Classical Mag

Inflation Hits Venezuelans Where It Hurts: Baseball Parks CARACAS, VENEZUELA— Venezuela's raucous, boozy and affordable baseball games have long provided respite from the growing gloom in the economically struggling country. Now, a more than quadrupling of ticket prices is putting a damper on the national pastime, with the season kicking off this month to sometimes half-empty stadiums and featuring players who say their per diems don't go far enough to buy lunch. On a recent game night, hard-core baseball lovers celebrating what fans call Venezuela's national religion filled about a third of the sooty stadium in central Caracas. The plaza of vendors outside had the ghost-town feel that has come to mark so much of Venezuelan life as the socialist country grapples with the world's highest inflation rate and a severe shortage of imported goods. Average attendance at the 25,000-seat arena is down 25 percent for the first month of the season. While most South Ame...

Obama Removes Burundi from Trade Program U.S. President Barack Obama says he plans to remove Burundi from a U.S. trade preference program because of a worsening crackdown on the political opposition there, after Burundi's president took a controversial third term in office. In a letter to Congress Friday, Obama said the violence against Burundi's opposition includes "assassinations, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests and torture." The measure to drop Burundi from the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) will take effect on January 1. AGOA allows eligible African countries to import certain products without paying any duties, helping the countries to boost exports. Obama said the violence in Burundi "worsened significantly during the election campaign that returned President [Pierre] Nkurunziza to power earlier this year." The decision by Nkurunziza to run for a third term sparked anger from many Burundians who said he was violating the ...

Demand Rises for Teff, Other 'New' Alternatives to Wheat Tom Banse October 30, 2015 2:44 PM NAMPA, IDAHO— Wayne Carlson became a convert to Ethiopia's staple grain while doing public health work in Africa in the mid-1970s. Teff flour is the key ingredient for injera, Ethiopia's signature, spongy flatbread. It has a mild, nutty or earthy taste. In the late 1970s, Carlson returned to the U.S., married and settled in southwest Idaho. Then he hatched the idea to introduce teff grass to North America in his home state. "Geologically, it is very similar to Ethiopia," he explained. "Ethiopia is placed on the East African Rift Valley, which is very much like the Snake River Plain." The Teff Company co-founder Elisabeth Carlson in the flour mill in Nampa. (Credit: Tom Banse) Neither Wayne nor his wife, Elisabeth, is a farmer, nor do they want to be. So they persuaded actual farmers in Idaho, and in the neighboring states of Oregon and Neva...

UN Climate Chief: Global Emissions Pledges Not Enough Yet head of a global conference in December are a good step toward achieving an international global warming goal, but they aren't yet enough, the U.N. climate chief said Friday.   The plans submitted by 146 countries for the climate conference in Paris could cut average global emissions per capita of greenhouse gases by up to 8 percent by 2025 and 9 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, a U.N. assessment found.   U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres' office  didn't directly assess the pledges' impact on the goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century compared with pre-industrial times.   Figueres, however, pointed to an International Energy Agency assessment that they would result in a 2.7-degree increase, compared with 4 to 5 degrees with no action.   "It is a very good step, it is actually a remarkable ...

The story and the numbers The meaning of Valeant’s accounting troubles IT IS fashionable to lament the vapidity and short-termism of institutional shareholders. Without them, it is argued, companies would invest for the long term, run by their enlightened managers. But a rash of creative-accounting incidents is a reminder that firms may go astray. On October 26th Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a drugs company, tried to rebut claims it was massaging its figures. A day later IBM said regulators were investigating how it books its sales. Tesco, a British grocer, is on the rack after admitting inflating its profits. Shares in Noble Group, a Singapore-listed commodities firm accused of questionable book-keeping, have collapsed. In May Hong Kong’s regulators suspended trading in Hanergy, a solar-panel firm. These episodes have had a brutal impact on shareholder wealth, with a total loss of $80 billion. The last outbreak of outright book-cooking was in 2001-03 when Enron, MCI-WorldCom and P...

Buttonwood Take it easy Economies are too weak for normal monetary policy to resume THIS was supposed to be the year when monetary policy started to get back to normal. Seven years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, central banks were expected to edge away from a policy of near-zero interest rates. But now, with the year almost over, the Federal Reserve has yet to push up rates while other rich-world central banks are focused more on easing than on tightening. Sweden’s Riksbank extended its quantitative easing (QE) programme on October 28th. Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, has indicated that further easing may come in December, probably by adjusting the pace, scale or type of asset purchases in its QE regime. More than two-fifths of economists polled by Bloomberg forecast that the Bank of Japan would pick up the pace of its monetary easing on October 30th, after   The   Economist   went to press. Even if policy is kept unchanged, the bank...

The value of university Where’s best? New federal data reveal which colleges do most for their graduates’ pay-packets. They are not the ones you might expect AS THE deadline looms on November 1st for the first round of college applications, America’s annual admissions hysteria is reaching its peak. It is the first big financial decision young people make, and arguably the most important. The Pew Research Centre finds that employed college graduates aged 25-32 earn 63% more than those with only high-school degrees. But such returns come with ever-greater financial risk: since 1978, tuition fees have risen three times as fast as inflation. College is still thought to be the best investment in America. But that view is based on broad averages, which obscure the differences among the country’s 7,800 higher-education institutions. Sadly for economists, students are not assigned to colleges randomly, which makes it difficult to determine which schools are worth the cost. Are Harvar...

Monetary policy in Japan The Bank of Japan keeps printing money at speed NACTION may at first glance seem more timid than pulling out the monetary bazooka—but it took nerve for Haruhiko Kuroda to hold fire at the Bank of Japan’s monetary-policy meeting on October 30th. The central bank’s policy board, which Mr Kuroda effectively controls, voted 8-1 to maintain the existing programme of quantitative easing (QE, or printing money to buy bonds) at its current level of ¥80 trillion ($660 billion) a year. Given that Japan is officially back in mild deflation for the first time since 2013, when the BoJ began QE, it was a bold decision not to act. The BoJ’s mandate, after all, is to produce sustained inflation of 2%. But Mr Kuroda kept his faith in gradually recovering growth, and in a range of measures which, he believes, suggest robust underlying price rises. In July the central bank began publishing a new index of inflation, known as “new core CPI”, which strips out both the pr...