Think carefully before joining China-led bank, urges US |
- Think carefully before joining China-led bank, urges US
- Hollywood can save the American family — Megan McArdle
- Greek’s latest stalling approach angers euro creditors
- US Presbyterian Church close to accepting same-sex marriage
- New Windows Hello: Sign in to your device using your face or fingerprint
- Gate closing on 2016 US presidential candidates — Jonathan Bernstein
| Think carefully before joining China-led bank, urges US Posted: 17 Mar 2015 06:00 PM PDT
The concerted move by US allies to participate in Beijing's flagship economic outreach project is a diplomatic blow to the United States and its efforts to counter the fast-growing economic and diplomatic influence of China. Europe's participation reflects the eagerness to partner with China's fast-growing economy, the world's second largest, and comes amid prickly trade negotiations between Brussels and Washington. European Union and Asian governments are frustrated that the US Congress has held up a reform of voting rights in the International Monetary Fund that would give China and other emerging powers more say in global economic governance. Washington has questioned whether the new bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), will have high standards of governance and environmental and social safeguards. "I hope before the final commitments are made anyone who lends their name to this organization will make sure that the governance is appropriate," US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told US lawmakers. Lew warned the Republican-dominated Congress that China and other rising powers were challenging American leadership in global financial institutions, and he urged lawmakers to swiftly ratify stalled reform of the IMF. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble announced at a joint news conference with visiting Chinese Vice Premier Ma Kai that Germany, Europe's biggest economy and a major trade partner of Beijing, would be a founding member of the AIIB. In a joint statement, the foreign and finance ministers of Germany, France and Italy said they would work to ensure the new institution "follows the best standards and practices in terms of governance, safeguards, debt and procurement policies." Luxembourg's Finance Ministry confirmed the country, a big financial centre, has also applied to be a founding member of the US$50 billion (RM184b) AIIB. The AIIB was launched in Beijing last year to spur investment in Asia in transportation, energy, telecommunications and other infrastructure. It was seen as a rival to the Western-dominated World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. China has said it will use the best practices of those institutions. A spokeswoman for the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, endorsed member states' participation in the AIIB as a way of tackling global investment needs and as an opportunity for EU companies. The bank is seen as a means to spread Chinese "soft power" in the region, possibly at the expense of the United States, which is pursuing its own Asian strategy to strengthen its military and economic presence there. The World Bank is traditionally run by a US nominee and Washington also has the most influence at the IMF. The adjustment of shares and voting rights in the IMF was brokered by Britain at a Group of 20 summit in 2010, and European countries ratified it long ago. Lew told lawmakers that the US delay was undermining its credibility and influence as countries question the United States' commitment to international institutions. "It's not an accident that emerging economies are looking at other places because they are frustrated that, frankly, the United States has stalled a very mild and reasonable set of reforms in the IMF," Lew said. 'High watermark' China said earlier this year a total of 26 countries had been included as AIIB founder members, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. It plans to finalize the articles of agreement by the end of the year. China's state-owned Xinhua news agency said South Korea and Switzerland were also considering joining. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei would not comment on which countries had applied, and repeated that the bank would be "open, inclusive, transparent and responsible." Scott Morris, a former U.S. Treasury official who led US engagement with the multilateral development banks during the first Obama administration, said Washington was paying the price for delay on IMF reform and for focusing on criticising the AIIB instead of working harder to improve existing institutions. "It's a clear sentiment among a pretty diverse group of countries: We would like to mobilise more capital for infrastructure through MDBs (multilateral development banks)," said Morris, now with the Washington-based Centre for Global Development. "And the US stands in the way of that and now finds itself increasingly isolated as a result." A government official in India, which also has joined, said the members of the AIIB would meet in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on March 29-31 to discuss the articles of agreement. China has said March 31 is the deadline for accepting founder-members into the organisation. Japan, Australia and South Korea remain notable regional absentees from the AIIB. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at the weekend he would make a final decision on membership soon. South Korea has said it is still in discussions with China and other countries about possible participation. Japan, China's main regional rival, has the biggest shareholding in the Asian Development Bank along with the United States. By convention, the Manila-based bank is headed by a Japanese. Japan is unlikely to join the AIIB, but ADB head Takehiko Nakao told the Nikkei Asian Review that the two institutions were in discussions and could work together. "We've begun sharing our experience and know-how," Nakao was quoted as saying. "Once the AIIB has actually been established, it's conceivable that we would cooperate." — Reuters  |
| Hollywood can save the American family — Megan McArdle Posted: 17 Mar 2015 05:42 PM PDT MARCH 18 — Robert Putnam's "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis" has touched off a wave of print and digital commentary. The book chronicles a growing divide between the way affluent kids are raised, in two-parent homes whose parents invest heavily in educating their kids, and the very different, very unstable homes in which poorer kids generally grow up. Naturally, social conservatives are delighted with this lengthy examination of the problems created by unstable families, even if they are not equally delighted with Putnam's recommendations (more government programmes). Equally naturally, there is pushback from those who see the problem as primarily one of economics and insufficient government spending, as well as from those who argue that there are lots of good ways to raise kids outside the straitjacket of mid-century, middle-class mores. I have been trying to find a more delicate way to phrase this, but I can't: This is nonsense. The advantages that two people raising their own biological or jointly adopted children have over "nontraditional" family arrangements are too obvious to need enumeration, but apparently mere obviousness is not enough to forestall contrary arguments, so let me enumerate them anyway. Raising children the way an increasing percentages of Americans are—in loosely attached cohabitation arrangements that break up all too frequently, followed by the formation of new households with new children by different parents—is an enormous financial and emotional drain. Supporting two households rather than one is expensive, and it diverts money that could otherwise be invested in the kids. The parent in the home has no one to help shoulder the load of caring for kids, meaning less investment of time and more emotional strain on the custodial parent. Children will spend less time with their noncustodial parent, especially if that parent has other offspring. Add in conflict between the parents over money and time, and it can infect relationships with the children. As one researcher told me when I wrote an article on the state of modern marriage, you frequently see fathers investing time and money with the kids whose mother they get along with the best, while the other children struggle along on crumbs.
Are there situations in which a single-parent home is better than the alternative? Sure, many. I'm not arguing that we should outlaw divorce or force 15-year-olds to marry. But that doesn't mean pretending there is no difference. There is a big difference—and a systematic difference between the way the affluent and the poor form families is going to mean systematic differences in the outcomes for affluent and poor kids. Trying to explain this all with a bad labour market or insufficient government benefits won't wash, either. It doesn't explain why people in 1930, who were much poorer in every sense than people today and had virtually nothing in the way of a government safety net, managed to get and stay married. As David Brooks notes, to explain the problem—and to fix it—you also need to talk about community norms. At the New Republic, Elizabeth Bruenig writes a rather sharp rejoinder to Brooks. Like Tyler Cowen, I don't think she really grapples effectively with Brooks' argument. "Morality should teach us how to live a good life. But to impose the easy virtue of the well-to-do on the poor is to request the most stressed and vulnerable members of society to display impossible moral heroism," she writes. "To abstain from relationships, sex, and childbirth until financially secure enough to raise a child without assistance would mean, for many, a life of celibacy; to pour limited resources into education in order to score a respectable job would mean failing to make rent." I certainly agree that celibacy is an unlikely goal for most of the population to adopt. However, I'm not clear on why she thinks this is necessary. Somehow, Americans used to manage to get and stay married despite much more limited financial resources; how did they perform this seemingly impossible feat? Virtually any answer you give is going to come back to some version of "norms." As a wise social scientist once told me, before you speak, always be sure that you are not conclusively proving the impossibility of something that already exists. There is, however, a better criticism of the Brooks column, one that I haven't seen made: Notably, how do you change norms across a society as heterogenous as ours? When I was writing that article on marriage, I put this question to Kathryn Edin, an ethnographer who has done a lot of research on these sorts of family patterns. Her response was profound: With the distance between rich and poor so great, it's hard even to think of a way that you could communicate different values to people who live such wholly separated lives. The distance that matters in this case is not the much— discussed distance between the 1 per cent and everyone else. Instead, it is the distance between the top 25 per cent and the bottom 25 per cent—between the people who still mostly live by the old injunctions to get married and stay married if you want to have kids, often while politely declaring that this doesn't actually matter, and the people who are actually having their children in much more fragile and temporary relationships. As Americans have become more sorted by income, education and class, we have lost much of our power to make the sorts of broad cultural changes that Brooks advocates. There is one place this change might come from: Hollywood. Entertainment is a surprisingly powerful venue for articulating social norms, and if Hollywood decided that it had a social responsibility to promote stable families and changed its story lines accordingly, that might actually do some good. I'm not talking about sticking a few propaganda story lines into Very Special Episodes of some sitcom, which wouldn't do a darn thing. Rather, I'm saying that if Hollywood actually believed that married two-parent families were overwhelmingly optimal, that would naturally shape what they wrote, in a way that would in turn probably shape what Americans believe, and do. But this is an inherently socially conservative message, and Hollywood is about the furthest thing you can name from socially conservative—our entertainment industry tends to send socially conservative messages only accidentally, as it did with "16 and Pregnant." And there is nearly as much social distance between David Brooks and your average Hollywood show runner as there is between David Brooks and the kids whose lives he wants to change. — Bloomberg * This is the personal opinion of the columnist. |
| Greek’s latest stalling approach angers euro creditors Posted: 17 Mar 2015 05:41 PM PDT
Describing the annoyance that has been building up among euro zone countries with the new Greek government's approach, one euro zone official said: "For many people the teleconference this afternoon could be something of a last straw." Euro zone deputy finance ministers held a teleconference at 1530 GMT to get an "update on the state of play" on Greece, which is running out of cash and time to negotiate and implement reforms that would unblock loans to prevent it from defaulting. But three sources with knowledge of the call said that, instead of an update, a Greek official had said these issues would be discussed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at the EU leaders meeting in Brussels. Tsipras, whose left-led coalition took power in January, is due to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French leader Francois Hollande as well as top EU officials. Two sources said that one of the officials on the call, which the sources described as short, said following the Greek refusal to update that the creditors were "riding a dead horse," suggesting the talks were getting nowhere. European officials said they did not understand what Greece hoped to achieve by bringing the issue to the summit, where Greece is not on the formal agenda and could only be discussed in meetings on the sidelines and only in broad political terms. They said EU leaders could not offer Tsipras anything more than the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers, because any further financial help to Athens hinged on reforms that Greece would have to implement, despite its great reluctance. All three sources with knowledge of the call confirmed the content, and the anger of euro zone ministers with the attitude of the Greek government, which does not want to honor reform commitments made by its predecessor in exchange for almost €240 billion (RM940b) in loans. The Tsipras government won the Jan. 25 election on slogans of rejecting budget consolidation and reversing some of the reforms. Euro zone officials believe Athens has made unrealistic promises it cannot now finance. While Greece agreed early last week to restart talks with its creditors on what reforms would have to be implemented to unblock further loans from the euro zone, there has been no progress since then apart from cooperation of technical teams to gather relevant data. Time is running out because Athens is likely to run of cash by the end of the month and may then default on its debt, potentially forcing itself out of the euro zone. — Reuters |
| US Presbyterian Church close to accepting same-sex marriage Posted: 17 Mar 2015 05:40 PM PDT
The 171 regional "presbyteries" or local leadership bodies of the church have been voting on whether to change the wording to call marriage a contract "between a woman and a man" to being "between two people, traditionally a man and a woman." The definition under debate is contained in the Louisville, Kentucky-based church's "Book of Order," part of its constitution. The change requires a simple majority of 86 votes, and only one more vote is needed, according to the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative group which opposes the change. The vote could come by yesterday night. The church has more than 1.7 million members. A gathering of elders and ministers of the church voted last June to allow clergy to perform same-sex weddings. The move gave clergy the choice of whether to preside over same-sex marriages in states where they are legal. In 2012, the church's General Assembly narrowly voted to reject a proposal to redefine marriage as a union between "two people." The church, also known as PCUSA, has lost more than 500,000 members over the past decade. Some church leaders have expressed concern that endorsement of same-sex marriage could cause an exodus of parishioners who see it as incompatible with biblical teachings. "These are indeed difficult days for folks both within the PCUSA and other denominations that have made these same choices in the past," said Carmen Fowler LaBerge, president of the Lay Committee, in a conference call yesterday. Clergy will not be compelled to perform same-sex marriage if the wording is changed. David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta, said that as with other denominations like the United Church of Christ that have changed policy on gay and lesbian issues, some congregants will be lost, but others will be gained. "All across Christianity, we see the dominoes falling of abandoning the historic stigma and rejection of gay people and gay relationships," Gushee said. The US Supreme Court agreed this year to take up the issue of whether states can ban gay marriage, which is now allowed by 36 states and the District of Columbia. — Reuters |
| New Windows Hello: Sign in to your device using your face or fingerprint Posted: 17 Mar 2015 05:38 PM PDT
Microsoft said its Windows Hello feature will support biometric authentication as part of an effort to reduce the use of passwords, which can often be hacked. This means "using your face, iris, or fingerprint to unlock your devices," Microsoft vice president Joe Belfiore said in a blog post. "You ― uniquely you ― plus your device are the keys to your Windows experience, apps, data and even websites and services, not a random assortment of letters and numbers that are easily forgotten, hacked, or written down and pinned to a bulletin board." The move comes following a wave of reports about hacking into databases, which can lead to identity theft and other crimes. Apple and Samsung have already begun putting fingerprint sensors on their smartphones, and other types of biometrics are being developed across a range of products and services. Belfiore said Windows Hello offers improved online security because it "enables you to authenticate applications, enterprise content, and even certain online experiences without a password being stored on your device or in a network server at all." Microsoft has begun testing for Windows 10, which is being developed for both traditional PCs and mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. No precise date has been given for its launch. Belfiore said "there will be plenty of exciting new Windows 10 devices to choose from which will support Windows Hello," and that if the device already has a fingerprint reader, it will be compatible with the new authentication system. Infrared imaging For facial or iris detection, "Windows Hello uses a combination of special hardware and software to accurately verify it is you ― not a picture of you or someone trying to impersonate you," he wrote. "The cameras use infrared technology to identify your face or iris and can recognize you in a variety of lighting conditions." Microsoft also announced that developers of other services would accept the same authentication under the programming system dubbed "Passport." This provides a more secure way of letting users sign in to website or apps. This opt-in system will verify the user of a device before authenticating that person for the wider range of services accepting Passport. "Instead of using a shared or shareable secret like a password, Windows 10 helps to securely authenticate to applications, websites and networks on your behalf ― without sending up a password. Thus, there is no shared password stored on their servers for a hacker to potentially compromise," Belfiore said. ― AFP |
| Gate closing on 2016 US presidential candidates — Jonathan Bernstein Posted: 17 Mar 2015 05:28 PM PDT MARCH 18 — When is it too late to run for president in 2016? For Democrats, it's already too late. For Republicans, the gate is closing soon. Most Republican presidential candidates have been all-in for months—Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz seem to have been fully engaged in the presidential race before they even took their seats in the Senate. However, two Republican governors who look great on paper, Indiana's Mike Pence and Ohio's John Kasich, have been tip-toeing around the fringes of the contest. At Bloomberg Politics, Mark Niquette reports the latest on the Kasich not-quite-campaign. Meanwhile, some Democrats seem to have just discovered the downside of a walkover by Hillary Clinton, and are belatedly calling for candidates—that is, viable nominees, not just protest candidates or gadflies—to challenge her. Technically, the deadlines that matter are the filing dates for early primaries. Those are still many months away. (While the calendar isn't set yet for 2016, the 2012 deadline in New Hampshire wasn't until late October 2011.) Candidates can still organise in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina even if they don't get started until this summer. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry didn't fully enter the 2012 primary until the summer of 2011. His subsequent problems appeared unrelated to the relatively late entry. So there's plenty of time remaining for Pence or Kasich.
On the Democratic side, that competition is basically over. Clinton has come close to monopolising the support of politicians, campaign and governing professionals, donors and activists, party-aligned interest groups and the partisan media. Even if a competitor jumped in now and mobilised all the party's uncommitted resources, there appear to be too few outstanding to mount a viable campaign. At the same time, if Clinton were suddenly to drop out, other strong Democrats would have plenty of time to engage—and would. (See Dan Drezner's contrary view here.) It's a lot harder to tell where things stand on the Republican side. Candidates have begun to hire staff and secure financial commitments, leaving fewer donors and campaign professionals available for late entrants. Both Kasich and Pence have been participating in the invisible primary—the competition for resources that precedes actual primary voting—but in a much less dedicated fashion than Scott Walker, Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. Indeed, it's already too late for someone to jump into the invisible primary. The candidates we've got now are probably all the candidates we're likely to get. — Bloomberg * This is the personal opinion of the columnist. |
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