Is Putin a hero?

At least this is how the Russian commentators considered him after he apparently defied the security service warning of a plot to kill him in Iran.
President Putin confirmed he would travel to Tehran after the summit in Germany, although Kremlin officials did not confirm the plan.
On Sunday, there was a report published by the Russian news agency quoting a single unnamed security source, that plotters were planning to assassinate Putin in Tehran this week.
The plot reports come shortly before Duma elections this December and Putin’s scheduled departure from office next March.
Lacking the theatrical manner and the booming voice of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Putin needs a kind of manifestation of quiet courage to make his image more colourful.
According to Nikolai Zlobin, director of the Russian and Eurasia Project of the World Security Institute in Washington, it did not have anything to do with Iran or terrorism; it’s more of an example of the struggle inside Putin’s administration.
The propaganda machine is trying to show Russian people how vulnerable the country could become without him at the helm.
Another analyst felt that there were real details backing up the allegations, but they have been manipulated to suit a political agenda.
Putin’s visit to Iran is the first by a Kremlin leader since Stalin went in 1943.
Tehran dismissed the plot report as baseless.
As for Putin’s political future, after stepping down as president next March, he would consider leading United Russia and continuing in power as Russia’s prime minister.
With this move, United Russia will become more than a political party.
According to Newsweek United Russia plans to remake itself in the image of the old Party, complete with an ideology, a youth wing and, ultimately, a monopoly on power and patronage “Our absolute first priority is to save Russian civilization,” says Andrey Vorobyev, head of United Russia’s Central Committee. “Not to allow Western influence to corrupt our language, not to allow fashionable theories or other interferences from outside to damage Russian sovereignty.” More concretely, Dmitry Orlov from the Kremlin-connected Center of Political Technologies gave deputies at the party congress a list of milestones to achieve in Russia’s ascent to greatness. Among them: “a manned mission to the moon by 2012; hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014; attaining the world’s fifth largest GDP by 2020; flying to Mars by 2025.
United Russia has already used its power as the leading party in Parliament to change the way elections are held, excluding independents and small parties from running at all”

Anyone with political ambition is in the United Russia party. The majority of the regional governors, 60 out of 89, are on the party’s lists, as are almost all Russia’s mayors. Business barons, such as Viktor Rashidov, director of the Magnitogorsk Steel Factory (with 69,000 employees), and Vladimir Gruzdev, owner of the Seventh Continent supermarket chain (annual sales: $130 million), are also party members, lending their cash and influence to the cause.
Cash, influence and media control. Is there anything better than that?
The result is that millions of ordinary Russians see Putin as a savior, and find his leadership and vision powerfully attractive—“far more attractive than the dubious virtues of democracy and the right to choose among political parties”.
It seems that after 15 years of an imperfect democracy, Russians are on the brink of getting back to square one, as in one party.

Greenspan: The mastermind of the housing bubble?

I used to think about Alan Greenspan like the brilliant mind behind world’s economy.
Who is the man Alan Greenspan? Is he more of the professional jazz musician? Or is he identified as the man behind the ‘housing bubble’? I guess he would rather be the jazz musician right now.

I read the review about his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World and I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Greenspan’s policies of adjusting interest rates to historic lows contributed to the housing bubble in the US. The Federal Reserve acknowledges the connection between lower interest rates, higher home values, and the increased liquidity the higher home values bring to the overall economy.
Greenspan also praised the rise of the subprime mortgage industry and the tools with which it uses to assess credit-worthiness in an April 2005 speech:
“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. Such developments are representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services industry throughout the history of our country … With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. … Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s.”
It is already known what happened next: The subprime mortgage industry collapsed in March 2007. The effects are still creating havoc to the US economy and to a lower extent to Canadian one.
What was the effect on the global economy?
The US is still the leader of setting global interest-rate policy. Meaning that economic powers like Japan, Great Britain, the EU were forced to maintain artificially low interest rate.
Greenspan hold the interest rates too low for too long.
With the collapse of the housing market, US home owners lost billions of dollars in their property asset values all over the US. And, the bottom is not in sight yet!
In Canada, we will not be immune to the housing market price correction.
We may expect prices to correct 15% to 20% considering house prices have gone up almost 100% (in some cases even more) over the past 6 years.
In the hot housing markets in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton. there are not much up-side potential in house prices continuing to increase without a correction.

EU urges Canada to move on visa dispute

The European Union threatened yesterday to take action if Canada did not drop by the end of the year visa requirements for citizens from at least one new EU member from the ex-Soviet bloc.
EU countries have reciprocal agreements with other nations under which visa requirements on either side are waived. But Canada has yet to change rules under which citizens from eight eastern European contries still need visas to get in.
The countries are: Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

EBay stops sale of Belgium

A spoof sale of Belgium has been stopped by EBay after reaching a $14.3 million bid.
The “vendor” identified as the former journalist Gerrit Six, offered the kingdom for sale ‘as a whole’ or in three parts- Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia. The offer came with ‘plenty of choice, despite of the 300 billion of National Debt’.
Belgium is mired in a political crisis that has led to discussion of the country’s future as a federal state.
Althgough 100 days passed since the general election, there is still no sign of a coalition government being formed by the political parties in Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia.

Who benefits from the war in Irak?

Since 2003 some companies have been making billions of dollars from the war in Irak.

The top ten are:

1. KBR Inc and Halliburton : 17, 226 millions dollars
2. Veritas Capital Found: 1, 444
3. Washington Group International: 931
4. Environmental Chemical: 878
5. International American Products: 759
6. Flour: 757
7. Perini: 650
8. Parsons: 540
9. First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting: 500
10. L-3 Communications: 359

Let’s see who these big earners are:

KBR is one of the largest construction and energy field-service companies in the world. It has a long history of collaborating with the U.S. government on war-related construction.

Veritas Capital Found specializes in investing in defense and aerospace companies. Veritas owns a portfolio of companies — and has a stake in others — that pull down big Iraq-related contracts.
Veritas purchased in 2005 DynCorp International; through this company offers security services and police training, as well as logistical services.

Washington Group, Flour and Perini landed many of the contracts to restore, repair and maintain oil fields, power plants, schools, public water systems and military bases.

Environmental Chemical does munitions disposal.
International American Products sets up systems that deliver electricity to military camps.
L3 Communications offers security screening services, linguists, training and law-enforcement services, and some equipment replacement

The top three hidden winners : companies who got the most in Department of Defense contracts from 2002 through 2006

Lockheed Martin
Boeing
Northrop Grumman