Wednesday-Night

August 31, 2007
News Analysis
By JENNY ANDERSON
… the business of creating new finance vehicles like derivatives and structured products has exploded in recent years. And [until quite recently] there remained a mostly rosy view of such instruments, because of their ability to help businesses and investors spread out risk.
But the global financial turmoil - set off […]

See also:
Why a U.S. Subprime Mortgage Crisis Is Felt Around the World
WHAT WENT WRONG - The Economy ; What’s next? ; World Economy and related posts on The Economy
29 August 2007
We are NAFTA-ed out! The intense discussion last week was excellent, informative and at points highly entertaining, but it’s time to move on.
Today’s […]

21 August 2007
By LYDIA POLGREEN AND HOWARD W. FRENCH
The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air.
The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 […]

Global Warming Enabled Russia’s Arctic Land Grab, and Now It Could Get Worse

Any lingering doubts about how ill-prepared we are to face up to the reality of climate change should have been laid to rest this month when two Russian mini-submarines dove two miles under the Arctic ice to plant a Russian flag […]

What Nobody Cares to Hear and Rarely Bothers to
Report Is the Thoroughly Mundane Nature of the SPP
by DAVID JONES
The Aug. 20 to 21 Montebello summit was most important for being held. Although there are real problems confronting the North American continent, from drug wars to border security […]

22 August 2007
As we prepare for #1329, we offer the following indispensable addition to the Wednesday Night lexicon:
The word outsight, defined as “A statement believed by the person who utters it to be an important or profound insight, but which is in fact regarded by its audience as so obvious or elementary that it […]

The North American Reality
Stephen Blank
August 9, 2007
In the heat of the summer, we have been washed over by a wave of blogs warning about plans afoot to create a North American Union or to build new gigantic new NAFTA superhighways across the US.
Alien invaders — a “Bushite” coup, announces one blog - will swarm across […]

18 August 2007
The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America was created in March 2005 as a trilateral effort to increase co-operation on security, trade and public-health issues among the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing.
“To hear some people talk, the Security and Prosperity Partnership meetings are nothing to get […]

17 August 2007
New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NEW ORLEANS — Six inches.
After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly […]

Harper committed to biofuel; Forests cleared to grow ‘energy crops’
MARGARET MUNRO, CanWest News Service
Restoring and protecting forests would do far more to reduce the carbon load in the atmosphere than dedicating vast tracks of land to “energy crops,” a new report says.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently announced a $1.5-billion, nine-year plan to make Canada a […]