Pinchas Landau writes about Israeli and Global economics, finance and politics
No major financial market generates as much frustration and perplexity as the foreign exchange market – and it’s not hard to understand why. Take the last few days as a prime example: A series of negative developments relating to the state of the US economy — which included a downbeat assessment from the Federal Reserve Board, as well as shockingly […]
» Read moreMany Israelis, from huge global corporations to ordinary households, made major efforts to take part in the global real estate bubble that began in the mid-1990s and collapsed in 2006-2007. As usual in these situations, those who got in early did very well for themselves, whilst the late-comers – always the majority in these situations – fared poorly or, if […]
» Read moreYesterday, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England both announced that they were maintaining interest rates at their current very low levels. Last week, the Federal Reserve did the same. As for Japan, it virtually goes without saying that rates there will remain at their current zero level and the focus of attention when the Bank of Japan […]
» Read moreAfter several decades in which Israel’s ‘energy sector’ comprised a bunch of half-baked local companies (legally structured as partnerships, but let’s skip the niceties) in the “oil exploration sector”, Israel is on the way to becoming an energy producer and an energy exporter. The process began in 1999, when deposits of natural gas were discovered offshore by the ‘Yam Thetis’ […]
» Read more“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time”. These famous and seemingly prophetic words were uttered by Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, as dusk fell over London on August 3, 1914. Grey had just sent the British ultimatum to Germany, following the latter’s invasion of Belgium, but he […]
» Read moreO THE month of May, the merry month of May, So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green! ‘The Merry Month of May’, a sloshy poem of which the above is merely the opening, was written by the Elizabethan dramatist, Thomas Dekker and originally published in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). The discerning reader will require no […]
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