Politicians must convince German, Dutch and Austrian taxpayers that it is worth signing up to some kind of Europe-wide rescue fund.
The International Monetary Fund is once again a major force, but given its recent track record, will its policies do more harm than good?
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/ 28 December 2008
It was the year the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that ran the world for 30 years suffered a heart attack of epic proportions.
Ambitious Indian companies are flexing their muscles in the global economy.
Clinching a deal would have provided a powerful vote of confidence in globalisation from the WTO’s 153 members, in the face of the world economic slowdown.
Across the world, a food crisis is now unfolding with frightening speed. Hundreds of millions of men and women who, only a few months ago, were able to provide food for their families have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the imminent prospect of starvation.
Alan Greenspan, darling of Wall Street, monetary ”maestro” and personification of the American boom, retires in the new year. As rumours fly in Washington about who will take charge of the world’s biggest economy, the experts are already weighing up his legacy.
Post Office privatisation seems a trivial policy to bring a government crashing down, but Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi has staked his political life on plans to split up and sell off Japan Post. After what he called the ”forces of resistance” voted down the proposal, he called a snap election.
Stock market sell-offs and collapsing corporations have been the most visible signs of the United States economic downturn over the past two years. But as growth slowed the economic pain spread well beyond chastened dotcom millionaires, hitting disadvantaged groups that had only just begun to benefit from the long boom of the late 1990s.
It is with a guilty sigh that Yoshi Izumi admits his firm is doing rather well out of the virus that is terrifying millions of people in Asia and threatening the economies of several nations in the region.