By Alan Beattie, FT World Trade Editor

To the usual putdowns of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation - “four adjectives in search of a noun” and “A Perfect Excuse to Chat” - my colleague Kevin Brown has added another ahead of this week’s big meeting: “a grouping that speaks for half the global economy but decides almost nothing”. If anything, this is a mild understatement.

Still, Apec has been doing its best to prove its relevance: here is a paper arguing that Apec members see more trade integration amongst themselves than do non-Apec members. It’s careful not to delineate a firm causal link, and just as well - even as it is the paper verges on blatant goalhanging in inviting us to infer some relationship.

More likely is that Apec was lucky enough to include all the countries (Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, later on China and Vietnam, etc) that organised themselves into the “Factory Asia” disaggregated supply chain - and which was focused on western markets. And not even the actual bilateral trade agreements in the region (as opposed to Apec’s “voluntary” i.e. toothless one) contributed much to that process either (see previous link). Meanwhile,  pace one very vocal advocate, the chances of turning Apec into a proper free trade zone are the square root of Doha.

The best reason for Apec, one east Asian official once confided to me sotto voce, was that it forced the US president to travel to Asia at least once a year. But surely any good CEO visits his biggest suppliers and creditors regularly in any case?

When the FT circulates the list of best-read articles on the internet around the building, the top one or two articles often have a tell-tale word in brackets, after them (Drudge). For, as any web-editor knows, the surest way to get a surge in internet hits is to have your article picked up by the Drudge Report - an idiosyncratic mix of high politics, economics, celebrity news and climate-change scepticism - which has a huge following in the US, particularly amongst “conservatives”.

For a journalist being Drudged is a mixed blessing. Initially, you feel terribly popular and successful as you soar up the “most read” table. And then the e-mails start coming in. Here are a few that arrived today, in response to my Tuesday column on Obama. I think they give a fairly alarming insight into the mental state of parts of Middle America.

Somebody called Bob Clymer writes: “From your writings you are clearly in the Marxist/Socialist camp. Keep your stinking European nose out of America.” And here are the musings of one Bill Smith: “when are you idiotic British Marxist ass-kissers ever going to see reality?  Obama is a dead man walking….he’s too stupid to realize it yet….The Mossad will cap his big brown head and make it look like some Muslim hot-head did it….This halfbreed idiot is a ruination not only to the USA but to free men everywhere….something you lazy bastards in Europe gave up like 65 years ago….” What kind of a mental state do you have to be in, that you want your own president to be assassinated by a foreign country?
Continue reading "On being Drudged"

An opinion poll released last week revealed some heartening news for the US. President Barack Obama is the most popular political figure in the world. The least trusted leaders, according to a poll of 20 countries conducted by worldpublicopinion.org, are President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran and Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister. When Mr Obama has breakfast with Mr Putin in Moscow on Tuesday, it will be a meeting between the world’s romantic hero and one of its pantomime villains.

But charm and good looks can only get you so far in geopolitics.Mr Obama’s charismatic aura is obscuring an uncomfortable truth. His foreign policy is in crisis.

The arms-control agreement signed on Monday between the US and Russia will give the president some badly-needed positive news to bring back from Moscow. But beneath the smiley surface, relations between Russia and the US remain tense and suspicious.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

It was only when Sarah Palin popped back into the news that I realised how much I had been missing her. The general opinion in the hated mainstream media (MSM) is that her slightly bizarre resignation as governor of Alaska has polished off her chances of becoming president in 2012.

Maureen Dowd speculates that Palin has gone crazy. Even conservative commentators seem to feel she has done herself in. Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post that Palin is a hypocrite. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard says - “Forget about Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and possibly ever.” Toby Harnden of London’s Daily Telegraph titillates his readers by saying that Palin is an empress without clothes - and says that he is abandoning the effort to keep defending her.

I’m sorry - but it’s way too soon to write off Palin’s chances of the presidency. Just take a look at the polls and you will see that she has a real shot at it. A recent Pew survey shows that amongst Republican voters she is far more popular than any alternative candidate for the party’s nomination in 2012. Some 73% of Republicans had a favourable view of her - compared to a 57% positive rating for Mitt Romney and 55% for Newt Gingrich, her two most plausible rivals.

Ah, say the Palintologists, but she will fall apart in a primary campaign. And - even if she doesn’t, she has no chance in a general election. Neither argument is persuasive.  Continue reading "Palin for president - you better believe it"

Real Madrid’s £80m purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United will doubtless be portrayed, in some quarters, as meglomaniacal madness. In fact, it is part of a carefully thought-out and rather clever business strategy.

About seven years ago Florentino Perez, who has just re-assumed control of the club, built the first team of Real international superstars or Galacticos - including Zidane of France, Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo of Brazil, Beckham of England and Figo of Portugal, Critics denounced this as a team of show-boaters - the Harlem Globetrotters of football. They pointed out that Perez had sanctioned the sale of a key member of the side, the unglamorous ungalactic defensive midfielder Claude Makelele - and that Real’s fortunes declined shortly afterwards.  The galacticos never won very much.

But the critics missed the point. The galaticos were part of a commercial strategy that hugely boosted Real’s income through guest appearances, the sale of merchandise and television rights. Real now have the highest revenues of any football club in the world, and they have doubled since 2002.

I once discussed the strategy with Real’s commercial director who compared football to the movie industry. Real, he argued, was a content provider - just like a Hollywood studio. So just as it was rational for a film studio to pay millions to get a box-office star like Tom Cruise in their movie, so it was rational for Real to pay huge amounts to sign Beckham or Zidane. Their celebrity could then be leveraged into higher sales. Real were already looking forward to the age of video-enabled mobile phones. Their dream was to build up a global community of Real fans. Then whenever Beckham or Zidane scored a goal, these fans would get a text message and would be able to watch the goal on their phones - for a price.

It seems to me - seven years on (I had this conversation in 2002, while researching The Economist survey of world soccer - tough assignment) that the technology is just about there. The original Galacticos have moved on - although Beckham played quite well for England last night. But a new generation of content-providers is about to arrive in form of Ronaldo and Kaka, the star of the Brazilian national side.

Related reading:

History of the world transfer record

There was a moment, a few months ago, when sensible people in rich countries were considering pulling all their money out of the bank, buying gold ingots and hiding them under the bed. But now that the panic has passed, something less frightening and rather bleaker is beckoning. Welcome to the politics of austerity.

Across the developed world, unemployment, public debt and taxes are rising. When the global economic crisis first hit, it was natural to assume that the poorer and more recent democracies would be most vulnerable to a political backlash. Without the accumulated wealth or the welfare systems to cushion the blow, their populations looked vulnerable. Most countries in central Europe or Latin America only made the transition to democracy in the 1980s, so authoritarian nasties might still be lurking in the shadows.

But perhaps we are looking for trouble in the wrong places. It could be that it will be the richer democracies, such as Britain and the US, that find it most difficult to adapt to the politics of austerity.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

By any conventional political analysis, the governing Congress Party should have done badly in the Indian elections. The economy is suffering because of the global recession. And the Indian government has appeared powerless and clueless in the face of a spate of increasingly bold terrorist attacks. Both issues should have played into the hands of the right-wing opposition party, the BJP.

Instead Congress has done much better than expected. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, might have been exaggerating slightly when he claimed that the election results have handed his party a “massive mandate”. But Congress has clearly out-perfomed expectations. Before the votes were counted, the conventional expectation was that Congress would get around 150 seats - instead they seem to have won over 200 seats, and should be well placed to form a reasonably stable coalition.

Early comments from the BJP suggest that their leaders are baffled by their defeat. The hardline Hindu nationalists in the party will argue that the party suffered by not pushing the issues of security and Pakistan harder. A lot of the blame is sure to attach to the BJP’s elderly leader, LK Advani, who will surely now be elbowed aside. Predictions that Mayawati, a leader of a party that appeals above all to Dalits (”untouchables”) would be the rising force in Indian politics have also been confounded. She has done surprisingly badly in her home state of Uttar Pradesh.

Instead the coming man in Indian politics now looks likely to be the latest scion of the Gandhi family - 38-year-old, Rahul. With Manmohan Singh now 76-years-old, Rahul Gandhi is clearly well-positioned to be the next party leader.

When President Barack Obama welcomes the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the White House on Wednesday, he will be meeting two leaders the US relies on – and deeply distrusts.

The Americans desperately need both Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to get a grip on the deteriorating security situation in the region now referred to in Washington as “AfPak”. But both men are regarded as incompetent leaders with whom the US has a scratchy and difficult relationship.

Mr Obama will doubtless greet the two leaders with his trademark grace and bonhomie. But behind the scenes US officials will be anxiously weighing the options for alternative leadership. Is it too late to find a better candidate to run against Mr Karzai in the Afghan presidential elections this year? Is there a more competent would-be president of Pakistan waiting in the wings?

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.