The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economy has shown signs of overheating despite a sharp slowdown in economic growth, suggesting that, constrained by the supply of labor, its potential growth rate might have fallen significantly from its past level. With the priorities of the PRC’s authorities shifting from raising economic growth to curbing inflation, they are expected to change their stance on macroeconomic policy, including monetary policy, from easing to tightening. As a result, the PRC economy is likely to slow in 2014.
The global financial crisis did not start in 2008 but in 2007 when BNP Paribas and UBS AG suspended withdrawals from some of their funds. If the world is once again buffeted by a similar crisis thanks to the enormous splurge in Chinese lending and fears about the quality of…
The yuan has recently been something of a safe haven among emerging-market currencies, yet market participants have learned from a bloody lesson over the past week that it is no longer an easy, one-way bet. A sharp fall of both the onshore and offshore yuan against the greenback made the…
China's banks disbursed the most loans in any month in four years in January, a surge that suggests the world's second-biggest economy may not be cooling as much as some fear. Chinese banks lent 1.32 trillion yuan ($217.6 billion) worth of new yuan loans in January, beating a 1.1 trillion…
China’s Premier Li Keqiang isn’t the sort of man to blush in public. But yesterday, when he went in front of China’s national legislature and targeted 7.5% growth in gross domestic product for 2014, he should have. The problem isn't the number -- most economists agree that 7.5% is a…
Shanghai's over-the-counter equity market was almost deserted on a weekday morning last week. Two cleaning ladies swept the floor of a trading hall devoid of brokers or computers, while a woman at an information desk ate breakfast and talked on her mobile phone. During four visits this year to the…
In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the super computer HAL easily checkmates astronaut Frank Poole. In real life, the victory of machine over man came true in 1997, when Deep Blue defeated chess world champion Garry Kasparov.
But unlike in chess, where computers can vanquish even the best human players, in Go, the best computer programs only reach the level of a good amateur. The reason is not simply mathematical (as the calculations involved are substantially more complicated than chess), but also very human, since certain choices are not purely logical but also intuitive.
Using a universally relevant metaphor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to US president Jimmy Carter, wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997): "Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played." China's New Silk Road strategy certainly integrates the importance of Eurasia but it…
In May, 1997, I.B.M.’s Deep Blue supercomputer prevailed over Garry Kasparov in a series of six chess games, becoming the first computer to defeat a world-champion chess player. Two months later, the Times offered machines another challenge on behalf of a wounded humanity: the two-thousand-year-old Chinese board game wei qi,…
The popular game for mobile devices was removed from online stores on Sunday by its Vietnamese creator, who said its fame "ruins my simple life". Dong Nguyen, who created the game in just two to three days, was making as much as $50,000 (£30,482) a day from the game's advertising…
By Subhash Kak Aug 31 2015 If Europe emphasises exploration and conquest, China relies on its Confucian heritage of consolidation of power, much like its ancient boardgame, weiqi Experts view the recent turmoil in the Chinese stock market as a consequence of the overcapacity of the Chinese infrastructure, misallocation of…
China's banks disbursed the most loans in any month in four years in January, a surge that suggests the world's second-biggest economy may not be cooling as much as some fear. Chinese banks lent 1.32 trillion yuan ($217.6 billion) worth of new yuan loans in January, beating a 1.1 trillion…
For a decade, starting in the late nineteen-eighties, Ramesh Ramanathan worked his way up the executive ladder at Citibank in the United States. Then he led its corporate-derivatives branch in London. In 1998, however, he quit and returned to India, his country of birth. He had a new goal: finding a way to curb poverty in the nation’s cities.
The global financial crisis did not start in 2008 but in 2007 when BNP Paribas and UBS AG suspended withdrawals from some of their funds. If the world is once again buffeted by a similar crisis thanks to the enormous splurge in Chinese lending and fears about the quality of…
China's banks disbursed the most loans in any month in four years in January, a surge that suggests the world's second-biggest economy may not be cooling as much as some fear. Chinese banks lent 1.32 trillion yuan ($217.6 billion) worth of new yuan loans in January, beating a 1.1 trillion…
Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley have been buzzing on Twitter over the last 24 hours about reinventing retail banking with better software. “I am dying to fund a disruptive bank,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted yesterday. Other Valley heavyweights chimed in, including Chris Dixon (a colleague at Andreessen Horowitz), Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures),…
Feb 8 (Reuters) - If Greece is forced out of the euro zone, other countries will inevitably follow and the currency bloc will collapse, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said on Sunday. Greece's new leftist government is trying to re-negotiate its debt repayments and has begun to roll back…
With its proposed deal to buy Viber Media, Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten is stepping into a war zone. The world of smartphone communications apps is fiercely competitive with many powerful players, and Viber’s success isn’t guaranteed. So why is Rakuten paying $900 million to get into this market? http://blogs.wsj.com/
China’s banks disbursed the most loans in any month in four years in January, a surge that suggests the world’s second-biggest economy may not be cooling as much as some fear.
Chinese banks lent 1.32 trillion yuan ($217.6 billion) worth of new yuan loans in January, beating a 1.1 trillion yuan forecast and nearly three times December’s level, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement on Saturday on its website.
The global financial crisis did not start in 2008 but in 2007 when BNP Paribas and UBS AG suspended withdrawals from some of their funds. If the world is once again buffeted by a similar crisis thanks to the enormous splurge in Chinese lending and fears about the quality of…
Tags: china, lending, january, bank, chinese, economy, asian
The yuan has recently been something of a safe haven among emerging-market currencies, yet market participants have learned from a bloody lesson over the past week that it is no longer an easy, one-way bet. A sharp fall of both the onshore and offshore yuan against the greenback made the…
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economy has shown signs of overheating despite a sharp slowdown in economic growth, suggesting that, constrained by the supply of labor, its potential growth rate might have fallen significantly from its past level. With the priorities of the PRC’s authorities shifting from raising economic growth…
China’s Premier Li Keqiang isn’t the sort of man to blush in public. But yesterday, when he went in front of China’s national legislature and targeted 7.5% growth in gross domestic product for 2014, he should have. The problem isn't the number -- most economists agree that 7.5% is a…
Shanghai's over-the-counter equity market was almost deserted on a weekday morning last week. Two cleaning ladies swept the floor of a trading hall devoid of brokers or computers, while a woman at an information desk ate breakfast and talked on her mobile phone. During four visits this year to the…
Over the last decade, as DNA-sequencing technology has grown ever faster and cheaper, our understanding of the human genome has increased accordingly. Yet scientists have until recently remained largely ham-fisted when they’ve tried to directly modify genes in a living cell. Take sickle-cell anemia, for example. A debilitating and often deadly disease, it is caused by a mutation in just one of a patient’s three billion DNA base pairs. Even though this genetic error is simple and well studied, researchers are helpless to correct it and halt its devastating effects.
A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience. http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-technium
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv
In Mike McQueary, some see a hero who brought down a monster. Others see a liar who railroaded a legend. At the upcoming trial that will close the book on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Joe Paterno's former protégé will have the final word. http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10542793/the-whistleblower-last-stand
Nate Weiner is neither a journalist nor a publisher. He’s a developer bent on changing publishing, and he’s built the platform to do it. With 10 million users, Pocket is the largest save-for-later service on the market. But more than market share, what sets Pocket apart is its ability to…
Meetings are such a fixture in our work lives that we constantly hear the same advice: have an agenda, keep it short, don’t invite too many people. However, despite the commonality of this well-meaning advice, research from Harvard suggests that half of all meetings are unproductive. http://99u.com/
I met a priest in the north of Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until later in the year, but Reverend Kaneda’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on 11 March 2011 was the most violent that he, or anyone he knew, had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough, when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Kaneda’s temple with corpses to bury.
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv
Meetings are such a fixture in our work lives that we constantly hear the same advice: have an agenda, keep it short, don’t invite too many people. However, despite the commonality of this well-meaning advice, research from Harvard suggests that half of all meetings are unproductive. http://99u.com/
In Mike McQueary, some see a hero who brought down a monster. Others see a liar who railroaded a legend. At the upcoming trial that will close the book on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Joe Paterno's former protégé will have the final word. http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10542793/the-whistleblower-last-stand
A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience. http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-technium
Nate Weiner is neither a journalist nor a publisher. He’s a developer bent on changing publishing, and he’s built the platform to do it. With 10 million users, Pocket is the largest save-for-later service on the market. But more than market share, what sets Pocket apart is its ability to…
Using the same transaction malleability bug in bitcoin’s protocol that led to bitcoin exchanges like Mt. Gox and BitStamp shutting down withdrawals, hackers cleaned out the bitcoin wallet belonging to Silk Road 2, an underground Internet black market that launched in October after the FBI shut down the original Silk Road.
The hackers made off with 4474.27 bitcoins, roughly the equivalent of $2.7 million.
The website of Mt. Gox appears to be taken down, shortly after six major Bitcoin exchanges released a joint statement distancing themselves from the troubled Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange. Mt. Gox's homepage was not loading, although no error message appeared. Mt. Gox was not immediately available for comment. "This tragic violation…
Government regulators around the world have spent the last year scrambling to prevent bitcoin from becoming the currency of choice for money launderers and black marketeers. Now their worst fears may be about to materialize in a single piece of software. On Thursday, a collective of politically radical coders that…
A bug in the bitcoin software that makes it possible to alter transaction details over the network has caused panic-selling among holders of the crypto-currency, sending prices crashing below the $600 mark on Monday morning. http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=25707
The price of the digital currency bitcoin slid to its lowest level in nearly two months on Monday after bitcoin digital marketplace Mt. Gox said a halt on withdrawals it announced on Friday would continue indefinitely after it detected "unusual activity." http://www.reuters.com
TEAR GAS IS A GOOD TEACHER. It taught me that what they say is true: Awful conditions can bring out the best in people. It taught me that one can get used to almost anything, including a sensation of choking, and of impending death. It taught me to savor the simple pleasure of fresh air.
Tear gas even taught me something about a subject I have studied for many years as an academic: social media. It was June 2013 and I was in the middle of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul. After each volley of tear gas, protesters would pull out their phones and turn to social media to find out what was happening, or to report events themselves. Twitter had become the capillary structure of a movement without visible leaders, without institutional structure. Without even a name.
A few weeks ago David Carr profiled Kevin Kelly on page 1 of the New York Times Business section. He wrote that Kelly's pronouncements were "often both grandiose and correct." That’s a pretty good summary of Kevin Kelly's style and his prescience. http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-technium
Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv
In Mike McQueary, some see a hero who brought down a monster. Others see a liar who railroaded a legend. At the upcoming trial that will close the book on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, Joe Paterno's former protégé will have the final word. http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10542793/the-whistleblower-last-stand
Meetings are such a fixture in our work lives that we constantly hear the same advice: have an agenda, keep it short, don’t invite too many people. However, despite the commonality of this well-meaning advice, research from Harvard suggests that half of all meetings are unproductive. http://99u.com/
Nate Weiner is neither a journalist nor a publisher. He’s a developer bent on changing publishing, and he’s built the platform to do it. With 10 million users, Pocket is the largest save-for-later service on the market. But more than market share, what sets Pocket apart is its ability to…
With its proposed deal to buy Viber Media, Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten is stepping into a war zone.
The world of smartphone communications apps is fiercely competitive with many powerful players, and Viber’s success isn’t guaranteed. So why is Rakuten paying $900 million to get into this market?
Facebook has bought messaging app WhatsApp in a deal worth a total of $19bn (£11.4bn) in cash and shares. It is the social networking giant's biggest acquisition to date. WhatsApp has over 450 million monthly users and is popular with people looking to avoid text messaging charges. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26266689
Facebook Inc. (FB)’s $19 billion purchase of mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp Inc. is a stark reminder of how much money phone carriers are losing out on as competitors let users text and chat at no charge. Free social-messaging applications like WhatsApp cost phone providers around the world -- from Vodafone Group…
The $19 billion deal to sell WhatsApp Inc. to Facebook Inc. (FB) started at Yahoo! Inc. more than five years ago, when Jan Koum became disillusioned at the way Internet companies were fixated on advertising. He left Yahoo in 2007 with one of the company’s other engineers, Brian Acton, and…
For a decade, starting in the late nineteen-eighties, Ramesh Ramanathan worked his way up the executive ladder at Citibank in the United States. Then he led its corporate-derivatives branch in London. In 1998, however, he quit and returned to India, his country of birth. He had a new goal: finding…
The global financial crisis did not start in 2008 but in 2007 when BNP Paribas and UBS AG suspended withdrawals from some of their funds. If the world is once again buffeted by a similar crisis thanks to the enormous splurge in Chinese lending and fears about the quality of…