Archive - Feb 23, 2014

There go the margins... For months, Netflix and Comcast have been 'negotiating' over whether the video streaming service should pay for the apparently excessive load it places on Comcast's network, but now, as the WSJ reports, Netflix has agreed to pay to stop the network provider slowing its stream and impacting customers. According to Netflix data published in January, the average speeds of Netflix's prime-time streams to Comcast subscribers had dropped 27% since October. With Netflix accounting for almost 30% of web traffic at peak times, it is no surprise that Comcast's squeeze finally paid off. There are no details yet on the multi-year "mutually beneficial" deal but it is clear that broadband providers are gaining leverage over content providers.

A rock and a hard place...

If you’re still wondering if the US Constitution of 1787 failed to protect liberty, then just look around you. That scrap of parchment is an obvious failure. The US government is the hugest government in the world and meddles in the lives of its citizens (and people worldwide) in every way imaginable. The government accepts no limits on its power whatsoever. The president rules by decree. This isn’t done under some new constitution. This is all done under the 1787 one.

The bad feelings concerning Russia run deep in the Western parts of Ukraine (as they topple statues of Lenin in growing numbers) while in the East they see themselves much more as Russians. These feelings run very deep in the region and memories do not fade so easily as the mayor and police chief of Kerch vigorously defend the Ukrainian flag in the clip below - deep in the eastern Crimea region (that Russia has already suggested it is willing to go to war over). Russian President Vladimir Putin has now been placed in a very difficult position, as Martin Armstrong notes, the entire set of circumstances creates the image of events in Ukraine that have diminished the power of Russia, which is a matter of pride and the only stable resolution remains a split along the language faultline. The critical question then is - will Putin let it go?

Everybody knows of the light-heartened Big Mac index that the boys at The Economist thought up in 1986 in an idle moment as a yard stick for comparisons between countries around the world.

Apparently all it takes to kick the world out of a secular recession and back into growth mode, is for several dozen finance ministers and central bankers to sit down and sign on the dotted line, agreeing it has to be done. That is the take home message from the just concluded latest G-20 meeting in Syndey, where said leaders agreed that it is time to finally grow the world economy by 2% over the next 5 years. "We are putting a number to it for the first time -- putting a real number to what we are trying to achieve," Hockey told a news conference. "We want to add over $2 trillion more in economic activity and tens of millions of new jobs." There is only one problem: the G-20 has absolutely no idea how to actually achieve its goal of boosting global output by more than the world's eighth largest economy Russia produces in a year. Nor does it have any measures to prod and punish any laggards from this most grand of central planning schemes.