Charlie Rose

Gelles  03/14/2013 10:20 AM Report

Internal DEMAND and EXPORT demand. The former can be turned on at will. Create monetized demand with tax relief, more liquidity, ant-poverty, infrastructure: take your pick. You may have to react to price inflation--but if you do, the voters will probably be with you.

EXPORTS are another matter: your products have to world class; your customers have to be flush with their own money or something even better. Export invites extra risk that your customers will pay with money of uncertain value. And, of course, your competition can come from any quarter.

If the domestic economy is hard to know and harder to manage, the global economy (for exports) is virtually impossible to enter with experience and high expertise.

Still, every nation today is compelled to manage its imports and its exports. Small nations are at the mercy of large corporations. Small corporations are at the mercy of all other exporters, as well.

If we ever develop an effective Economic Security Agency, its scope of expertise will have to cover every producer everywhere. It will not be a cheap undertaking.

REMant  03/13/2013 11:51 AM Report

With umpteen parties vying, last month's Italian general election appeared to Americans, I'm sure, as something of a soap opera, tho that's the way things are in a parliamentary system.

The real winner was anti-austerity, current prime minister Mario Monti coming in a distant fourth, which, of course, tho probably not unexpected, prompted a great deal of anguished, hand-wringing in more northern climes nevertheless.

Despite winning a narrow plurality in parliament and the popular vote over former prime minister billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, Pier Luigi Bersani, of Mr Prodi's own Democratic Party, and leader of a center-left coalition including the socialists, is unable to form a government, even with the extra seats coming along with it. In the main because of the strong third place showing of Beppe Grillo's populist and green 5 Star "movement," which eschews all parties. Not that Bersani's government would be much more welcome to Ms Merkel and Co.

Berlusconi - indictments and all - garnered nearly a quarter of the vote and nearly a third for his anti-austerity coalition. They are, or were, primarily small and medium-sized business owners. Italy's economy shrank 2.2 percent last year, and more than 100,000 small businesses went bust. Official unemployment is over 10 percent, (more probably, as in this country), and Italy may have the highest national debt in the eurozone after Greece.

This trend toward socialism of one sort or another reflects, IMHO, less a desire for equality than a circling of the wagons, and the exact opposite of what the movement used to stand for.

And I'm afraid the renewed European interest in Africa is primarily motivated by economics and amounts to neocolonialism, the business of terrorism, just a cover, as it was when we once obsessed about Communists taking over the 3rd world.

It is, I guess, only to be expected that a lot of American newspersons would blame the European prelates for everything wrong in the Church, and sympathize with evangelical yearnings of those in "emerging "countries," but it is not so simple.

According to the AP, Italian Cardinal Scola, who has presided over the sees of both Milan and Venice, is actually a Vatican outsider, and the favorite of the reformers, while the candidate of "democracy," Brazilian Cardinal Scherer, oversees the troubled Vatican bank, is a Vatican insider and the favorite of those seeking to maintain the status quo.

It is said the Romans are for an American who'll bring in more tourist dollars. Vatican politics seem no different from everyone else's.