Free Republic

Much of the current global economic crisis can be traced in part to greed, poor governance and regulatory failures, epitomised in cases such as the Bernie Madoff scam, massive derivative trading at AIG or poor risk management at Lehman Brothers. As economies now begin to emerge from the recession, attention is turning to the need to fine-tune business practices and free-market capitalism to ensure more sustained, equitable growth. Sarunee Archavananthakul, an academic at Thammasat University, said local executives should consider adopting the concepts of sustainable finance to their business models. Sustainable finance involves financial management that balances the goal to...

<>The International Monetary Fund (IMF) should expand the basket of Special Drawing Rights to include the Chinese yuan, commodity currencies and gold, a senior Kremlin official said on Tuesday. The SDR is an international reserve asset allocated to member countries with its exchange rate determined by a basket of currencies, at the moment including dollar, euro, yen and sterling. A review of the basket is due in November 2010. "The rouble, yuan deserve to be included in the SDR basket," Kremlin economy aide Arkady Dvorkovich told a news conference ahead of the first summit of Brazil, Russia, India and China,...

China continued to consider a “super-sovereignty” currency among the countries of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an intergovernmental mutual-security organization that met today in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, in the Urals at the division of Asia and Europe. Members include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, with India as one of its four observers. Right after the SCO meeting, the BRIC country (Brazil, Russia, India and China) leaders met formally for the first time. It is not merely coincident that three of them have expressed a desire to adjust their foreign exchange reserve portfolios by reducing the share or...

Brazil, Russia, India and China on Tuesday called for a more diversified international monetary system, but wrapped up their first full-fledged summit by avoiding any explicit criticism of the world's dominant currency, the U.S. dollar. The statement issued by the leaders from the so-called BRIC nations contained no reference to developing new reserve currencies to complement the dollar, which Russia had called for at a separate event earlier in the day. Instead, the cautious wording appeared to reflect China's concerns that any anti-dollar statements could erode the value of its currency reserves. "There is a strong need for a stable,...

Time to Defend the Dollar By Robert RomanoAs ALG News recently warned, helicopter money is about to be dumped onto the global economy. In fact, and unless the American people can focus their efforts to opposing it, the U.S. will squander yet another hundred billion dollars in foreign aid to help an international institution create a worldwide reserve currency, burying the U.S. dollar once and for all.Last month at the G-20 summit, Barack Obama pledged a $100 billion line of credit to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of a $550 billion global effort to bolster the international bank....