This post is a guest contribution by James Pressler* of The Northern Trust Company.

Over the past few years, Dubai has built a reputation not just locally but worldwide. As the fastest growing of the seven emirates making up the United Arab Emirates, it has become known for its astonishing creations - the largest manmade islands (three at latest count), one of the world’s largest ports, and the Burj Dubai - the tallest manmade structure in the world. Unfortunately, its latest creation is not receiving the same kind of oohs and ahhs. The announcement on Wednesday requesting a six-month payment freeze on the $59 billion in debt issued by Dubai World, a state-run conglomerate behind all this grand development, made markets shudder at another prospect - the largest sovereign default since Argentina in 2001.

While technically this week’s announcement does not yet constitute a formal

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Energtek Inc., a world leading developer of Adsorbed Natural Gas (ANG) technology, announced this morning that its fully-owned subsidiary, Energtek Philippines Inc., successfully demonstrated its converted natural gas tricycles to government officials in Manila last week. The three-wheel vehicles were converted utilizing Energtek’s proprietary CNG Lite(TM) technology.

Energtek’s engineering team performed both the vehicle conversions and demonstrations. CNG Lite(TM) technology was presented to numerous governmental officials involved in the various aspects of the nation’s public transport programs. According to the press release, the presentations were attended by both executive and technical teams of several governmental departments. Photos of the presentations are available online at http://www.Energtek.com.

The Philippine Government intends to include tricycles in the nation’s official Natural Gas Vehicle Program for Public Transport (NGVPPT). The NGVPPT, passed in 2002, is a nationwide program that ‘aims to enhance energy supply security in the transport sector through fuel diversification

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There is no doubt that the recent aggressive interest rate cuts by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) are positive. However, they carry less punch if banks keep some of the lower cost of funding for themselves, without passing the full benefit on to customers.

Banks in this country have a key role to play if New Zealand is to recover from the current recession but they don’t appear to be “playing ball” when it comes to the margins they are currently enjoying.

The table below shows the extent of the mortgage margin for the major banks over current bank bill rates. The average floating mortgage rate margin over bank bills for New Zealand banks is currently 3.40%. It used to be a rule of thumb that the major banks had a margin of about 1.5% over bank bills for floating rate mortgages.

Of course these are very unusual times but does

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By Edward Hugh: Barcelona br /br /The German economy is about to suffer its deepest recession since World War II according to economics Minister Michael Glos speaking in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag due to be published tomorrow (Sunday). Glos said growth in Europe's largest economy is now expected to drop by as much as 2.5 percent this year (and there is still downside risk here). Earlier government estimates had been for slight positive growth (0.2 percent). This suggests that the miracle export-driven-recovery in German economic performance that so many were enthusing about in 2007 has actually been a short lived, one-off, affair, driven largely by an unsustainable lending boom in the UK, and Southern and Eastern Europe. If we take as good this year's government estimate, it gives us average growth for the German economy over the last 10 years of 1.07%, hardly ...

The German economy is about to suffer its deepest recession since World War II according to economics Minister Michael Glos speaking in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag due to be published tomorrow (Sunday). Glos said growth in Europe's largest economy is now expected to drop by as much as 2.5 percent this year (and there is still downside risk here). Earlier government estimates had been for slight positive growth (0.2 percent). This suggests that the miracle export-driven-recovery in German economic performance that so many were enthusing about in 2007 has actually been a short lived, one-off, affair, driven largely by an unsustainable lending boom in the UK, and Southern and Eastern Europe. If we take as good this year's government estimate, it gives us average growth for the German economy over the last 10 years of 1.07%, hardly changed from the supposedly "correctional" pace ...

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Santa Monica in California. I’m on holiday here with my lovely wife Lynn and our two equally gorgeous daughters, Eilish and Maddie, and am about to embark on an RV trip across America to Orlando in Florida.

Lynn will attend a conference on digital scrapbooking at Disneyland in Orlando in a fortnight if we make it. I’ll tell her story about how she came to be a digital design exporter (earning a lot more than me…) in this blog at a later date.  Suffice to say, this trip will more than pay for itself in US dollar earnings.

I’ll try to blog about the trip and what I learn from an economic and business point of view as often as I can. It should turn out a lot easier to do than in New Zealand. Free cable broadband or WiFi access

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National Party leader John Key hit two hot buttons in his speech at the weekend when  he promised to increase government borrowing by 2% of GDP to invest in infrastructure.

First, he correctly pointed out that New Zealand needs to invest heavily in infrastructure to boost productivity. Second, he said the government needed to borrow to do it. The first hot button is crucial, but not so controversial. The second hot button is both controversial and crucial. Both should be central election issues. 

Key pointed out what everyone has known but has been unable to achieve for years:   New Zealand needs better infrastructure to improve our productivity and therefore improve our wealth-generating potential. NZ Inc needs to find ways to invest in this infrastructure quickly and heavily. New Zealand needs better broadband, better hospitals, better schools, better roads and better energy networks. We all know this. The question is how do we do it? 

The unsolved problems have always been:

Do we ...