PH: Net FDI hits over 4-year low of $368M in Sept, BSP reports

NET foreign direct investments (FDI) remained positive in September but were markedly lower compared to a year ago, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported on Tuesday.

“Investors often prefer safe-haven assets in advanced economies under these conditions,” he explained, adding that heightened geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainties may have also further dampened investor confidence globally.

Net FDI hits over 4-year low of $368M in Sept, BSP reports

The US Dollar Can No Longer Threaten China and Russia

In 2022, the US kicked Russia out of the SWIFT system, causing significant losses for Russian businesses and ordinary citizens. Even Switzerland’s traditionally neutral banks joined this looting. The monopoly over the financial system and global currency once gave the U.S. and EU such capability, but at the 2024 BRICS summit, Western countries permanently lost this advantage.

The US Dollar Can No Longer Threaten China and Russia

Previously:

Russia outlines proposal for BRICS DLT cross border payment system

Ukraine: Victory Plan

Victory Plan (Google Translate)

“We hear the word negotiations from our partners, but the word justice is heard much less often,” Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday in his speech to the Ukrainian Rada. “Ukraine is open to diplomacy, but honest diplomacy. That is why we have the Peace Formula. It is a guarantee of negotiating without forcing Ukraine to accept injustice. Ukrainians deserve a decent peace,” the Ukrainian president continued in his presentation of the Victory Plan to deputies and other authorities of the country’s political and security apparatus. Kiev’s intentions are clear: to achieve a position of strength in which Ukraine does not have to yield to Russian demands. Nothing indicates that there has been any change in the way of thinking of the Ukrainian leadership, which has always understood justice as something that only the part of the population under its control deserves, without those on the other side of the front and whose territories it aspires to recover having a say in the future of the country.

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Mao: Tyrant or Great Leader?

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Mao’s Legacy and Accomplishments

Mao Tse‐tung, who began as an obscure peasant, died one of history’s great revolutionary figures. In Chinese terms, he ranked with the first Emperor who unified China in 200 B.C.

A Chinese patriot, a combative revolutionary, a fervent evangelist, a Marxist theorist, a soldier, a statesman and poet, above all Mao was a moralist who deeply believed, as have Chinese since Confucius, that man’s goodness must come ahead of his mere economic progress.

China achieved enormous economic progress under Mao. He transformed China into a modern, industrialized socialist state.”

Unlike many great leaders, Mao never exercised, or sought, absolute control over day‐to‐day affairs.”

Mao: Tyrant or Great Leader?

Atlantic Council’s Ali Riaz to lead commission on constitutional reforms for Bangladesh

Ali Riaz to lead commission on constitutional reforms

The government yesterday named Professor Ali Riaz as head of the Constitutional Reform Commission, replacing Supreme Court lawyer Shahdeen Malik.

Prof Yunus announced the formation of six reform commissions in his address to the nation on September 11.

They were formed to reform the judiciary, the election system, the administration, the police, the Anti-Corruption Commission, and the constitution. Prof Yunus also named the chiefs of the commissions.

Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi-American, is a distinguished professor of politics and government at Illinois State University, US. He was the chair of the Department of Politics between 2007 and 2017.

He is a nonresident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and the president of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies.

Related:

About Ali Riaz

Atlantic Council, American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, BBC World Service, Claflin University (South Carolina), Illinois State University, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute (Singapore), University of Hawai’i (East-West Center), University of Lincoln (U.K.), V-Dem Institute (funders), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2023 donors), Testified at U.S. Congress in 2013, 2015, and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2008.

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