The world should have one global currency

A multi-currency system presents the governments a large field for export-import manipulation using the exchange rates: put your currency's exchange rate down and your imports will go up for some time not because your goods got better or cheaper or something - but for purely manipulative reasons. A whole system of risk management is in place in banks and foreign trade companies to respond to an artificial and unnatural risk as the one related to exchange rate fluctuations. A whole industry of forex traders is there to gain profit from not producing something, but simply from speculating on these governmental speculations. (I hate to sound like a primitive marxist physiocrat, but here it's the case when their argumentation sounds reasonable).

A globalized world should indeed have one single currency. Many libertarians, including the Belarusian economist Jaraslau Ramanchuk, propose a return to the gold standard. Even though at the university we were taught that abandon of the gold standard was quite an obvious thing to do (gold isn't liquid enough), afterall one can see the abandonment of the gold standard in 1970s as being politically motivated and driven by the US.

Still, more likely is it that the world will melt into one currency zone following the example of the EU. Regional currencies at first, to merge into one global currency zone after that. But this is something of a science-fiction scenario that could get real in a hundred or two hundred years. A big question is at all whether there would be enough motivation at all to abandon the multi-currency system and all its positive sides (possibility to generate profits from exchange rate fluctuations, possibility to diversify investments etc).

Non-Russian music from Russia

Having listened to Huun-Huur-Tu, the famous Tuvan throat-singing band, I got inspired to search for some other non-slavonic music from Russia. It really gives an alternative impression of the country as big and as diverse as Russia.

Here an example Tatar pop music:










The beautiful national anthem of Udmurtia:




the Russian rock star Zemfira singing in her native Bashkir:





Сhuvash song

This Blog on BBC World Have Your Say

This blog was quoted by BBC World Have Your Say on Friday. The topic was the racist statement by Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, where he said that the world economic crisis was caused by "white people with blue eyes".

BBC people wanted to call me for a comment on the mobile phone, but unfortunately I was in a bus on the way to a RusHydro Seminar on Hydropower in Uglich. What a pity! :(

Still, I'm glad that almost all people in the comments there supported the idea that Mr. da Silva's statement was racist and unacceptable for a national leader. Racism is racism, ethnicity-based prejudices are ethnicity-based prejudiced.

Racist statement by Brazilian president

Brazil president blames white people for crisis

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday blamed the global economic crisis on “white people with blue eyes” and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people’s mistakes.

Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, Mr Lula da Silva told reporters: “This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing.”

//FT

Now what was that for a second?

And this politician will get away with this openly racist (not?) statement? Oh yes, because as long as white people are libeled it's never called "racism". Should he have made a similar statement about black people, there would've been crowds of angry white (!) left-wings at Brazilian embassies all over the world.

Fight Club is the movie for the economic crisis

Indeed, the best movie one should watch during the world economic crisis that promises us the worst recession since the Great Depression is David Fincher's "Fight Club". For economy is not your entire life. At least it should not be it.

Confederalization is Russia's only chance to survive

A brilliant article in today's Gazeta.ru:

http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2009/02/19_a_2945783.shtml

I fully agree with the author.

Russia is a country too large to be effectively managed in a centralized way. And this means that the country has to be decentralized, has to be truly federalized (what it isn't now) or even confederalized.

You can't manage any problems in a same way in the Islamic Northern Caucasus, the Finnish borderlands and the semi-inhabited far eastern Kamchatka that have completely different economical, geographical, cultural conditions. It's impossible to even have a single educational system on a territory that large. Therefore functions should be transferred from the Federal power to local administrations, the more the better.

People should have the chance to achieve real changes on local level and not just to migrate to Moscow or St. Pete for opportunities and career. They should have the freedom and the responsibility instead of relying on the Federal government. The Federal government has to encourage people to develop their home regions - and the only way to do so is to decentralize the country.

Otherwise we will see Russia falling in parts as soon as it faces a serious economic crisis where Moscow starts lacking resources to control the regions. And this process would be accompanied by terrible wars that would make a second Yugoslavia, if not a second Rwanda, out of the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region.

On the other hand, there is the problem that confederalization and decentralization of a country like Russia may end in its collapse. We're used to be forced to live together and every loosening of the brutal binding power creates the temptation for the local elite to break away completely. Especially this relates to regions that are able to live separately like Yakutia, Kaliningrad (former German Eastern Prussia), Tatarstan, Vladivostok.

This means that some other motivation should be created for the regions to be loyal to Russia. One should not be proud of being Slave of an Empire, but should enjoy being a free member of a Federation that gives opportunities and is an attractive example for the neighbouring states.

How bad can the crisis get us?

Somebody said that one should always hope for the better and be prepared for the worst. Looking at all those news related to the economic crisis, hearing about collapsing Eastern Europe, watching that incredible industrial production decrease percentage numbers, seeing the fund market's negative reaction on Obama's signing this Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Mr. Obama's election for US president itself should have already said us all that there's nothing good to expect), is makes you think of what could be the worst thing to happen.

Back to industrial age or even deindustrialization? Dissolution of the Russian Federation (I heard the Constitutional court recently officially re-approved the 1990 for-now symbolic Declaration of Independence of Yakutia, the Siberian republic)? An other world war?

Yeah, and here it reminds me of the Apocalypse scheduled for December 2012 according to the Mayan calendar. Would be funny to wonder in four years from now, how the hell the Mayas could have predicted it so precisely, heh?