Here’s a “Wall Street” investment opportunity for you, brought to our attention by the Danish business newspaper Børsen:

Wall Street putter 10 dollar i Christiania http://t.co/mHIuhLHb

November 5, 2011 12:10 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@borsendk

borsen.dk

“Christiania”? That’s the renegade area of Copenhagen which since its initial squat in 1971, on what had been an abandoned area of the city’s defenses, has styled itself the “Freetown” of Christiania, subject (by and large) to its own laws and maintenance of public order rather than those of the Danish state. (We’ve had occasion to cover this subject here before.)

The problem is, Christiania needs money. The area is still government land, strictly-speaking, and the new strategy of the Danish government for cracking down on it is to have the residents buy it, for 76 million Danish crowns (a little over €10.2 million), if they want to stay there. They’ve got until 1 April 2012 to come up with the first installment of DKK 46 million (a little over €6 million); so far they have been able to gather together a little over DKK 4 million into their Freestate Christiania Fund.

In the spirit of Willie Sutton, then (“because that’s where the money is!”), the fund has dispatched a representative to Wall Street, an “economics advisor” named Risenga Manghezi, to push Christiania folkeaktien (“people’s shares”) there. But the piece’s headline (and the tweet) reveals what “success” Manghezi has had so far: she has raised $10.

That probably should come as little surprise. For what are these “people’s shares” exactly? An earlier piece in Børsen on Christiania’s buy-out plan (actually, a “leader” or opinion article whose title is “Good for you, Christiania”) fills in details on what writer Christopher Arzrouni calls “a nice initiative, but also a paradox”:

You decide yourself how much you want to pay, and people will not worry about how much the people’s shares rise or fall in value. It is in fact not a proper share. People receive a symbolic co-ownership and support something that is not commercial.

Maybe that meager success – so far – in gaining money from Wall Street is not such a surprise after all. Still, in the original article referenced by the tweet Manghezi declares him(her?)self delighted at the “fantastic” way things have been going: “This has been a big challenge to get through to these men in suits, but the most important thing is that the shares have been in Wall Street’s hands. This is really important symbolically.” Manghezi next plans to cross the tracks to visit the Occupy Wall Street protestors to see if she might get some interest in her folkeaktien for Christiania there.

Never heard of him? No, I don’t mean Dr. Demento. “Dr. Doom” is the monniker borne (probably proudly) by NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini, famous for foreseeing – among other things – the gigantic collapse in the US housing market beginning in 2007 that kicked off this worldwide Great Recession. Back then Roubini kept adding to his fame by forecasting further disastrous developments in one aspect of national or international economic performance after another; people would never believe him that things could get that bad, yet most times events proved him to be spot-on.

Now he has further comments which he contributed to the Financial Times. Unfortunately, that paper has a rather restrictive readership policy – i.e. it likes to force you to pay – but luckily we can resort to Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen instead. There it’s a brief piece, and Roubini’s message is clear, simple, and expressed in the title: The catastrophe commences on Tuesday.

Tuesday? That’s election day in the USA, of course, and according to Roubini that will unleash a new economic crisis because the Republicans are expected to make significant gains, recapturing control of the House of Representatives and maybe the US Senate as well. This will inaugurate paralysis in Congress as Democrats and Republicans block everything the other side tries to do, even as the US economic situation remains dire and in need of fiscal initiatives of one sort or another.

True, this insight is hardly blindingly original, and it has also certainly been advanced recently by other commentators, and then even rather more eloquently. (“In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.”)

Then again, everyone knows that Paul Krugman is a liberal (Nobel Prize-bearing) attack-dog. But this is the FT, Børsen – Dr. Doom, no less!

I’ve got some good news for you, and some bad news.

It has to do with global warming, and since this is my weblog, I get to decide that I’m going to give you the bad news first. You probably didn’t hear about this – I know that I didn’t – but this past week has seen the World Climate Conference – 3 take place in Geneva, Switzerland. Journalist Richard Heuzé of the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro provides coverage and, as you can well imagine, the outlook is not good. It’s so “not good” that the conference participants had a wide array of things to choose from for panicking about.

On this particular occasion they happened to concentrate their foreboding on the state of the Arctic. Put simply, it’s much too warm there already. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon spoke to the conference just after actually conducting – as Heuzé puts it – his own “inspection tour of the North Pole,” and his tidings were dire. “The Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the Earth. There could be no more ice there in 2030.” One rather daunting result of that could be the unleashing of a positive-feedback effect that would cause the global warming process to accelerate, whereby the warming Arctic permafrost releases massive amounts of heretofore trapped methane gas into the atmosphere, which traps heat at the Earth’s surface even more effectively. (more…)

Any residence of Texas knows about “The Valley,” even if he or she doesn’t happen to live there. Not really a valley it all, it’s that area down along the Rio Grande that constitutes the border there between the US and Mexico, a handy place for new Mexican immigrants to the US (legal or otherwise) to get their start, but otherwise producing little of note for the world other than folk singer Kris Kristofferson and legends from the Streets of Laredo.

Now The Valley has produced something else, something that has caught the attention of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO): a new strain of swine flu that is resistant to the main drug the world is relying on to counter its effects, Tamiflu. Reports about this come both from France’s Le Point and (perhaps somewhat strangely) Denmark’s leading business newspaper, Børsen, which cite PAHO spokeswoman Maria Teresa Cerqueira, attending a swine flu conference currently happening in La Jolla, California.

Granted, this same Tamiflu-resistant strain has already been spotted in Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, and even once before in North America, namely in Canada. But how did it come about? Cerqueira: “In the USA Tamiflu is sold by prescription, but in Mexico and Canada they sell it over-the-counter and take it at the first sneeze. And now that it is really needed, it doesn’t work anymore.” In other words, if you grant the assumption that the swine flu we can expect in the autumn is likely to be deadlier than what we’ve encountered so far (although, to be fair, the past strain did kill 353 persons in the USA and 143 in Mexico, among others), then pill-popping Mexicans and Canadians have exhausted the world’s Tamiflu firepower on the earlier, safer version – which reportedly merely caused symptoms comparable to any common, garden-variety flu – and thus have left everyone vulnerable to the more dangerous strain.

There’s perhaps a glimmer of hope in the Le Point piece, namely that one patient found to have the Tamiflu-resistant virus was able to be cured with another drug, “Zanamivir,” made by GlaxoSmithKline. So maybe there’s still an alternative cure available – until the virus in short order develops resistance to that!

For all the deluge of advice that the Obama transition team is receiving from every quarter, publicly and privately, about what the goals should be for his new administration, it’s obvious to all that addressing the precarious state of America’s economy has to be priority #1. (Yes, even over puppy selection.) The President-elect made that clear himself in his radio address yesterday, stating “I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on Jan. 20, because we don’t have a moment to lose.” Actually, maybe not even that: waiting all the way until next January 20 increasingly seems some sort of quaint constitutional anachronism in the face of what seems to be the accelerating decline in the American economy.

(As in, for example, Paul Krugman here: “Any way we can get current management at Treasury to take early retirement, and get the new guys in right away?” But remember that, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term in office, American presidents were in fact inaugurated on March 4 of the year following that in which they were elected. That four-month delay proved to be very dangerous a couple of times, most notably in 1861, when seven Southern states had seceded from the Union before Abraham Lincoln could take office, and in 1933, when FDR ascended to the presidency following a series of catastrophic bank-runs.)

For one thing, if they wait until next January 20 to do anything, General Motors may already be gone. That at least is the message from Jens Nymark in Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen: General Motors can be finished this year. (more…)

It was heartening to read, from this European vantage-point, the article about Suddenly, Europe Looks Pretty Smart in the New York Times last Saturday, mainly describing the European “bailout plan that has now set the pace for Washington, not the other way around, as had been customary for decades.” At the same time, so far the poster-child victim of the financial crisis has been poor Iceland, a country that is rapidly running out of foreign exchange with which to pay for any imports and so is in contact with the International Monetary Fund for a rescue. But Iceland has gotten some company in the IMF petitioners’ ante-room recently from (among others, but just to name a European country) Hungary. The three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are likely soon to join them there, although of course the European Union is also offering its own assistance.

So Europe may look “pretty smart,” but still European countries can suddenly find themselves in a deep financial hole in the present dire international conditions – yes, even EU member-states like Hungary and the Baltics. The one common denominator that seems to remove a European state from vulnerability, though, is membership of the Euro-zone, i.e. those 15 states out of the 27 member-states of the EU who use the euro as their common currency. Hannes Gamillscheg of the Frankfurter Rundschau recently picked up on this phenomenon (The guardians of the crown – alone) but from the point-of-view of a couple of those countries now outside the Euro-zone who in the past have explicitly rejected opportunities to come inside, namely Denmark and Sweden. (So the “crown” in the article’s title refers to the two different “crowns” that are those countries’ currencies.) (more…)

The Danish business newspaper Børsen, while naturally covering tightly this week’s enormous travails in the American financial establishment, also has found at least some on-line pixel-space for one tertiary effect: there are some mighty interesting souvenirs coming on the market via eBay (Buy a piece of finance-history on eBay).

For instance? Consider the exquisite Lehman water-pitcher on offer: the seller comments “[Lehman] Administrative Director Dick Fuld told me that this pitcher cannot be smashed to pieces, but he also said that about our loan-business two months ago. Caveat emptor, I would say.” Bids started at 99¢ but later reached $20.50 for the item, the newspaper reports. Or you can also bid to become the proud owner of a Lehman-brand fire-safety hat (brand-sikkerhedshat). “Become the owner of a piece of financial history,” the seller implores.

Congratulations to Carlos Sastre, who yesterday won the 95th Tour de France, but let’s also issue a shout-out to his doctors, who managed the difficult feat of doping him up over a grueling 23-day tour well enough so that he could win the thing, but not too well, so that anything untoward would show up on any test (but was any sort of sample ever taken from Sastre? – the article does not say) and/or any particular day’s achievement would appear so out-of-the-ordinary as to raise the usual suspicions.

Still, if you look at that article (it’s the coverage from the NYT, which I am wont to link to when it’s just a matter of giving you a source for the simple facts, ma’am, about some event that has happened; it seems like English is the best language to go with in that situation), there is mention of a “surprisingly strong ride in the final time trial.” Hmm – “surprisingly strong,” and the article also notes that Sastre knew very well that it was specifically the time trials that he would have to do better in during the Tour, in order to finally win the thing after coming up short so many times before. Floyd Landis, you might recall, also had a “surprisingly strong” stage two years ago when it looked like he was falling behind and would lose his overall Tour lead; that was when he flunked the doping test he was administered immediately after. I ask again: was Sastre tested after that “surprisingly strong” time trial stage? (more…)

“Is history about to repeat itself?” asks Clément Daniez of the French newsmagazine Le Point in his article published on-line today, Russians and Americans Replay the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vladimiar Putin has already explicitly spoken of such a thing: last October (2007) he warned that Washington’s plan to set up an anti-missile shield in Europe, with the radar in the Czech Republic and the interceptor missiles themselves in Poland, was setting the stage for a similar sort of serious confrontation between the two world powers as occurred in October, 1962. Of course, in the meantime the Bush administration has gone ahead anyway, as Condoleezza Rice was in Prague on July 8 to sign the agreement with the Czech government for setting up the radar. (more…)