Sunday, April 11, 2010

What I'm Reading

"If we look at Europe with Latin American lenses, we realize that the Eurozone is ... a bunch of over-indebted countries with their currency pegged to, of all the economies of the world, Germany."

"The last thing the West wants is to help potential competitors develop in the way that it has developed itself ... The strategy is for global conglomerates to buy up property (with tax-deductible credit), while European banks extend loans to fuel debt bubbles. This policy has left the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries economically dependent beyond their ability to pay down the debts they have run up so rapidly over the past decade."

"The success of the [Jobbik] party, which has railed against “Gypsy crime” and Jews, threatens to tarnish Hungary’s international image ... Some economists fear that the growing influence of Jobbik, which wants to eliminate tax rules favoring foreign companies, could undermine the country’s economic recovery by alienating already jittery investors, spooking credit agencies and making it harder for the country’s next prime minister to shepherd the economy."

"This hostility to universal citizenship is, I submit, the main characteristic of fascism. And the rejection of even a tempered universalism is what we now see repeated under democratic circumstances."