Tag Archives: Business New Europe

What are grown-up investors to make of relations between Russia and the West? The rhetoric emanating from politicians and media commentators, in the US and UK at least, seems to be drawn from another era. Mainstream British and American newspapers are full of coverage about the Kremlin’s connections to US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Some headlines go into full Cold War retro mode, talking of spy swaps and “Soviet agents”.

Russia’s official media has, typically, responded in spades. Against the background of the Ukraine crisis and related sanctions, accusations of “Kremlin meddling” in the US election have been met with more, even harsher, anti-Western rhetoric from Moscow. Such spiralling paranoia makes it seem like we’re through a bizarre re-run of the halcyon days of McCarthyism and Mutually Assured Destruction.
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BNE INTERVIEW: Sir Suma Chakrabarti, EBRD President

March 18, 2016

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China’s new membership of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is “a win all round”, says EBRD President Sir Suma Chakrabarti, rejecting criticism that allowing the People’s Republic to join contradicts the multilateral’s Articles of Association.

“It’s definitely a win for the EBRD to have the world’s second-largest economy as a shareholder, allowing us to do proper business development in China and encouraging Chinese companies to work with us,” Sir Suma tells bne IntelliNews, during an exclusive interview in London.

BNE INVISIBLE HAND: EU-Russia Food Fight Masks Business As Usual

September 24, 2015

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For several days in late July and early August, thousands of farmers across North East France used tractors to obstruct roads from Germany. The aim was to prevent trucks carrying agricultural goods from crossing the Rhine. In South West France, too, more Gallic protesters, similarly mounted on tractors, blocked farm produce coming from Spain.

In Russia, meanwhile, customs authorities invited TV cameras to film the destruction of 20 tons of French and Spanish cheese using a bulldozer, while crushing a range of other foods – including bacon, tomatoes and nectarines.

These two bizarre events – French tractors stopping food imports from within the EU, and televised “fromagicide” – are not unrelated. Both stem from Moscow’s decision a year ago to ban farm produce from America, Canada, Norway, Australia and, most significantly, members of the EU.
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BNE INVISIBLE HAND: Upstart Brics Starting To Raise Their Game

July 22, 2015

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In early July, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa assembled in Ufa, around 700 miles east of Moscow, for the seventh annual Brics summit.

Overshadowed by Europe’s currency imbroglio and China’s stock market nosedive – along with the usual plethora of summer sporting events – this diplomatic gathering in the Bashkirian capital deserved far more media attention than it got.

BNE INVISIBLE HAND: Why Fukuyama is still wrong, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

October 24, 2014

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It’s 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Billed as the most important political event of the second half of the twentieth century, the collapse of Communism has been much commented upon but rather less widely understood.

Far from marking the “end of history”, the demise of state-planning in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the subsequent dissolution of the Warsaw pact, ushered in an era when history significantly sped-up. Developments that took decades or even centuries in other parts of the world, have been compressed into just a few tumultuous years.

BNE INVISIBLE HAND: Turkey needs to get its groove back

July 23, 2014

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Turkey’s economic potential is obvious. Sitting at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, this secular, predominantly Muslim democracy could hardly be more strategically located. With its blend of Western and Eastern cultures and fast-growing 74m-strong population, many of them young and well-educated, Turkey should be among the world’s most attractive emerging markets.

And so it has seemed. The Turkish economy has tripled in size since the early 2000s, riding an almighty wave of consumption and construction. Foreign direct investment has poured in. This ancient country, with its ubiquitous monuments and minarets, now has a multitude of skyscrapers, shopping malls and infrastructure mega-projects. These include the $11bn Istanbul-Izmir motorway, a high-speed Ankara-Istanbul rail-link and a plausible bid to build the world’s largest airport, handling 150m passengers a year.