Friday, August 3, 2012

Global growth -- now or never; Banking reputation at 'new low'; Guns and India MPs; India's federal crisis; Tackling cancer through cloud computing


1 Global growth – now or never (Stephen S Roach in Khaleej Times) Predicting sources and timing of the proverbial next crisis are near impossible, but there are two destabilising scenarios to ponder: First, the full risks of a sovereign debt overhang haven’t played out yet. With long–term government interest rates remaining low, there’s a false sense of complacency. In 2011, debt exceeded 100% of GDP for the broad collection of so-called advanced economies for the first time since the end of World War II. The overly-indebted can finesse this problem for the time being, but probably not much longer.

 Second, the world’s most important economic relationship between the US and China could fall victim to its own set of imbalances. Particularly troublesome is Washington’s bipartisan penchant for China bashing, with demands that China be forced to raise the value of the renminbi or face trade sanctions. This is the wrong response. The US suffers from a multilateral trade deficit – characterised by imbalances with 88 countries in 2010. Washington must come to grips with its own unprecedented shortfall in national saving. Lacking saving and still wanting to grow, the US must import surplus saving from abroad – running massive current account and multilateral trade deficits to attract the foreign capital.

The global rebalancing agenda would be better served if the US-China trade relationship were recast as an opportunity. For a growth-starved US economy hobbled by sluggish consumer demand, exports could become an important source of growth. China is America’s third largest and most rapidly growing export market. The US focus needs to shift toward market access – ensuring that its companies have a fair shot at Chinese markets as that nation ushers in what could be the greatest consumption story of the modern era.

In short, the outlook for sustainable world growth depends critically on how the US and China address rebalancing imperatives. Advanced economies, especially the US, must consume less and save more. The developing world, especially China, has no choice other than to draw down its excess saving and consume more. The sooner the world faces up to these urgent rebalancing imperatives, the better.

2 Banking reputation at ‘new low’ (The Guardian) Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, admitted that the reputation of the banking industry had plunged to a new low, as the bailed-out bank was hit by a string of charges caused by computer mistakes and mis-selling of financial products – with more to come from the Libor scandal. First-half losses widened to £1.5bn from £794m at the same time last year.

In light of the Libor rate-rigging scandal which is about to engulf RBS, the bank's senior independent director, former Standard Life boss Sir Sandy Crombie, is conducting a review of the "culture and values" of the bank. Results were hit by the enforced payout of £125m to compensate customers who fell victim to a computer meltdown in June – a cost that could yet rise and which Hester described as a "significant blot" on the bank's reputation. Another hit from the mis-selling of payment protection insurance took its total charge for this debacle in the past 18 months to £1.3bn.

Admitting that the reputation of the industry was at "new lows", Hester added: "This is dangerous because customer trust is a prerequisite for a successful banking sector and an effective banking sector is so important to economic stability and growth. We are in a chastening period for the banking industry. The consequences of the sector's past over-expansion are still being accounted for, probably with some way still to go."

3 Guns and India MPs (BBC) Why do so many Indian parliamentarians need guns? And why are guns being sold to MPs who have criminal cases pending against them? Nobody quite knows. But the government's reply to a freedom of information request on gun ownership among MPs has revealed some startling facts: 756 guns were sold to MPs and VIPs - usually politicians - in India between 1987 and 2012. Eighty two MPs purchased guns being sold off by the state between 2001 and 2012. Eighteen of these 82 MPs have criminal cases pending against them. They include charges of murder, attempt to murder and kidnapping. One of these MPs - Atiq Ahmed from Uttar Pradesh - has 44 criminal cases pending against him.

These mostly imported guns were seized by customs and then sold to MPs - at well below the market price until a few years ago. Curiously, only MPs can buy these confiscated weapons. Ordinary citizens, according to the watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms, are not eligible even if they have firearms licences.

In a new report, the watchdog raises some pointed questions.Why should guns be sold only to MPs when many of them already enjoy police protection at state expense? Why are guns being sold to MPs who have "serious criminal charges" pending against them? The government and the MPs have no answers yet. Right to information activist Ambrish Pandey, who unearthed the information, believes the sale of guns to MPs is a result of an "ad hoc, discretionary and opaque policy of allotment".

India's democracy is already facing a serious challenge from criminalisation of politics. Nearly a third of MPs - 158 out of 543, to be precise - in the lower house face criminal charges in more than 500 cases. Seventy-four of them face very serious charges, such as murder and abduction.

4 India’s federal crisis (AG Noorani in Dawn) The framers of India’s constitution never imagined that the states would become so assertive. They set up a highly centralised federation. It worked fine so long as Congress hegemony lasted. In 1967, it lost power in the states of the entire northern belt. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi welcomed a “more practicing federation with multiple parties and coalitions in power.” Five years later, however, she said, on Feb 3, 1972, that it was necessary that the state governments should be “in tune” with the government at the centre, accept its policies and be willing to implement its programmes.

Her conversion to a brazenly anti-federal approach was induced by her election victory in 1971, when she gained a massive majority in the Lok Sabha. There began an era of ‘ready-made chief ministers’ in the states. This era continued right till 1989, including during the tenure of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1984-1989) There was a break from 1977-80 when an unsteady coalition of Congress opponents wielded power. The PV Narasimha Rao government of the Congress (1991-96) survived on defections. From 1996 to this day, India has been ruled by ramshackle coalitions, either with the BJP as the main partner (1996-2004) or the Congress from 2004 onwards.

During this entire phase the letter of the constitution had not changed. But radically altered politics changed the federation to a degree none had imagined before. This is likely to continue, for the era of a single party’s majority in the Lok Sabha seems to have ended. Coalitions which would include powerful regional parties will govern India. All over the world units of federations are clamouring for greater power, especially in Canada and Australia. It is a matter of time before the states in India unite to present a Magna Carta for the redressal of their long-felt grievances.

5 Tackling cancer through cloud computing (Khaleej Times) A 17-year-old girl who won this year’s annual Google Science Fair has written a cloud-based computer program that makes breast cancer detection less invasive. Brittany Wenger, the Palo Alto, California student made it to the science talent competition for kids aged 13 to 18, by creating computer programs coded to think like the human brain and then used them to locate mass malignancy in breast tissue samples. She called it the “Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer”.

Traditional methods of finding mass malignancy use a minimally invasive, but painful, biopsy called a fine needle aspirate (FNA). A section of the medical fraternity now insist that analyzing tissues collected with this method isn’t always effective and often calls for further invasive procedures. The teenager tested her method with 7.6 million trials to see how accurately it would detect cancerous tumors and was amazed to find it succeeded 97.4 % of the time with 99.1% sensitivity to malignancy when analyzing samples collected from FNA.

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