As Nicole Johnston of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports, this comes with both benefits and drawbacks.

But while the West Bank has reaped the benefits of globalization, it has also seen hardship. Businessmen are complaining less about Israel and more about cheap exports from China, sometimes known in the West Bank as the “beast from the East.”

Worldfocus producer Mohammad al-Kassim examines the impact of globalization on Palestinian commerce.

A woman carries food from an aid organization in Liberia.

Though its civil war ended years ago, Liberia remains politically and economically unstable — and more may suffer as food and fuel prices rise around the world.

Glenna Gordon is a freelance writer and photographer currently based in Monrovia, Liberia. She has reported from Uganda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Rwanda and writes at the “Scarlett Lion” blog about encountering a trio of problems in Liberia: food, money and transportation.

Tryin’ Small

Before I came to Liberia, friends and colleagues warned me that it wouldn’t be easy. It isn’t. But in ways that are different than I expected.

FOOD

Thomas is a nice young man who comes to our house about once a week to wash clothes. On Tuesday, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind picking up a few things for us at the vegetable market. I don’t have time to go and haggle over the price of an avocado every week, and it’s a way for him to earn a little extra money.

He brought three moldy heads of cabbage, tiny onions (not the shallot kind, the picked-before-they-were-fully-mature kind), mushy potatoes already gone bad, instead of a pound of fresh tomatoes about a dozen small jars of tomato paste, and four avocados that won’t be ripe for at least a few weeks.

The best part was when I asked Thomas why he didn’t bring fresh tomatoes, he looked confused, and then asked me if I was referring to the “bush fruit.”

Fifteen dollars later, I plan to give all guests who visit my house over the next few weeks a small jar of tomato paste as a parting gift.

MONEY

There are no ATMs or banks linked to the international banking system in Liberia. That means no Visas, Master Card, Barclays, or any other bank card will get you cash if you stick the piece of plastic in a Liberian ATM. It’s all EcoBank, all the time.

I’ve been trying to get my bank at home to wire money to my EcoBank account. This isn’t easy. I have to fax them a form. There aren’t a lot of working fax machines in Liberia. Since that technology is based on land lines (which there aren’t) and became vogue in a tech era of yore (when Liberia was at war), this is difficult. My boyfriend found one, and faxed the form. The bank won’t accept it because it was a scan, and not a fax. I’m not sure how that happened.

Finally, through only slightly duplicitous means, we got money into our EcoBank account here. I went to the bank yesterday to withdraw. The bank’s computer system was down.

TRANSPORTATION

There isn’t really public transportation in Liberia in any sort of organized way. You can flag down a yellow taxi (literally a falling apart four door small vehicle), squeeze in the back where four people always sit, or in the front, where two people sit next to the driver, and pay about 5 LD for a ride (that’s Liberian Dollars equivalent to about eight American pennies). But, there aren’t enough taxis in town and you might wait up to an hour to catch a ride which may or may not take you where you need to go, since there are also no set taxi routes.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Peter Casierunder a Creative Commons license.

Financier Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud case has made headlines worldwide.

News of what may be the largest Ponzi scheme in history – a $50 billion fraud case alleging wrongdoing by former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff — rocked U.S. and foreign investors.

Similar fraud cases recently emerged in other world markets as well. In Canada, for example, many farmers lost thousands of dollars to fradulent pigeon-meat businessman Arlan Galbraith. In Colombia, up to 500,000 investors face losses thanks to Ponzi schemes.

Daniel Kaufmann is the director of the World Bank’s Global Programs and Governance and writes at the “Global Governance” blog about worldwide Ponzi schemes and their relationship to the global financial crisis.

Ponzi Schemes in Russia, Colombia and the US: from Mavrodi to Murcia to Madoff

Very recently we witnessed political and social unrest in Colombia due to the implosion of the DMG pyramid scheme (named after the scammer, David Murcia Guzman).  And now we got Madoff in Wall Street.  These cases today show how difficult it is sometimes to learn from the past.  Especially when past events are far way in space and time…

I have received articles from experts in Colombia who found parallels with the analysis I made long time ago on the Mavrodi’s MMM pyramid scheme collapse that inflicted major pain on so many Russian citizens in 1994.  The focus of my old article was particularly on the MMM Russian case.  But there were other such financial collapses caused by pyramid schemes at that time–including in Romania, and of course the tragic case of Albania, in which 2,000 citizens died during the civil war that ensued.

Pyramid schemes in the financial sector are known as ‘Ponzi schemes’ – after Charles Ponzi who scammed many Bostonians almost a century ago.  A Ponzi scheme fraud occurs when the money of fresh investors, attracted by the promise of ‘fantastic’ dividends, is used to pay the previous investors.  The first group of investors to enter the scheme gets high dividends, the word spreads about the high payoff to those early investors, fresh investors are attracted, until everything falls apart because the much broader group of latecomers cannot be compensated by the eventual cap in the number of new investors attracted into the scheme.  It is literally a house of cards, with no actual investments, but based instead, on an unrealistic expectation of ever growing cadres of new ‘investor’ cohorts to pay the previous cohort.  When such perennial growth fails to materialize, it becomes impossible to pay returns to the previous investors that had already joined relatively late in the game.

So the DMG debacle in Colombia is nothing new.  The similarities with past events are obvious.  Even in the present, Colombia does not stand alone, as we now face in the US what is arguable: the largest ‘pure’ Ponzi scheme caused by an individual.  This is the case of Bernard Madoff, former chairman of Nasdaq stock market.  Madoff himself seemed to have acknowledged (even bragged?) that his fraud was a Ponzi scheme (a big lie…), estimated at about US $50 billion!

That is the blatantly obvious part.

But at the same time, and much less obvious, and with little media coverage, is the issue of the link between the financial and mortgage markets disaster (that started months ago in the US), on the one side, and pyramid schemes, on the other.

Even if less obvious, some of the characteristics of the actions and schemes promoted by some of the main actors in the real estate, mortgage and financial markets contain some Ponzi scheme elements.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user jenn_jenn under a Creative Commons license.

Mohannad Aama, managing director of Beam Capital Management, speaks with Martin Savidge about the upheaval in credit and fixed income markets as well as the spike in LIBOR — London’s overnight bank lending rate.

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