Early Headlines: 56% of Germans Say Greek Deal Bad, No China Meltdown, More Iran Deal Details, Slavery in Brazil, KKK Rallies ‘Round the Flag and More

Early Bird Headlines 19 July 2015

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

Global

• The Freakish Year in Broken Climate Records (Bloomberg) The annual State of the Climate report is out, and it’s ugly. Record heat, record sea levels, more hot days and fewer cool nights, surging cyclones, unprecedented pollution, and rapidly diminishing glaciers. And yet, with global heat records set, there were places (like central Asia, the eastern U.S.and Canada) which had unusual cold. Bloomberg says the state of the climate is “broken”.
  

U.S.

• Why Isn’t American a Language? (BBC News) Britain and the US share a common language – but English is spoken and spelled very differently on each side of the Atlantic. According to this article the language in England has changed more over the centuries than it has in “the colonies”.
• KKK rallies to Confederate flag at South Carolina capitol (Reuters) A klansman speaking on a video says the Confederate flag does not stand for hatred.
  

Germany

• More than half of Germans think planned Greek deal is bad: poll (Germany) Only 2% think the deal was positive and 27% said they thought it was somewhat positive. And 48% would liked to see a Grexit from the Eurozone.
  

Iran

• Nuclear deal will not change Iran’s relations with U.S.: supreme leader (Reuters) Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday the nuclear deal with world powers did not signal any wider shift in Iran’s relationship with Washington or its policies in the Middle East. The agreement struck this week was met with celebrations in the streets of Tehran as many Iranians anticipated it would allow the economy, battered by years of sanctions, to stabilize and make their daily lives easier. But Khamenei, who has the last word on high matters of state and had given his blessing to the nuclear talks, moved to dampen any speculation it would lead to a broader rapprochement with the United States.
• Where the U.S. Caved to Get Iran to Sign (Bloomberg View) if you compare the deal today with what was described in a White House fact sheet on the “framework” reached in April it shows that the West ceded a lot of ground to Iran in those final days in Vienna. The West did get inspections of military sites and a phase-in of lifting of sanctions, but Iran got concessions like the ability to undertake research and reprocessing for spent nuclear fuel after 15 years and pursue uranium enrichment after 8 years.

China

• No, China Is Not in an Economic Meltdown (Ian Bremmer, Time) Hat tip to Frank Li. Bremmer says that recent media coverage of wild price swings on China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite got one major thing wrong: treating China’s stock market as if it operated like markets in the West. It doesn’t, and won’t anytime soon. Although the volatility in Shanghai will likely continue, the market isn’t headed for an October 1929-scale meltdown. China’s government has tools it can use to protect the market that Washington doesn’t have to boost Wall Street. Econintersect: We agree with Bremmer’s assessment, but do think that Chinese stock markets may be in for a lengthy period of more pedestrian performance following all the turbulence. And of course China does have other economic problems to wrestle with as they progress through a multi-year restructuring of their economy. See the next article for area to cause them some concern.
• Manage, meddle or magnify? China’s corporate debt threat (Reuters) Beijing may have averted a crisis in its stock markets with heavy-handed intervention, but the world’s biggest corporate debt pile – $16.1 trillion and rising – is a much greater threat to its slowing economy and will not be so easily managed. Corporate China’s debts, at 160 percent of GDP, are twice that of the United States, having sharply deteriorated in the past five years, a Thomson Reuters study of over 1,400 companies shows. And the debt mountain is set to climb 77 percent to $28.8 trillion over the next five years, credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s estimates.
• China tour arrests were ‘misunderstanding over documentary’ (BBC News) A misunderstanding about a documentary members of a tour to China watched in their hotel led to their arrests, says a spokesman for two of the party. Three Britons arrived home on Saturday – the last of 20 UK, South African and Indian nationals to be deported since their detention in Inner Mongolia. They are said to have watched a film about Mongol warlord Genghis Khan to help them get the most out of the trip. But Chinese officials mistook it for a terrorist video, according to members of the tour party.

Brazil

• Heartache and Suffering: Slavery in Brazil (Al Jazeera) There is a journey across the north of Brazil that few who make it ever forget. It goes from the often-destitute farms and villages of the country’s northeast along disintegrating freeways and across the waters of the River Araguaia on rusting ferry boats. Down ragged red dirt tracks, it arrives at the frayed periphery of the Amazon rainforest, where the voyage ends. This is the slavery road, along which thousands of poor workers are trafficked, threatened, beaten and made to work without pay on farms or down coalmines or deforesting the jungle. It has happened for decades and – despite efforts to combat it – is still commonplace in the world’s eighth-largest economy.

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