Oil, debt, banking and the world recession

The threat of a major debt crisis is presently hanging over the international financial community like Damocles' sword. Behind the crisis lies the flood of petrodollars into the financial institutions of the industrial world since the mid 1970s and the consequent large-scale lending to “doubtful customers”. A simple solution to the problem is not in sight

Remembering the City: Changing Conceptions of Community in Urban China

Adopting complimentary integrative research methodologies, this article examines changing conceptions of community amongst urban residents within the city of Suzhou, Jiangsu province, China. Whilst the impact of urban transformation from a macro-perspective, deploying large scale quantitative measures to capture resident perceptions within China’s mega-cities, has been addressed, there is something of a scholarly lacuna that adopts a micro-perspective to explore the nation-state’s smaller developing cities. Thus, through local residents’ past memories, ‘everyday’ experiences of (former) urban communities, and reflections on a particular way of life, we focus upon the subjective/affective meanings and memories attached to processes of urban change. We place emphasis on the manner in which residents make sense of socio-spatial transformations in relation to the (re)making of community, local social interaction, and a sense of belonging. Discussion centres on the affective and embodied notions of a particular way of life in (older) communities; sensory performances that were deemed difficult to replicate within modern development zones and the broader field of contemporary Chinese society

Economic Theory and Some Disobliging Aspects of Electricity Trading and Deregulation

The main purpose of this note is to make a few up-to-date remarks about electricity deregulation. As things have unfortunately turned out, instead of reducing the price of electricity, the deregulation of electricity has often resulted in escalation. Recent examples of this phenomenon are Sweden and the state of Montana in the US, where prices suddenly spiked to record levels, and then stabilized at twice the original price. (The Montana deregulation failure was examined in considerable detail on the well-known news program "60 Minutes"). Of course, where the US is concerned, the most important event associated with electricity deregulation is probably the California Utilities Commission terminating the deregulation experiment after unambiguously labelling it a failure, and the same thing has happened in Ontario, Canada