an icelandic economist in soho

By Sjón

(my tr.)

orange tents
sprout up
around the pub

and he wonders
if the flies that seek  his beer
are real

*

the world’s economy is governed by a giant baby
that extends between the oceans

when it cries the shares fall one after the other

like snow buntings
over snow
in a snowy winter
like snow buntings
over a snowy winter
on snow
like snow
over snow buntings
in a snowy winter
like snow
over a snowy winter
on snow buntings
like a snowy winter
over snow buntings
on snow
like a snowy winter
over snow
on snow buntings

and the change in his pockets grows lighter

*

the gust of wind
that crosses the square
and is meant for him alone

it opens the tent flaps
so that the listening device
comes into view

and he wonders
if the girl at the cash desk
isn’t  a bit mechanical in her movements

Foul-mouthed FM

Via the Telegraph:

Mr Miliband spoke to the Russian foreign minister - a veteran not known for diplomatic niceties - to express British unease at events in Georgia. It seems Mr Lavrov didn't like being lectured by young Miliband.

Such was the repeated use of the "F word" according to one insider who has seen the transcript, it was difficult to draft a readable note of the conversation.

One unconfirmed report suggested that Mr Lavrov said: "Who are you to f------ lecture me?"

Make or break

In spite of its advocacy of the essentially faceless Barack Obama, the Independent makes a sensible point in today's leading article:

The make-or-break moments of this campaign will come in the candidates' debates. If the young Democrat can hold his own with the tested Republican on great matters of war, peace and economic struggle, he can lay to rest charges that he lacks the spine and the experience to sit in the Oval Office. If he does, Mr Obama will win, perhaps by a wide margin. If not then it is quite possible, even in the best year for Democrats in a generation, that he will lose.

Strange bedfellows

Edward Lucas has a Guardian op-ed and blog post on the strange phenomenon of Putin's British bedfellows:

It is all very odd. Russia is an oil-fuelled fascist kleptocracy ruled by secret police goons and their cronies. It is authoritarian: critics risk forcible incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, or are simply murdered - such as the shooting dead in police custody of Magomed Yevloyev, an Ingush journalist, this week. It is imperialist: bullying neighbours with oil and gas cut-offs, let alone the occupation of Georgia, where Russia's proxies have practised ethnic cleansing on a scale that recalls the atrocities of the wars in former Yugoslavia. And it is deeply corrupt and lawless: something that even Putin's successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, has acknowledged publicly. However bad other countries may be, it is hard to find anything there worth emulating.

Lost

One occasionally wonders where the BBC gets its foreign correspondents, and where its co-ordination goes at times of heightened international tension. During the transmission of President Saakashvili's moving. eloquent and well-phrased address to more than 100,000 deeply affected Georgian citizens on Tbilisi's Freedom Square, viewers were treated to a rambling series of voiceovers by bewildered correspondents whose main purpose seemed to be to call the president's status into question. Mr. Saakashvili had been too "cocky", we were told, and the assumption had to be that he was not a popular man - he wasn't fighting for his country, but for his own position, etc., etc. Things were not much better on Sky, where the same lack of any translation of what Mr Saakashvili was actually saying prevailed, and the same insistent and almost desperate attempt to question his authority marked the contribution of the comments by so-called "foreign policy experts" on the voiceover.

When Richard Holbrooke was interviewed by Sky, still with the shots of the Saakashvili speech in frame, the interviewer asked him if he thought that Mr. Sasakashvili was guilty of "hubris". At this, Holbrooke quite justifiably almost threw a fit, and told the interviewer he was blaming the victim. A shouting match ensued, and equilibrium was restored only when it became clear that Holbrooke could at least agree with the interviewer on the matter of criticizing the Bush administration - in particular, Bush himself and Condoleezza Rice - for its slowness in dealing with the Georgia situation.

All this, coupled with the Brown government's shameful 4-day silence on the Georgian crisis, a silence broken only yesterday, when prime minister Brown rather grudgingly, it seemed, issued a statement critical of Russia's intervention, makes one very doubtful from time to time about the figures who actually control the media and politics in Britain. Perhaps a general election, bring the advent of a Conservative government here, may clear the air - certainly David Cameron's public statement on the crisis was the most coherent and convincing to be heard from British statesmen, laid the blame fairly and squarely where it belongs, at Russia's door.

Oligarchs in Britain

In the context of the news that London is now thought to be home to around 300,000 Russians, the majority of whom are members of the country's pro-Putin/Medvedev elite, the Telegraph looks at the history of the rise of the "oligarchs", the extremely rich state-sponsored ex-communists who oose an increasing threat to the UK's economic stability:

The story of how the oligarchs made their money is hard to credit.

As former communists, many were permitted during Perestroika to set up co-operatives, which later became lucrative trading businesses.

In 1992 the government established a mass privatisation in which workers were given shares in their businesses and vouchers that enabled them to be bought and sold.

Unaccustomed to the ways of capitalism and enduring a difficult economic period, many were easily encouraged by the oligarchs to sell their vouchers for what now appear ludicrously small sums.

According to one estimate, the 140m vouchers issued by 1994 valued the entire Russian industrial sector at just $12bn. The folly was compounded in 1995 when Yeltsin's government turned to the newly enriched and emboldened oligarchs for loans.

When the government defaulted, they cleaned up again, seizing mineral and oil assets.

It left them in a strong position to benefit from the recent oil and commodity boom.

And, the paper adds:

Previously, Russian oligarchs were a phenomenon to be admired (or despised, according to taste), but one that could be dismissed as an entertaining foreign curiosity.

With their intertwining links and increasing influence on the London stock market and corporate Britain, that is no longer the case.