Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Japan Tsunami Footage from Car
While You Were in Europe: South China Sea Military Flare-up Ahead?
Lord of the Flies, & the Decline of Violence
Magnus: Europe’s Kreditanstalt Moment

Japan Tsunami Footage from Car

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:32 AM PDT

I hadn’t seen this Japan tsunami footage before. Remarkable.

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While You Were in Europe: South China Sea Military Flare-up Ahead?

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 11:25 AM PDT

While the world is busy with the old’s world’s problems, troubling stuff in SE Asia over oil between India and China:

India is being pulled into a complex and increasingly tense territorial dispute in the South China Sea, with China repeatedly warning ONGC, the Indian state oil company, that its joint exploration plans with Vietnam amount to a violation of Chinese sovereignty.

The Indian government responded to the latest Chinese warnings Thursday by repeating its pledge to continue exploring for energy in the South China Sea, where China is embroiled in territorial disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

ONGC, meanwhile, said it planned to resume drilling next year at one of its two remaining blocks in the area, after a temporary suspension there because of a hard seabed, and after relinqishing another block last year because it lacked production potential.

“We plan to restart drilling there,” said ONGC Chairman A.K. Hazarika. “The [Indian] Ministry of External Affairs has informed us that the block is well within the territory of Vietnam and so there are no issues with exploration there.”

The testy public exchanges follow an unusual incident in July when, according to the Indian government, an Indian navy ship visiting Vietnam as part of expanding bilateral defense ties received a radio message warning it that it was entering Chinese waters. China has dismissed India’s version of the incident as “groundless.”

Analysts say the fresh standoff between Asia’s two emerging economic and military giants, which fought a brief war over their disputed Himalayan land borders in 1962, increases the risk of a military flare-up in the South China Sea.

More here.

Lord of the Flies, & the Decline of Violence

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 10:27 AM PDT

Stephen Pinker’s latest book — on the decline of violence over time — is getting an early rave review. I’m planning to read the book, but the cautionary note struck in the closing of this Guardian review seems appropriate.

What might change [the steady decline of societal violence]? As I was reading this book I was repeatedly reminded of two novels. One is Lord of the Flies, an earlier generation’s definitive allegory of the violence lurking in us all. Pinker’s book makes Golding’s vision look dated: there is no state of nature bubbling away beneath the surface of civilised man, notwithstanding all the hysterical nonsense that has been uttered about the recent riots (which were, for riots, remarkably unviolent). The other novel is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this generation’s definitive allegory of how it could all go wrong. McCarthy pictures a world in which some random future spasm (perhaps an environmental catastrophe) leaves us all unhinged and lets the inner demons loose. Does our gradual move away from violence towards civility leave us better or worse equipped to deal with the next great calamity when it comes?

More here.

Magnus: Europe’s Kreditanstalt Moment

Posted: 22 Sep 2011 10:11 AM PDT

George Magnus calling Europe’s crisis correctly in a comment to a Mohammed El-Erian post over at the FT:

I regard bank recapitalisation and a robust and open-ended commitment by the ECB to buy Italian and Spanish bonds as a double-headed sine qua non for ending the European bond market and sovereign financing crisis. The existential issues that need to be addressed for a viable eurozone can be left until later. But they cannot if the bond market crisis is not resolved quickly. The time for incremental and technical changes to ECB and other policies and instruments is, to use banking parlance, long past due. And while I agree with Mr El-Erian's policy prescriptions, it is surely not alarmist to say that if the political divisions and lack of determination in policy circles remain as now, we will surely hurtle to our own Kreditanstalt moment – the 1931 collapse of Austria's largest bank which was how that appalling decade started.

More here.