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 ...

I very much enjoyed this book review by Gerard DeGroot published in Sunday's Washington Post on Michael Meyer's new book on the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It never fails to impress me how much our ideas about this recent period in history continue to inform (or more aptly, misinform) our understanding of contemporary politics and relations with Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union.  Apparently Michael Meyer's book pokes some holes in the traditional hero myths, and points to the accidental and chaotic nature of how all these world-changing events spun out of control.  Very interesting and thoughtful stuff here.The events themselves were played out by a cast of thousands in Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Bucharest. There was no script; this was an improvisational drama conceived by Camus, with help from Kafka and Molière. The Soviet Union came ...

Unemployment is on the march, the plummeting housing market has yet to find a bottom and top U.S. companies in the banking and automaking sectors remain downright shaky.

And yet the U.S. stock market - as a discounting mechanism - experienced a robust rally last week, posting a four-day rally that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average gain 9.0% and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index a resounding 10.7%.

Unfortunately, in an economy that has been deeply hurt by huge imbalances that took years to build, we are left with key sectors that are operating in a distress mode. They are now at the mercy of the aggressive government actions being taken in an attempt to whip them back into shape.

Of course, it is always preferable to invest in an environment where the private sector is taking the steps to increase efficiency

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If the global economy were a hospital patient, you’d definitely find it in the Intensive Care Unit.

It’s not on life support just yet, but it certainly finds itself in an increasingly precarious position, due to the numerous negative factors swirling around the financial world.

One of these factors is something you might not be aware of, given the furor here in the U.S. It’s happening half a world away over in Eastern Europe and is just beginning to get some attention now.

So pack your bags and I’ll fill you in…

Pain In Prague And Poland

In Eastern Europe, the economic problems are two-fold…

1.       The region is experiencing a similar downturn to the one in the U.S.

2.      Local currencies are enduring a significant slide against the euro.

For example, the FOREX exchanges in Prague (Czech Republic) and Warsaw (Poland) have hit multi-year lows. And so-called “toxic foreign currency options” have sent the Polish Zloty

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America may be banged up, but Europe is teetering on the edge of flat-out fiscal disaster… which helps explain the bizarre action in gold and the dollar as of late.

Imagine a postcard-perfect mountain village. A-frame chateaus, old world door crests, cheery gas lamps – the kind of place you might see tucked away in the Pyrenees or the Swiss Alps. As a crowning touch, large flakes of snow are gently falling.

Now take a step back. Instead of an actual village, you are looking at the contents of a snow globe.

The snow globe is sitting on the edge of a large oak table.

Now you see the back of a large, well-manicured hand – perhaps a banker’s hand – accidentally sweep the snow globe over the edge of the table. The snow globe hurtles toward the cold marble floor, where it will shatter into a thousand pieces.

What you have just envisioned

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blockquoteThe highly open Czech economy is set to slow down considerably, affected by the deteriorating outlook for its main trading partners. Although GDP growth was still solid in Q3 2008, both exports and imports growth slowed significantly. The global crisis is expected to adversely impact the real economy particularly from the fourth quarter of 2008. Overall, GDP is expected to have grown by 4.2% in 2008 with a strong contribution from the external balance.br /EU Commission Forecast January 2009/blockquotepAnalysts and followers of the Czech economy are basically agreed on two things at the moment: that the Czech is slowing (and rapidly), and that the dependence on car exports is a real achilles heal at a time when a generalised credit crunch means that the financing which is needed for people to make car purchases often quite simply isn’t there. Beyond this point opinions differ. Some expect the slowdown to end …

a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_28p7XDn4Qb0/SU0TcP1epkI/AAAAAAAABVg/TlCDCJj1DqQ/s1600-h/carls+bridge.jpg"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 278px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_28p7XDn4Qb0/SU0TcP1epkI/AAAAAAAABVg/TlCDCJj1DqQ/s400/carls+bridge.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281899313983563330" border="0" //abr /You have noticed that I have not been posting as usual. It happens because of my reallocation. Last Thursday it was my last day in Bulgaria. I have spent in Sofia more than one year and I have to say I enjoyed my stay very much. In last weeks I had been thinking about new locations and job a lot. And finally decided to come back to my home country, back to Prague. After 3 years of living abroad I really look forward to come back to Czech Republic. But before I start new job I am taking 2 months of vacation. I will publish some new posts during my holiday.br /br /Picture above shows Carl's Bridge in Prague.div class="blogger-post-footer"http://stockweb.blogspot.com/atom.xml/div pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/0CWBo_Yz176B2_YBKJm6OhIDVg8/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/0CWBo_Yz176B2_YBKJm6OhIDVg8/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a ...

The Czech central bank slashed its benchmark interest rate more than expected this morning as a growing credit crunch slows down borrowing and a decline in external demand hits exports and industrial output. Manufacturing output in the Czech Republic contracted for the seventh month in a row in October, and the purchasing managers index (PMI) hit an all-time low of 41.2, just above the revised euro zone figure of 41.1, giving us some idea of just how interconnected Czech and Eurozone activity are. Sharp Rate Reduction The Prague-based Ceska Narodni Banka reduced the two-week repurchase rate by three-quarters of a percentage point to 2.75 percent, its lowest level since June 2007. The size of the cut is the largest since at least 2004. The koruna fell to 24.953 per euro immediately after the decision, and this was its lowest level since Oct. 27. It was trading ...

A fun little bit of news out of the beautiful city of Prague today…

The first Burger King (NYSE:BKC) will open in Prague in the next few months. And it’s not only targeting the Czech Repbulic. It wants to become number one in European markets. To do that, it’s already got operations in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, and it planning joints in Slovakia and Slovenia.

But it’s got tough competition from McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), who is top dog right now with 70 restaurants serving 53 million customers. It’s spent more than $172.2 million on restaurants in the Czech Republic.

When I was in Budapest, I grabbed a Whopper for a quick lunch before meeting my guide back at the hotel, Buro Panzio. It cost me 750 Forint, which is about $3.75 or so, and the place was packed. My last night in Budapest, I hit the town with some new friends, and ended up

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With the Russian invasion of Georgia, attention has been focused on Eastern Europe and any investment opportunities or bargains there. The Czech Republic is one of the larger countries in that part of the world. Here are some interesting facts about the country: 1. It is a pluralist multi-party parliamentary representative democracy. 2. They have a flat tax. 3. Their annual GDP growth has recently been approximately 6%. 4. It has the highest ranking compared to the former Comecon countries in the Human Development Index. 5. It ranks 35th out of all countries for GDP based on purchasing power parity. 6. Most of the country's economy has been privatized. 7. It has has abolished border controls with all of its neighbors. 8. The Programme for International Student Assessment ranks the Czech education as the 15th best out of all countries. 9. 4.6% of their electricity comes from renewable sources, including hydropower. 10. They ...