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.

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[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

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