New housing projects behind old shacks in Equatorial Guinea. Steve Coll/newyorker.com
An awfully interesting post by Steve Coll just went up over at the New Yorker's Think Tank blog. Coll writes that he recently spent a week in the central African nation of Equatorial Guinea researching the country's new prosperity -- he says that they are "the only country in the world that appears to be immune from the global recession."
Equatorial Guinea's good fortune surely has much to do with the fact that the country, which Coll says was among the world's poorest just six years ago, discovered large oil reserves in the mid-90s. But the fact that China has invested heavily in the country doesn't hurt. Billions of dollars in grants and loans from the Chinese government have gone toward construction projects, many staffed by Chinese laborers. China gets to buy some of Equatorial Guinea's oil at a reduced price.
Along with the wealth has come a degree of political unrest.
Continue reading "Prosperity in Equatorial Guinea" »
-- Jacob Ganz
1:32 PM ET
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner defended the Obama administration's overhaul of financial regulations on Capitol Hill this morning. Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee, Geithner faced intense questioning on one key element of the plan -- giving the Federal Reserve greater regulatory powers over large financial institutions.
Both Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd and the committee's top Republican, Sen. Richard Selby, both told Geithner they didn't like the idea of giving the Fed more regulatory control, largely because of its failure to see the financial crisis coming.
Dodd quoted one critic's view that giving the Fed more power was like giving a kid a "bigger, faster car right after he crashed the family station wagon."
-- Mathew Katz
12:09 PM ET
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Empty stores in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Josef Lieck
Listener Josef Lieck just spent a week in Taiwan. He writes:
At first you might think it's a shopping mall a night, but then you'll see that all the doors are wide open on an early afternoon. It is actually a whole bunch of completely deserted flag ship stores in a shopping mall (Star Place) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. People here tell me, yes, they have been hit and hit hard.
Continue reading "Postcard From Taiwan " »
-- Caitlin Kenney
12:03 PM ET
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An empty dealer in Kalamazoo, Mich., makes a go of it as a repair shop. Jay P./flickr
We've had some questions from you about our slide show of empty car dealers -- mainly about what happened to all the cars that were left on the lot after Chrysler's June 9 deadline for dealers to shut down.
I called up Howard Sellz, who owned Big Valley Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Van Nuys, Calif., until it closed down with 140 cars left on the lot. He said that dealers had two options: some chose to sell the cars after the deadline, without Chrysler warranties or benefits. Others, he said, took up Chrysler's offer to redistribute the cars to surviving dealerships to be sold.
"I've been here 44 years, to have an empty lot is the most depressing thing I've ever gone through in my life," he said.
Sending your cars to surviving dealership comes with some fees, he said.
Continue reading "What Happens To All Those Cars?" »
-- Mathew Katz
11:47 AM ET
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Click to enlarge. Department of Labor
New claims for jobless benefits ticked upward last week by 3,000, to 608,000, the Department of Labor reports. For a sense of scale, consider that last week's number was revised upward by 4,000. The overall trend in new claims is still downward, if painfully slowly.
Keep your eye on those continuing claims, though, meaning the pool of people who've been canned and haven't yet found work. This time, those claims fell by 148,000, but they'd climbed by 78,000 the week before. It's hard to tell what to make of that, exactly. Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Ecnomics takes a stab. He writes that continuing claims "lag initial claims by a few weeks; they ought to be falling now given that initial claims peaked more than two months ago."
After the jump, why so many people still can't get a job.
Continue reading "U.S. Companies Still Not Hiring" »
-- Laura Conaway
9:49 AM ET
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