The number of tenants being affected by the housing crisis are growing as foreclosures continue to rise across the US. It is not just homeowners who are feeling the full effect of rise in foreclosures. Many people who rent their homes are facing eviction.
Al Jazeera’s Casey Kauffman met the Hinojosa family in Los Angeles, who were recently evicted from their home.
This is Joe Klein of Time magazine writing in his blog, Swampland on Pakistan’s capitulation in Swat Valley:
This is terrible news. The Pakistani government has essentially given control of the Swat Valley to the Taliban. It means that the Taliban are now 100 miles from Islamabad and the military center of Rawalpindi. It also means that Pakistan’s Northwest Province is well on its way to becoming what Afghanistan used to be–a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and related terrorists.
As if this happened yesterday or as if the Pakistani government had a choice in matter. The Pakistani government did not give “control” of Swat to the Taliban, the Taliban took control of Swat months ago. This is just the best deal the Pakistani authorities could strike with the Tehrik-e-Nifaz Shariat Muhammadi which is the group that controls the Swat Valley. It’s de jure recognition of a de facto condition. As for the rest of that inane paragraph, elements of the Taliban are in Islamabad. Check the local madrassas. You’ll find them there. That last sentence is simply laughable. Time pays for this? Where has Joe Klein been? Pakistan has been a sanctuary for “Al-Qaeda and related terrorists” for over two decades. (more…)
Haiti is the poorest in the Western hemisphere with 49 percent of its people live in absolute poverty.
Worldfocus special correspondent Benno Schmidt and producer Ara Ayer visited there recently and report that in their struggle to survive, Haitians are destroying the very elements of their environment that sustain them.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was greeted at the airport in Jakarta by 44 children from President Barack Obama’s former elementary school. The children sang traditional folk songs and waved Indonesian and American flags.
Afterwards, Clinton met with her Indonesian counterpart, Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda. Wirajuda said he expected their talks to focus on Indonesia’s strategic importance in the region, the Iranian nuclear dispute and the war in Afghanistan.
At a news conference, Clinton praised Indonesia for its efforts in fighting Islamic militancy. Despite being the worlds most populous Muslim country with some 230 million people, Indonesia maintains a secular government.
Salman Al Farisi, the deputy chief of mission at the Indonesian embassy, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the message that Clinton’s trip sends to the rest of the Muslim world and Indonesia’s role in the fight against terrorism.
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai said on Wednesday he spoke with President Obama for the first time on Tuesday — on the very day Obama said he will send 17,000 more Americans to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. This would bring the total number of coalition troops in Afghanistan to 85,000, including thousands of British soldiers.
Frederick Barton, the co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the mission of the additional troops, their chances of success and how neighboring Pakistan will impact future efforts in Afghanistan.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has written a column on Japan’s lessons for a world of balance-sheet deflation. This mirrors my thinking on the matter and I’ve written a number of posts on the matter since early December. The evidence points to a situation where monetary policy is non-existent and that only a significant and consistent fiscal stimulus will turn the economy around. The important metrics to monitor are those associated with corporate balance sheets such as debt loads, debt/capital, debt/equity. Most companies have overvalued assets on their books and their use of cash at this point seems more geared to paying off debts rather making new investments. This is despite near zero interest rates.
What has Japan’s “lost decade” to teach us? Even a year ago, this seemed an absurd question. The general consensus of informed opinion was that the US, the UK and other heavily indebted western economies could not suffer as Japan had done. Now the question is changing to whether these countries will manage as well as Japan did. Welcome to the world of balance-sheet deflation.
As I have noted before, the best analysis of what happened to Japan is by Richard Koo of the Nomura Research Institute.* His big point, though simple, is ignored by conventional economics: balance sheets matter. Threatened with bankruptcy, the overborrowed will struggle to pay down their debts. A collapse in asset prices purchased through debt will have a far more devastating impact than the same collapse accompanied by little debt.
Most of the decline in Japanese private spending and borrowing in the 1990s was, argues Mr Koo, due not to the state of the banks, but to that of their borrowers. This was a situation in which, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, low interest rates – and Japan’s were, for years, as low as could be – were “pushing on a string”. Debtors kept paying down their loans.