Panama: Bananama Republic is back

Great news for the region! Panama's finest snarkblog, Bananama Republic, is back up and running after a sabbatical (that's what they say when owners go bigtime vacation, innit?) and already laying on great insight into the long thin country with a canal.

Bananama Republic was is and will always be the best place to read about the underbelly of Panama. Put it (back) on your radar (or even better, your RSS).

IKN, now available on Amazon Kindle™

Jeesh, that Bezos dude must be getting desperate to drum up some business. News from the world of the interwebnetpipes is that this humble corner of cyberspace is now available to read via Amazon Kindle™. Lord only knows why you should want to fork out a buck ninety-nine (is that for a week?...a month? I have no idea) to read something that you can get for free anyway, but some focus group or another must have thought it a great idea at some point.

So anyway, if you have one of those funny plastic book walkaround thingies and really want to get IKN delivered to it, here's the link to click through. No swear words on the customer review section, please.

Solidarity with Censored Blog 'Que Te Pasa Clarín'

News from Argentina is not good for freedom of speech. The blog 'Que Te Pasa Clarín' (QTPC), set up by an ex-employee of the country's largest media group, has been gagged by court order after Clarín applied for an injunction against its publication. Right now all you see if you go to the QTPC front page is a "sorry, we've been taken off the air" message from the blog authors.

It's worth pointing out at this point the Clarín is Anti-Kirchner and the blogger behind QTPC is highly critical of the newspaper and its editorial line. Also, from when the blog kicked off in early April to today it has been severely critical of Clarín and often publishing embarrassing secrets that Clarín simply didn't want out in the public field. You can still access all 140 posts at QTPC at this Google search link, but instead of going to the page you need to click the 'CACHED' button of each entry. Those of you who do Spanish can find out all the juicy details that the shits at Clarín wanted to suppress.

IKN voices its total support for the blog QTPC and roundly condemns the bullyboy actions of Grupo Clarín, an enormous, monopolistic, publicly quoted media company (GCLA on the London Stock Exchange) that would be the first to scream blue murder if it were the object of press restrictions itself.


UPDATE: The story I linked to above on the first link ("been gagged by court order") was a specific report in Argentina's 'Critica' daily, but now it seems the story has been pulled and the linkgoes to the website's home page...no report anywhere on the site. Looks like Clarin has managed to gag its rival, too. Wowsers, what fascists! Here's a report on the closure from a site in Spain.

Brazil: Top quality new blog on Brazil economics to recommend

Headsup people, Vitoria Saddi has a blog!

The blog's name is "Latin America and Brazil On Economics and Politics" and is good news for people like me that don't know enough about her specialist subject and want to know more. As mentioned previously, one of the standard mail questions I get is "why not more about Brazil, Otto?", but now I can refer them over to a true expert. Vitoria is blogging in English with some Portuguese articles as well, but if you don't know who Saddi is as yet here's the biography (prepare to be impressed).

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Vitoria Saddi was senior Latin American economist at RGE monitor. Previously, she was chief economist at Queluz Asset Management and Latin American economist at Salomon Brothers in Sao Paulo. Ms. Saddi was a lecturer at the University of California at Long Beach and Ibmec Business School. She received the BNDES award for the best master dissertation in Economics in Brazil. At the University of Southern California she received the award for outstanding teaching assistant and at Ibmec the award for excellence in teaching. She holds a master in Economics from FGV-SP and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

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And those, esteemed lector of IKN, are top credentials. I can also confirm that Saddi plays a seriously good game of chess.

So there's today's new blog recommendation and the savvier among you will do what I've just done and put it on your RS feed forthwith...or maybe even fifthwith. If not, you can always access her blog on the link you'll find from today over there on the right. Here's the link to her blog again, so you have no excuse.

Alex Dalmady's blog now back up and working

Another Alex

Alex Dalmady has got his blog back up and running after yesterday's glitchy moment, which is wholly good news. Here's the link, so go now.

Meanwhile, a thought about James Donaldson, who got an airing with his rather emotional but also cherrypickingly well-informed rebuttal post of yesterday right here on this link. When I saw "James" come back again and post exactly the same comment on another IKN Stanford post I thought it was a little strange, so using sitemeter I tracked his ISP, and lo and behold he was writing from Memphis, Tennessee. I read today that the offices where Stanford's CFO James Davis worked (and that were raided today by the SEC) are also in Memphis. Also, I checked and filtered and crossed-filed and did all sorts on Google for about half an hour but I couldn't pin a James Donaldson with any connection (and I'm usually quite good at the Googling thing, too). Now I know that the home of Elvis music is a big town, but I can't help wondering. Can't help thinking about the coincidence of the "JD" initials, as well....

Finally, check out the latest at Devil's Excrement, as it shows just how mercenary the Stanford deposit collecting machine really was in Venezuela and gives one pause for thought. According to MO, it's the middle class sector that's going to be hit hardest, not some ultra-rich that might lose 10% of their net worth. The anger will come, unfortunately.

Click here for all IKN posts on Stanford (the series begins February 10th)