By Leon T. Hadar Commentary by Friday, June 19, 2009 State Condoleezza Rice travelled to Lebanon in an effort to bring an end to the war raging there between Israel and Hizbullah. At the time, she tried to market to reporters in Washington a somewhat odd spin on the violence taking place, not only in Lebanon but also in Iraq and Israel and Palestine. "What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing - the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East," Rice explained. Indeed, the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda was challenging the status quo in the "old" Middle East by using US military and diplomatic power to promote democracy in Iraq (by ousting Saddam Hussein and holding free elections),...

Business Times - 19 Jun 2009 Spending like there is no tomorrow It seems in Washington's new financial universe, a trillion here and a trillion there are nothing more than small change By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT MANY years ago one of America's elder statesmen, the late Everett Dirksen, a Republican Senator from Illinois who had spoken often and passionately about the debt ceiling, federal waste and the growth of government, was reported to have made the following observation about US government spending: 'A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.' It is not difficult to imagine Mr Dirksen turning over again and again in his grave these days after finding out that Washington has approved about US$13 trillion worth of bailouts over the last year; that the US deficit this year will run nearly US$2 trillion (as a result of financial bailouts and the stimulus package); and that the current national debt exceeds US$11 trill...

Business Times - 16 Jun 2009 Is Obama ditching his challenge to Wall St? He and his aides may be embracing a more gentle approach to financial system reforms By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AGAINST the backdrop of economic crisis and Washington's decision to bail out some of Wall Street's leading financial institutions earlier this year, there were expectations that the Obama administration would respond to rising populist sentiments with ambitious proposals to enforce tough federal government regulations on the financial system. Some even thought that this would include direct intervention in corporate pay decisions and the creation of a powerful government regulatory agency. President Barack Obama is expected to announce this week his plan to overhaul regulation of America's chaotic financial system. The conventional wisdom in Washington and Wall Street now is that the administration and Congress will probably adopt measures that would allow the government to liqui...

Business Times - 11 Jun 2009 Obama is the realist, not neocon critics By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN THE aftermath of his Cairo address to Muslims last week, neoconservative critics of US President Barack Obama's foreign policy are portraying him as a spacey idealist who, in the tradition of president Woodrow Wilson, is trying to recreate the international system based on a wild fantasy that, as Robert Kagan puts it, 'nations will act on the basis of what they perceive to be the goodwill, good intentions or moral purity of other nations, in particular the United States'. In particular, out-of-job neocons are blasting the supposedly naive approach of the current White House occupant towards the Middle East with his emphasis on the need to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran and Syria and promote a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they warn that a region where players operate based on crude Realpolitik principles would be resistant to Mr Obama...

Business Times - 09 Jun 2009 Lower job loss rate does not equal a recovery By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US President Barack Obama returned to Washington, after his trip to the Middle East and Europe, where he will presumably try to boost efforts towards what some officials and pundits are describing now as 'economic recovery'. Economic recovery you said? But the US Labor Department reported on Friday that 345,000 Americans lost their jobs last month - adding to the six million already out of work since this recession began - as US unemployment rose to 9.4 per cent, which is the highest rate since 1983. And if one recalls the so-called 'bank stress tests', the unemployment rate applied in their worst case scenario was 8.9 per cent. So a 9.4 unemployment rate does not sound like great economic news. Yet, both officials in Washington and investors in Wall Street seemed to be in a cheerful mood after the report was issued on Friday and digested over the weekend. T...