Joomla! site syndication http://www.fiepymes.com/english 2012-02-09T17:37:56+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2011-11-08T01:00:00+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/articles/venezuela/venezuela-among-world-leaders-—-in-red-tape.html Following last week’s announcement that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has created two new Cabinet ministries — the Ministry of Ground Transportation and the Ministry of Air and Water Transportation — it may be time to propose a new economic theory: that countries’ economic development is inversely proportional to their number of ministers.I’m not kidding. Last week, Chávez announced that the previous Transportation Ministry will be split in two, creating the two new Cabinet ministries that — like many others in Venezuela — will be headed by military officers. The two new positions bring to 31 the number of Venezuelan Cabinet ministries.Many Venezuelans took the announcement with a mixture of humor and resignation. “We will soon see ships crashing against airplanes,” joked one reader commenting on the news of the new ministries in the daily El Universal, referring to the chaos brought about by Venezuela’s giant government bureaucracy. Since taking office in 1999, Chávez has created dozens of new Cabinet ministries, some of them with titles that are hard to imagine fitting on a business card. One of them, created less than a year ago, reads, “Minister of State for the Revolutionary Transformation of Greater Caracas of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” text/html 2011-11-07T01:00:00+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/news/guatemala/ex-general-otto-perez-molina-wins-guatemala-election.html ormer army general Otto Perez Molina, who vowed to pursue a hard line against violent crime, has won Guatemala's presidential run-off election on Sunday.Mr Perez Molina won some 54% of the vote, with his rival, Manuel Baldizon, on 46%, electoral officials said. Both candidates had promised to tackle growing insecurity and the presence of Mexican drug gangs in the country.Guatemala is a key transit point for drugs from South America to the US. text/html 2011-10-31T01:00:00+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/news/colombia/colombia-holds-municipal-elections.html Voters in Colombia head to the polls Sunday for regional elections under the watchful eye of thousands of military police officers. An estimated 130,000 candidates are vying for 13,000 posts, including governors, mayors, assemblymen, council members and various municipal boards.In an effort to prevent violence, President Juan Manuel Santos has deployed 300,000 troops for the safety of voters and candidates.The Independent Electoral Observation Mission (IEOM) - an independent watchdog group - says 41 candidates have been killed this year during the campaign leading up to Sunday's vote, and scores have received death threats. text/html 2011-10-28T01:00:00+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/articles/estados-unidos/crony-capitalism-comes-home.html Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public. The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability. To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists. I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism. text/html 2011-10-27T01:00:00+01:00 http://www.fiepymes.com/english http://www.fiepymes.com/english/articles/estados-unidos/fed-policy-and-asset-prices.html Recently Ben Bernanke caused a stir when he suggested that, in the future, the Fed should play a role in combating asset bubbles. Although his specific ideas are analogous to asking Al Capone to combat organized crime, Bernanke's suggestion does involve a genuine debate among academic economists: When assessing the tightness or looseness of monetary policy, should we focus narrowly on consumer prices in the current period, or should we also look at the central bank's impact on asset prices?The Austrians have always warned that a single-minded focus on consumer prices could lead to disaster. For example, during the 1920s, the official CPI and other price indices were quite stable, leading Irving Fisher and other mainstream economists to give the Federal Reserve of the day a sweeping endorsement for maintaining the dollar's purchasing power. Yet Austrians knew that the Fed's monetary expansion — though not showing up in sharp rises in CPI — was setting the economy up for a crash. From this perspective, the huge rise and then collapse of the stock market in the late 1920s was no surprise for Austrians.