Gulf economies to grow at 4.4%; Shutdown isn't a sideshow: Debt is a threat; What smartphones say about you

1 Gulf economies to grow 4.4% (Khaleej Times) The economies of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries will expand by 4.4 per cent in 2014, the International Monetary Fund said, raising its earlier forecast for the oil-rich bloc. The aggregate economic growth in 2013 for the GCC will be at 3.7 percent, said Nemat Shafik, the IMF deputy managing director, in a meeting with the finance ministers of the member states in Riyadh.

The “GCC has continued to be one of the most-performing economies,” she said, adding that “the growth is 3.7 per cent this year [and] 4.4 per cent next year, after an exceptional growth of 6.4 per cent in the last two years.” The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Oil and gas receipts represent the bulk of their revenues.

The IMF published its economic forecast for the Middle East and North Africa region in May, with the combined growth for GCC members projected to stand at 3.7 per cent for 2013 and 3.78 per cent for 2014. Meanwhile, the central bank of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s top holders of US government bonds, said it was not worried by the political deadlock in Washington that could cause the United States to default on its debt.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?section=uaebusiness&xfile=/data/uaebusiness/2013/October/uaebusiness_October87.xml

2 Shutdown isn't a sideshow: Debt is a threat (Niall Ferguson in The Wall Street Journal) In the words of a veteran investor, watching the US bond market today is like sitting in a packed theater and smelling smoke. You look around for signs of other nervous sniffers. But everyone else seems oblivious. Part of the reason people aren't rushing for the exits is that the comedy they are watching is so horribly fascinating.

Yet, entertaining as all this political drama may seem, the theater itself is indeed burning. For the fiscal position of the federal government is in fact much worse today than is commonly realized. As anyone can see who reads the most recent long-term budget outlook—published last month by the Congressional Budget Office, and almost entirely ignored by the media—the question is not if the US will default but when and on which of its rapidly spiraling liabilities.

A very striking feature of the latest CBO report is how much worse it is than last year's. A year ago, the CBO's extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%. A year ago the debt was supposed to glide down to zero by the 2070s.

Only a fantasist can seriously believe "this is not a crisis." The fiscal arithmetic of excessive federal borrowing is nasty even when relatively optimistic assumptions are made about growth and interest rates. Currently, net interest payments on the federal debt are around 8% of revenues. But under the CBO's extended baseline scenario, that share could rise to 20% by 2026, 30% by 2049, and 40% by 2072. By 2088, the last date for which the CBO now offers projections, interest payments would—absent any changes in current policy—absorb just under half of all tax revenues. That is another way of saying that policy is unsustainable.

The mere prospect of a taper, beginning in late May, was already enough to raise long-term interest rates by more than 100 basis points. Fact: More than half the federal debt in public hands is held by foreigners. Fact: Just under a third of the debt has a maturity of less than a year. Hey, does anyone else smell something burning?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906704579113661593684356.html?mod=trending_now_3

3 What smartphones say about you (Claire Caine Miller & Somini Sengupta in The Sydney Morning Herald) Once, only hairdressers and bartenders knew people's secrets. Now, smartphones know everything - where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun and when they go to bed. That is why advertisers, and tech companies such as Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualised, hypertargeted ads. And they are doing it without cookies, those tiny bits of code that follow users around the internet, because cookies do not work on mobile devices.

Privacy advocates fear consumers do not realise just how much of their private information is on their phones and how much is made vulnerable simply by downloading and using apps, searching the mobile web or even just going about daily life with a phone in your pocket. And this new focus on tracking users through their devices and online habits comes against the backdrop of a spirited public debate on privacy and government surveillance. On Wednesday, the US National Security Agency confirmed it had collected data from cellphone towers in 2010 and 2011 to locate Americans' mobiles, though it said it never used the information.

For advertisers, intimate knowledge of users has long been the promise of mobile phones. But only now are many mobile advertising services exploiting that knowledge, largely based on monitoring the apps we use and the places we go. ''In the old days of ad targeting, we give them a list of sites and we'd say 'Women 25 to 45','' said e-commerce manager David Katz. ''In the new age, we basically say 'Go get us users'.''

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/smartphones-have-a-lot-to-say-about-their-owners-delighting-advertisers-and-stirring-up-privacy-fears-20131006-2v2d4.html