China domestic debt surges 70%; 'Greece will leave bailout in 2014'; When the world turned the camera on itself

1 China domestic debt surges 70% (BBC) China has local government debts of 17.7 trillion yuan ($2.9tn), up 70% from three years ago, according to an official report. China’s government asked the National Audit Office (NAO) in July to do a round-up of the debts outstanding at a local level. The report showed some local governments were using new loans to repay more than a fifth of their debt. China has a total government debt of about 58% of its economic output.

Persistent fears over the level of non-performing bad debt have affected perceptions of the world’s second-largest economy, as some worry whether the loans can be paid back. The figure is still less than half the debt burdens in Japan – the world’s third-largest economy – and Greece, but some analysts warn that China’s debt cannot continue to grow at this pace forever.

According to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, local governments took up 80% of total bank lending in China at the end of 2010. Local governments in China borrowed heavily after the global financial crisis, to try to sustain growth rates. The Chinese central government has repeatedly stressed the urgent need to guard against financial risks, including the local government debt problem.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25553058

2 ‘Greece will leave bailout in 2014′ (Graeme Wearden in The Guardian) Greece will leave its bailout programme next year without needing a third aid package, the country’s prime minister, Antonis Samaras, announced, as he insisted that citizens could look to 2014 with confidence. Samaras told long-suffering Greeks that the end of the country’s financial assistance plan was in sight after almost four years of painful austerity, and that the new year would bring the prospect of normality.

Ireland left its bailout programme earlier this month, but a Greek exit would be a major milestone in the financial crisis that began to grip the eurozone in the spring of 2010. Greece has already received two aid packages, with around €130bn wiped off its debt in 2012.

Greece is expected to finally leave recession in 2014, and investor confidence in the country has grown through the last year. The yield, or interest rate, on its 10-year bonds has fallen to around 8% – compared with 30% at the peak of the crisis – as traders regained faith that the debt would be repaid. Greek government bonds were one of the best-performing assets in 2013, returning 47%.

Analysts, however, are sceptical of the claim that Greece will not need further aid next year. It has still not reached agreement with its international lenders over the size of its fiscal shortfall in next year’s budget, with troika officials pushing Athens to make further painful cutbacks. Record unemployment and pay cuts have pushed prices down across the country, and this punishing “internal devaluation” may continue in next year.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/dec/30/greece-leave-bailout-scheme-2014

3 When the world turned the camera on itself (Khaleej Times) Self-portraiture has been around for centuries, but the global proliferation of smartphones with built-in digital cameras — plus the ability to share photos instantly on social media — has taken the genre to a new level. With 2013 coming to a close, the publishers of the hallowed Oxford English Dictionary declared selfie to be their “word of the year.”

“Selfie: noun, informal. A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website,” according to Oxford. “Also: selfy. Plural: selfies.” Internet search provider Yahoo meanwhile estimates that in 2014, about 880 billion photographs will be taken. That’s 123 photos for every man, woman and child on Earth. Many will be selfies. In Britain, a survey for Samsung found that 17 per cent of men, and 10 per cent of women, take selfies because “they enjoy taking good-looking photos of themselves.”

“I think ‘selfie’ is a term of endearment for the self, in a way,” said Sarah Kennel, curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who admits to taking the odd selfie herself. “It does reflect a kind of narcissism in our culture,” she said. US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron got tongues wagging when they took a selfie with Danish leader Helle Thorning Schmidt at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in South Africa.

 “A selfie is a sort of perversion (and) a conquest of social virtual terrain,” said Paris-based travel photographer Jean-Francois Vibert. “Happily, perversion is not prohibited,” added Vibert, who namechecks the flamboyant pop star Nicki Minaj for selfies “so ‘trash,’ it’s self-mockery. On that level, the selfie is decadence for a totally decadent era.” Kennel said self-portraits are as old as photography itself.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?section=editorschoice&xfile=/data/editorschoice/2013/December/editorschoice_December11.xml