TODAY: Lavrov keeps eagle eye on Georgia; Netanyahu's fears about Russian rogue scientists; Chubais takes the fall for hydropower plant disaster.  Litvinenko widow despairs over apparent British moves towards rapprochement.  Luzhkov-Baturina to take Nemtsov to court. UN report pessimistic on Russia's demographic decline; Ban Ki-moon voices approval for ecological care.According to the Moscow Times, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that Russia will survey shipping in the Black Sea to monitor Georgian 'provocations' which are a 'serious concern'.  Jorg Himmelreich in the International Herald Tribune suggests that much analysis of last year's Georgia-Russia conflict has overlooked the crucial matter of President Bush's Georgia policy.  Spokesman Andrei Nesterenko says that he believes that the ratification of the Lisbon treaty would benefit ...

The Moscow Times suggests that Russia will be consigned to the sidelines in today's  G20 meeting to discuss creating a global financial architecture, as, for all of its riches, the country lags behind in industrial development.  With all of the legal and financial perils of investing in Russia - why does it still attract as many companies as it does? asks Business Week.  After being threatened with bankruptcy, Rusal apparently repaid debts worth $85.9 million to Alfa-Bank.  A delegation of Russian lobbyists intends to encourage US investors to invest in small-scale construction and timber in exchange for help in entering the Russian market.  Sberbank has acquired a 'golden share' in the search engine Yandex.  Moscow ranks 67th out of 75 world financial centers, just below Manila, Prague and Lisbon, according to a new report.  Bloomberg examines the ...

For those of us who predict stuff for a living, this is one of those lovely moments in economics when we know for a fact that only one of two things will happen in the near future. We now know one thing for a fact… that in the first third of the second quarter of 2009, American retailers paid more and sold less, both by price and by unit. Simple arithmetic tells you that this means lower profits.

“How to earn 367% off American Retail’s “Seven-Ten Split.”

“Biggest jump in wholesale food prices in more than a year!”

– Associated Press, commenting on the Labor Department’s latest wholesale prices report

I know that Justice and I have gone on for some length now on the recent rise in agricultural prices. And I now am about to delve into that same topic – again.

By now, you are probably wondering if

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /Wolfgan Munchau a href=”http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c94ac804-fb62-11dd-bcad-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1″was complaining only last weekend/a about the extraordinary narrow-mindedness of Europe’s economic and political leadership in the face of the current financial and economic crisis, from Ireland in the West to Hungary in the East, and from Greece in the South to Sweden in the North. But more than narrow mindedness what we are faced with is innocence and inability to react, and frankly I am not sure which is worst. I say “innocence” because it is by now abundantly clear that they simply haven’t yet grasped the severity of the problems we face (in countries like Spain, or even Germany itself, let alone in the East), and I say inability to react, since they are always and forever moving too little and too late. The initial response to the banking crisis last October was one example (where we saw a …

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SWpdPgifAyI/AAAAAAAAMH8/DqVtbiglSyI/s1600-h/oliveira.jpg"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290143233314063138" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 192px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 142px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SWpdPgifAyI/AAAAAAAAMH8/DqVtbiglSyI/s320/oliveira.jpg" border="0" //abr /br /"Art has a function of teaching about the human condition. We live in hope, hope is fundamental" - Manoel de Oliveirabr /br /br /br /br /pppbr /br //pp/ppbr /br /br /Manoel de Oliveira (photo and quote above) is a living example for the Potuguese people of how to force their way out of the low growth/low per capita income trap into which they have steadily stuck their neck. Oliveira celebrated his 70th last December - and how did he celebrate it: by starting work on a new film. Traditional productivity theory suggests most people slow down with age, but Oliveira seems to have done just the opposite - and since 1990, he has made at least one film a year. His secret for ...

The base metals were mixed on Wednesday. Copper traded within a tight 4-cent range through the day, finishing near the lower end at $1.5875/lb., down a penny and a quarter.

Nickel traded choppily, with a bit of an up bias late, to close at $4.6644/lb., up a bit more than a penny. Zinc was down early, but recovered to end at its intraday high of $0.507/lb., up a penny and three-quarters. Aluminum was weak, dropping nearly a penny and a half, to $0.8349/lb., while lead plunged in the afternoon hours after most of the day in the green, settling at $0.5656/lb., down two-thirds of a cent.

Copper was weak on both bad economic numbers out of Europe, and on ballooning stockpiles.

European industrial production declined 2.4% in September, year over year, marking the biggest drop since February 2002, according to the European Union’s statistics office. From August, production sagged by 1.6%. The

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