1 Africa’s biggest economy chokes growth (George
Osodi in Washington Post/Gulf News) Nigeria’s economy is growing at the slowest
pace this decade as oil prices drop. Companies are complaining they can’t get
the dollars they need to do business. And trading in the naira has long since
dried up.
There are many good reasons why Godwin Emefiele, who
runs the central bank of Africa’s biggest economy, should lift currency
controls and let the naira depreciate. One of the things holding him back is
politics.
Devaluing the naira may give opposition parties the
opportunity to claim that Emefiele’s main supporter, President Muhammadu
Buhari, has lost control of the economy. With his backing, the policy chief
will be able to resist his critics into 2016 before the worsening economic
slump eventually forces him to capitulate, according to Standard Chartered and
Bank of America.
Africa’s top oil producer introduced curbs on buying
foreign-exchange from late 2014 in a bid to prop up the naira as prices for
crude, the source of two-thirds of government revenue and 90 per cent of export
earnings, plummeted. These measures have all but fixed the exchange rate at
198-199 per dollar since March, even as other oil exporters from Russia to
Colombia and Malaysia have let their currencies slide.
Barclays and HSBC Holdings still think the central
bank will be forced to weaken the naira to between 220 and 230 before the end
of 2015. The International Monetary Fund says the currency measures are
detrimental to Nigeria, where growth slowed to 2.35 per cent on an annualised
basis in the second quarter. Former central bank Governor Muhammadu Sanusi II
said last week his successor was “in denial” if he thought he could continue
propping up the naira.
2 The Uberization of money (Zachary Karabell in The
Wall Street Journal) When it comes time to buy a home, you will probably revert
to procedures that were created in your grandparents’ era. You will assemble financial
documents and present them to a loan officer at a bank, who will take weeks to
determine what you can borrow and at what rate and then present you with a
narrow menu of costly options.
Imagine instead a simple online interface that could
generate a tailored credit score for you. It would connect you to lenders
ranging from banks and credit unions to pools of individuals who want to lend
privately at a negotiated rate for whatever duration you agree on. You could
shop around, combine different types of financing and arrange a mortgage
package that best suits you, all within a few hours.
We aren’t quite there yet, but we may be soon. Over
the next decade, the familiar 20th-century modes of banking and investing will
give way to something very different. We are on the verge of the Uberization of
finance, which will bring multiple new opportunities but also a range of new
risks.
The ubiquitous ride-sharing company uses a simple
device—the smartphone—to connect people who want rides with people who want to
drive them. Uber is a high-tech middleman that is making the intermediaries of
the past obsolete. The financial world is one of the most mediated industries
on the planet, and that is precisely what is about to change. Uberization also
means using vast amounts of data to make those connections feasible.
Technology is one source of this shift, but so is
legislation. The Jobs Act of 2012 contained a seemingly innocuous provision
making it easier for startups to raise money from investors previously deemed
too poor to dabble in such ventures. At the end of October, the Securities and
Exchange Commission finally approved the rules. As a result, any company or
person with an idea can solicit and raise up to $1 million without most of the
onerous regulatory and reporting requirements of the past.
3 Returning an award in India (Arundhati Roy in The
Guardian/The Indian Express) Although I do not believe that awards are a
measure of the work we do, I would like to add the National award for Best
Screenplay that I won in 1989 to the growing pile of returned awards. Also, I
want to make it clear that I am not returning this award because I am “shocked”
by what is being called the “growing intolerance” being fostered by the present
government.
First of all, “intolerance” is the wrong word to use
for the lynching, shooting, burning and mass murder of fellow human beings.
Second, we had plenty of advance notice of what lay in store for us — so I
cannot claim to be shocked by what has happened after this government was
enthusiastically voted into office with an overwhelming majority. Third, these
horrific murders are only a symptom of a deeper malaise. Life is hell for the
living too. Whole populations — millions of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and
Christians — are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where
the assault will come.
Today, we live in a country in which, when the thugs
and apparatchiks of the new order talk of “illegal slaughter”, they mean the
imaginary cow that was killed — not the real man who was murdered. When they
talk of taking “evidence for forensic examination” from the scene of the crime,
they mean the food in the fridge, not the body of the lynched man.
Which writer can write what Saadat Hasan Manto wrote
in his Letters to Uncle Sam? It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree
with what is being said. If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will
turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of
fools.
I am very pleased to have found (from somewhere way
back in my past) a National award that I can return, because it allows me to be
a part of a political movement initiated by writers, film-makers and academics
in this country who have risen up against a kind of ideological viciousness and
an assault on our collective IQ that will tear us apart and bury us very deep
if we do not stand up to it now.
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