- Trans-Pacific Partnership: No deal at Singapore meeting
BBC Feb. 25, 2014
TPP members have more negotiating to do after talks fail in Singapore
An ambitious 12-nation free trade plan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), has hit a new roadblock after four days of negotiations in Singapore.
Sticking points over market access and differences over tariffs on imported goods were the main reasons cited.
TPP members were also aiming to set a common trading standard on a range of issues, including labour regulation and environmental protection.
Negotiators were initially hopeful that a draft deal would be ready in April.
That is when US President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit the region.
A TPP deal at that time would solidify the US pivot to Asia.
Some analysts had suggested the US might be trying to use the TPP as a means to undermine China's growing economic power in the region.
But differences on the issues of tariffs on imported goods, particularly between the US and Japan, are becoming difficult to overcome.
Agricultural tariffs have become a bone of contention for Japan, which is trying to protect its rice, wheat, beef and pork as well as dairy and sugar from outside competition.
Meanwhile, other TPP members with a fairly large agricultural sector available for export, are pushing for the elimination of all tariffs.
- Will Ukraine's Crimea region be Europe's next 'frozen' conflict?
Eastern Europe analyst, special to CNN February 28, 2014
Armed men patrol outside the Simferopol International Airport in Ukraine's Crimea region on Friday, February 28. The gunmen, whom Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov called part of an "armed invasion" by Russian forces, appeared around the airport without identifying themselves. Crimea is an autonomous republic of Ukraine with an ethnic Russian majority. It's the last large bastion of opposition to Ukraine's new political leadership after President Viktor Yanukovych's ouster.
(CNN) -- The world's eyes may have been focused on the breathtakingly fast political changes unfolding in Ukraine's capital Kiev this week, but it is the Crimean peninsula, where dozens of gunmen raised the Russian flag over parliament Thursday, that should now be the primary source of concern for Ukraine's fledgling government and world leaders.
Crimea is an autonomous republic whose history has long been marred by political tension. Gifted to Ukraine by Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, its population is ethnic Russian by just over half and Ukrainian by a quarter, while more than ten percent are Crimean Tatars who are fiercely anti-Russian as a result of Joseph Stalin's repression of the group a half century ago.
Russia's strategically important Black Sea naval fleet is hosted at Sevastopol, the region's largest city, an arrangement that controversially extended until 2042 by the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was last seen fleeing Kiev. His whereabouts are unknown.
The large Russian population of Crimea has long viewed the central government of Ukraine with suspicion. In recent days the mood has turned into aggressive hostility towards the new authorities in Kiev. Crimean Russians see the newly-powerful opposition movement as illegitimate, sponsored by the West, and even fascist. Anti-Ukrainian protests are being held, Russian vigilante groups have sprung up across Crimea, Russian flags have been hoisted on government buildings, clashes have broken out between Russian separatists and loyalist Tatars and Ukrainians, and the Russian military has been seen patrolling key buildings and infrastructure.
The Russian Federation has done precious little to contain this dangerous dynamic. On the contrary, its state-sponsored media have covered the unrest in Crimea extensively and reiterated the Kremlin's view of the events in Kiev as a coup d'état. Envoys from Moscow have descended on Crimea to promise Russian citizenship to all who want it and even the region's re-integration into Russia proper.
Meanwhile, Russia's foreign ministry is warning of violations of the human rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, while the Russian military is reportedly preparing lists for the evacuation of the families of seamen serving at Sevastopol. Snap military exercises have been ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin close to Ukraine's borders. In short, the Kremlin is stoking the fires of the building separatism that can be observed in Crimea, despite its official commitment to non-interference and the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
This situation bears all the hallmarks of several long-standing, often referred to as "frozen", conflicts in Eastern Europe.
3. China's Yuan Slides Against U.S. Dollar
Drop to 10-Month Low Is Largest Since Revaluation in 2005
The Wall Street Journal Feb. 28, 2014
Not worth quite what they were two weeks ago. Bloomberg News
A two-week slide in China's yuan accelerated Friday, with the currency taking its biggest tumble since a 2005 revaluation on speculation the central bank is stepping up efforts to push it lower.
A 0.9% drop against the U.S. dollar Friday brought the week's losses to 1.2%, more than twice the 0.5% loss that spooked the market last week, coming as it did after years of steady gains. The yuan is down 1.8% so far in 2014, wiping out more than half its 2.9% gain last year.
The slide has been engineered by Beijing to thwart short-term speculators who are betting on a continued rise and to introduce greater two-way volatility into the trading.
China's central bank is deliberately pushing the yuan down to prepare the currency for wider trading. Geoff Kendrick, head of Asian foreign exchange and rates strategy at Morgan Stanley, spoke to the WSJ's Jake Lee about the moves.
China's currency managers have pushed its currency into a fast and sharp decline the past week. One motive seems to be to flush out speculators who have built huge positions betting that the yuan would keep marching higher against the dollar. Heard on the Street columnists Alex Frangos, Abheek Bhattacharya and Aaron Back debate what Beijing is up to with its latest currency moves.
Still, the especially large move Friday took the market by surprise, as the central bank had set a slightly stronger morning reference rate for the currency, and it was flat in early trading. But later in the morning the slide accelerated, with traders saying the central bank was intervening in foreign-exchange markets through state-owned banks—buying up the U.S. dollar and selling the yuan.
"There are large buyers buying the dollar onshore, and the offshore market is forced to follow," said a Hong Kong-based senior trader at a Chinese bank who asked not to be identified.
The Yuan's Reversal
The yuan touched 6.18 to the dollar in the onshore market, while tumbling in the offshore market in Hong Kong to 6.13 to the dollar.
The currency has risen over 30% since that 2005 revaluation, which ended decadelong peg, but since hitting a record high of 6.04 to the dollar last month it has lost roughly 2%. The larger the number of yuan to the dollar, the weaker the yuan is.
4. Cry for Me, Argentina
The New York Times FEB. 27, 2014
USHUAIA, Argentina — A bon mot doing the rounds in post-commodities-boom South America is that Brazil is in the process of becoming Argentina, and Argentina is in the process of becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is in the process of becoming Zimbabwe. That is a little harsh on Brazil and Venezuela.
Argentina, however, is a perverse case of its own. It is a nation still drugged by that quixotic political concoction called Peronism; engaged in all-out war on reliable economic data; tinkering with its multilevel exchange rate; shut out from global capital markets; trampling on property rights when it wishes; obsessed with a lost little war in the Falklands (Malvinas) more than three decades ago; and persuaded that the cause of all this failure lies with speculative powers seeking to force a proud nation — in the words of its leader — “to eat soup again, but this time with a fork.”
A century ago, Argentina was richer than Sweden, France, Austria and Italy. It was far richer than Japan. It held poor Brazil in contempt. Vast and empty, with the world’s richest top soil in the Pampas, it seemed to the European immigrants who flooded here to have all the potential of the United States (per capita income is now a third or less of the United States level). They did not know that a colonel called Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva (“Evita”) would shape an ethos of singular delusional power.
“Argentina is a unique case of a country that has completed the transition to underdevelopment,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College.
In psychological terms — and Buenos Aires is packed with folks on couches pouring out their anguish to psychotherapists — Argentina is the child among nations that never grew up. Responsibility was not its thing. Why should it be? There was so much to be plundered, such riches in grain and livestock, that solid institutions and the rule of law — let alone a functioning tax system — seemed a waste of time.
Immigrants camped here with foreign passports rather than go through the nation-forming absorption that characterize Brazil or the United States. Argentina was far away at the bottom of the world, a beckoning fertile land mass distant enough from power centers to live its own peripheral fantasies or drown its sorrow in what is probably the world’s saddest (and most haunting) dance. Then, to give expression to its uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism, romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy, musical, mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It has proved impossible to shake.
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