Category: Current Affairs

Due to increasing demands for larger dowries, unemployment and housing
problems significant numbers of Yazidi youths are struggling to get
married in the Kurdistan Region today, raising fears of social unrest
among the small community.

It has been reported that some Yazidi families are now demanding a
dowry of between ten and thirty thousand US dollars to allow their
daughter to marry a fellow Yazidi.

But now, in an attempt to rectify the problem, the Spirit Council (the
Yazidi supreme religious council) has announced a new religious decree
stating that families cannot demand dowries higher than two thousand
dollars.

Here is the full story and I thank Lars Christian Hvidberg for the pointer.  The first-cut approach to incidence suggests that wealth will be redistributed away from attractive and otherwise marketable bride prospects.  In addition, good-looking men should now "marry better," relative to wealthy men, than in past times.

Based on official statistics, since 2003, the number of Africans in
Guangzhou has been growing at 30-40% annually. Based on a report in the
Guangzhou Daily, there might already be 100,000 in the community. They
come from Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Liberia, and Mali. Amongst these,
Africa’s most populous country Nigeria claims first place.

They primarily live in village-districts in the city of Guangdong
(like Dongpu, Dengfeng Jie, Yongping Jie). They do their business in a
few large-scale China-Africa commerce malls.

Here is more information and I thank David Shor for the pointer.

You'll find it here.  Excerpt:

They were known for being both romantically and intellectually suited
to each other, often appearing in public holding hands, and though
often debating – Ms. Friedman was known as the less compromising of the
two – rarely, if ever bickering.

Reports are here.  The few times I met her, she seemed like an angel of a woman.

According to an article which appeared in the Spanish newspaper Expansion this morning, one in five Spanish mortgages is now considered as being high risk and liable to become “non performing”.

Here is more.

Really:

Bjorn Lomborg, an influential figure among climate change sceptics,
has thrown his weight behind a drive to forge a global deal to halt
rising world temperatures at a summit in Copenhagen this year.

“It’s incredibly important. We need a global deal on the climate,” Mr Lomborg told the Financial Times.

He does argue, correctly, that we should first focus on the low-hanging fruit, such as soot emissions and methane.

China's communist government owns a large part of the money-creation and money-spending apparatus. Money supply therefore shot up 28.5 percent in June. Since it controls the banks, it can force them to lend, which it has also done.

Finally, China can force government-owned corporate entities to borrow and spend, and spend quickly itself. This isn't some slow-moving, touchy-feely democracy. If the Chinese government decides to build a highway, it simply draws a straight line on the map…

…But don't confuse fast growth with sustainable growth. Much of China's growth over the past decade has come from lending to the United States. The country suffers from real overcapacity. And now growth comes from borrowing — and hundreds of billion-dollar decisions made on the fly don't inspire a lot of confidence. For example, a nearly completed, 13-story building in Shanghai collapsed in June due to the poor quality of its construction.

This growth will result in a huge pile of bad debt — as forced lending is bad lending. The list of negative consequences is very long, but the bottom line is simple: There is no miracle in the Chinese miracle growth, and China will pay a price. The only question is when and how much.

The link is here.  The claim is that the entire Chinese economy is a huge bubble waiting to burst, but in the meantime it is being sustained by government monetary and fiscal policy, plus it is being lending to its major customer (never a good long-run strategy), namely the United States.  These charges were written by Vitaliy Katsenels. 

I thank Laeeth Isharc for the pointer.

Details of the competition are here.  The winning team is here.  Background on the prize is here.  Previous MR coverage is here.

Bravo!  I should note that current "recommender" systems don't much help me make further selections.

I thank Jüri Saar for the pointer.

Here is the home page.  As I post this, Bernanke's reappointment (a good idea) is running at 70, Waxman-Markey is running at 50, and health care reform at 35, c'mon people get the volume on those contracts up.