Police and protesters clashed in Spain as millions of workers went on strike across Europe to protest spending cuts they say have made the economic crisis worse. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, car factories and ports were at a standstill and trains barely ran in Spain and Portugal where unions held their first ever coordinated general strike. Riot police arrested […]
China’s currency hit a 19-year high against the U.S. dollar on Friday. Not coincidentally, on the same day the yuan rose to 6.238 against the greenback, disgraced former Politburo member Bo Xilai suffered his latest indignity, with the official Xinhua News Agency announcing his removal from the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature. “According to the law on […]
In case you were wondering, this is what an economy dying looks like. More specifically, it’s what a currency dying looks like. It turns out the latter implies the former, as Iran is quickly finding out. The chart below compares the official and black market exchange rates between the Iranian rial and the U.S. dollar. […]
China’s foreign exchange (‘forex’) reserves and its holdings of U.S. government debt are two of the most frequently misunderstood issues in relations between the two countries. Recent events have underscored this problem. On September 18th, a car carrying Gary Locke, the U.S. Ambassador to China, was surrounded and partially attacked in a sideshow to an […]
The more Germany tries to save the Eurozone, the more it become the union’s scapegoat. The best response: ignore the populists, and keep on trucking, Sebastian Pfeffer writes in the European. Read Here
looking beyond borders 