i took politics in college, but now i wonder if it should have been economics

The Egypitan government has pulled Al Jazeera's license in continuing attempts to return to the days of, IDK, carrier pigeon communication.

Yemen protesters marched outside the Egyptian embassy in Yemen, yes, that's an awkward sentence but there are five thousand articles to read and correcting myself takes time. They're also in in the middle of their own protests in demanding their president resign.

Jordan is also protesting at the Egyptian embassy in the midst of a new wave of demands that their president resign.

China blocks the word 'Egypt' from it's search engines. Yeah. That's...something.

Algeria and Lebannon are getting inspired to join in.

Syria isn't being protest-oriented quite yet, but After Egypt, Can Syria Fall Next?

And Tunisia continues to shake up dictators everywhere by by issuing an arrest warrant for their former president while continuing to be revolutionaries.

God. I will never be able to read everything.



Okay, the thing is, market_roulette means I have a terrifying number of spreadsheets and a participant in the United Arab Emirates, so for about the last month me and my trusty google-based Arabic dictionary have been hunting their way through North Africa and skipping through India, whose markets, by the way, are possibly going to hit top ten if we all survive Deutsche Borsche and NYSE taking over the world (taking. over. the. world). So imagine my surprise doing my daily please tell me where the public listings for the Islamabad Stock Exchange is (I just barely controlled myself not to automatically enter the symbol and give the GMT), there's suddenly this huge wealth of information! Everywhere! Not about how to get ticker prices from Nigeria yet, but I'm working on it; but like, actual links to places that have information on the local economies and websites and God, so happy.

This is the the stupidest thing, but in the midst of Tunisia changing the world order, I was pissed at myself they weren't on my list, and my stock exchange list is officially taking over my life. Except while cleaning up spreadsheets this weekend to send to testers, I found it was on my original I did back in December. I pulled wholesale from Wikipedia finally after I convinced myself it wasn't cheating to just take the already gathered information. Which, yeah. It's just not on my final, because I hadn't gotten their market times and website.

I checked Wikipedia; they didn't have it. Which I thought meant I was just an idiot and picked it up somewhere else (no idea where else I'd fall on top of the Tunisian Stock Exchange, but to be honest, it's not like it's not possible), when really, I should have checked Wikipedia's history, which yeah, it used to be there, just not since January 19th. Along with all of Africa after A through E. Which helped, since I also had Morocco and was missing times for Tanzania and at that point I had begun to uneasily wonder if I was sleep-googling and did some kind of dreamtime googling of the greater southern hemisphere, eastish, in my quest to actually become crazy.

Which obviously, it wasn't either hallucinations or sinister purpose, but goddammit wikipedia, revert it back so the continent of Africa is represented again please? JSE was even taken off and it's like, in the top twenty in the world. They're trying to build a pan African exchange! Also, it's inaccurate and some of your links don't work, and I really, really wonder what the hell is happening to me.

Also, Australia and Germany are fighting over the Singapore Stock Exchange. God help me, I was literally thinking "...so threesomes are alright, aren't they?" About stock exchanges.

I have these entire highly subjective, inaccurate, completely shallow and poorly educated thoughts on politics, governments, colonialism, and why the NYSE really does actually scare me now, and so does Deutsche Borsche, and thoughts about the pan-African exchange that aren't really clear, except stock exchanges are privately held companies, yes, and they can do what they like, but thought, top twenty stock exchanges in the world:

1.) Americas/Europe NYSE Euronext $20.7 Market Value $28.7 Total Share Turnover
2.) Asia-Pacific Tokyo Stock Exchange $4.63 $5.45
3.) Americas NASDAQ $4.39 $12.4
4.) Europe London Stock Exchange $4.21 $9.14
5.) Asia-Pacific Shanghai Stock Exchange $3.02 $3.56

19.) Africa Johannesburg Securities Exchange $0.940 $0.349
20.) Asia-Pacific Shenzhen Stock Exchange $0.741 $1.86

Those numbers, by the way, are USD trillians. Yes. That's $20,700,000,000,000.00.

I had to just add zeros when I realized I had only put in enough for a billion.

JSE is the only African country/region represented. One South American: São Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa), Brazil. Two for South Asia, both in India. In contrast, the US has two, Canada one, China two, Japan one, Korea one, Australia one, Europe six.

It's not the numbers that are getting to me, really, though yeah, there is nothing about number one up there that helps me sleep at night. I spent a night reading through the public listings I could find of Kenya and Nigeria and heh,, Tunisia, and Egypt and Lebannon and yeah, that's indecent distribution of wealth, but that's power, too. I mean, in a way that isn't entirely married to country or politics, either, but the purity of chasing the concept of a completely free market for single-minded purposes of wealth, and when you're valued at four times your closest competitor, that's not just power. Just, let's say you controlled the public shares of most companies of the world, or not even most, but most of the globally-influential, wealthy ones.

I really have absolutely no context for feeling this unsettled; I'm not even close to an economics major, minor, or even dabbler. Just, I keep staring at my spreadsheets and wondering why I feel like this is is really goddamn obvious and I should educate myself, because I can't even tell you why I don't like it. I don't like monopolies, I really don't like the fact that practically speaking, most of the world has no weight on this, this list, but one company on one of these lists--NYSE, I think--nearly broke the worlds' economy and very much fucked up our own. And that's when teh US acted uncharacteristically fast and--for them--sensible.

I have no idea if the pan African exchange is a good idea, I honestly don't, I have no context for the politics or economy other than the most basic, but--I mean, I feel that someone, somewhere, has promotional stickers and pens printed with NYSE/Euronext Africa being made right now. And I have no idea why I'm so uncomfortable with the very idea.

Comments

[aivilo_18]

China blocks the word 'Egypt' from it's search engines. Yeah. That's...something.

Not to borrow ingrained responses from my dog, but...

::cocks head::

[twistedchick]

I haven't read either deeply or broadly about Egypt yet, but there's something I've been wondering. How much participation in and support for the protests/potential revolution is coming from conservative/Wahabist Islamic sources, who would like to do to Egypt what they've done to neighboring Sudan? I don't have a feel for the politics there, but I keep remembering news stories about fundamentalist Islamic authority figures being arrested for "anti-government activity" over the past few years, and from what little I know that translates to anti-Western, anti-modernist groups. Am I thinking in the wrong direction here?

[wrenlet]

How much participation in and support for the protests/potential revolution is coming from conservative/Wahabist Islamic sources

Actually, not a lot. Mubarak's government has spent years waving the Muslim Brotherhood around as the bogeyman under the bed, but the protests went on for several days before MB participated in a meaningful way. About 30 known members were arrested last week and transported to the north, and subsequently broken out of prison. They soon released a statement (which I listened to on Al Jazeera) stressing that they were freed by citizens, that there is no armed revolution, and calling on Egyptians to keep protesting peacefully and not resort to looting.

Keep in mind, last month when several Coptic Christian churches were bombed, MB condemned the bombing and pledged support to the Coptics. Muslim citizens then helped guard Christian churches during their Christmas services this month. Coptics have now been seen in the streets this week protecting Muslim protesters who pause to pray.

[twistedchick]

I'm very glad to hear that it's more Muslim Brotherhood than Islamists, and that the Coptics and Muslim Brotherhood are working together in that way.

[everbright]

You know, re: revolutions and NYSE/Euronext owning the world... I would encourage everybody to Be Afraid.

Only poor folks are reproducing above replacement levels, because women aren't getting educated in poor countries, and the negative correlation between woman's education levels and rates of childbirth is well established. So there will be more poor folks getting poorer, and less rich folks getting richer, which widens the gap between the haves and have-nots.

According to everybody's best guess, the planet earth can only feed 11 billion people. The world population is almost at 7 billion, and it only took us a decade to get there.

SO, congratulations, we're all going to be alive for the Malthusian Apocalypse. The Revolution Will Be Livecast.

Um, random comment not associated with post, but!

[daxion]

So, I blame you for this. For two weeks now I've been mainlining everything Fullmetal Alchemist. Hours and hours of awesomeness, yes, but still.

Blame.

[jamethiel]

... I would totally read SGX/XETRA/ASX threesome fic. Possibly with pining. And or orgasm denial.

(I'm sorry, please don't hurt e)

[anjak-j.livejournal.com]

Re: Al Jazeera. When will these Governments a la despot ever learn that cutting communications and news channels barely ever works?

The Middle East / North Africa was due. I foresee more of the same in neighbouring countries. The poverty in some of these countries is astounding, given the amount of money coming in. I've visited Egypt in the past and the poverty on the street is at total odds with the money that country makes in tourism alone.

[be-a-rebel.livejournal.com]

I had a half an hour debate with my parents about Saudi Arabia and the chances of them becoming democratic and then we proceeded to laugh ourselves silly. My aunt lives there so we constantly hear stories about the messed up judicial system and the 'muttawas' (judicial police) hence we are all ridiculously pessimistic on the issue.

That was extremely off topic. But well done Mubarak, trying to return to the stone age. How can they understand that these kind of restrictions never work? I cannot list the amount of times we've had channels pulled off the air. It never works. That's my favourite thing about humanity, it's near impossible to break our spirits.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

You can relax; in ten years all the significant money will be in dark pools anyway.

[verizonhorizon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for collating these! I am also overwhelmed by different articles and not sure what to read, or what's up-to-date, or what's legit. Thanks for these!

[hollyxu.livejournal.com]

I can't actually talk about either one of the issues in this post without exploding into a rant, so I'm just going to say, THEY SUCK, and leave it at that.

One of these days what we're doing to the economy and our money will come back to bite us all, and then the riots will be in the US. I don't look forward to the tanks.

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for these links.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I don't even understand any of what you said re spreadsheets but Egypt banned from China!google??? Ha, how else would we know what's politically acceptable?