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Leading Indicators: Off-the-Radar News Roundup
Judah Grunstein
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11 Mar 2010
- Indian officials said that India and Russia will sign a civil nuclear cooperation agreement as well as the final draft of the many-times-revised Admiral Gorhkov refitting contract during the visit of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. A visa pact facilitating business travel also figures prominently in the stack of deals to be inked.
- Meanwhile, India's defense minister confirmed before the Indian parliament that India had formally requested to purchase 10 U.S.-made C-17 transport planes, for a price of $1.7 billion. This comes on top of last year's $2.1 billion deal to purchase eight U.S.-made maritime patrol aircraft. This is more evidence of an Indian shift toward a balanced procurement basket, even if it remains heavily weighted toward Russian-made big-ticket items.
- Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Islamabad yesterday for a two-day visit that included a meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, as well as meetings involving high-level defense, interior and foreign affairs officials from both countries.
- IMF President Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that South African President Jacob Zuma lobbied him to resume the fund's lending to Zimbabwe in a meeting on Tuesday, but that due to the political situation in the country, such a move was not yet possible. The news here is that Zuma has now pressured both the EU and the IMF to end their aid and development embargoes, despite having received no significant political returns on his recent re-investment in brokering a deal to save Zimbabawe's "frozen solution" power-sharing government. In other words, he's carrying water for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, even though Mugabe stiffed him, which suggests that Zuma's got serious problems back home.
- Germany's foreign minister is on a tour of South America, in an effort to make up lost ground in a region long neglected by Berlin. Stops include Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile.
- The head of Gazprom's Italian partner company in the South Stream pipeline project proposed combining that project with the EU's troubled Nabucco pipeline, long cast as a rival to South Stream. Look to see this suggestion pop up more and more in the coming months. When you hear it coming from either Moscow or Brussels, pay attention.
- Chinese telecom giant China Mobile announced it would pay $5.8 billion for a 20 percent stake of a Shanghai development bank as part of its plans to enter the mobile banking market. If you think wireless and telecom are huge now, wait until they begin driving massive flows of liquidity across the developing world. The possibilities are mind-boggling. Consider that one of the factors driving desertion and payday AWOLs in the Afghan security forces is the lack of a national banking system, forcing grunts to hand-deliver their paychecks back home.
- Brazilian President Luiz Inacia Lula da Silva asked U.S. President Barack Obama to send a negotiating team to resolve a dispute over U.S. cotton subsidies that the WTO has already decided in Brazil's favor. Brazil yesterday published a list of 102 U.S. products that will face higher tariffs in the event a deal is not reached. Adding insult to injury, Lula remarked, "If the United States had, along with
Brazil, made a deal in the Doha Development Round, we would not be
fighting now, and the African people would be selling their cotton in
the U.S. and Europe."
Researched by Kari Lipschutz.