On this week’s podcast, we return our attention to emerging markets, highlighting opportunities beyond the BRICs in EMEA- Europe, Middle East and Africa. Business Monitor’s Head of Country Risk and Financial Markets Justin Patrie, discusses the outlook for Egypt, Ghana and Turkey with Mark Schaltuper, Head of Europe Analysis, Liz Martins, Head of Middle East [Read more...]

 

 Standard Podcast [14:35m]
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Mexico’s Cemex, one of the top three cement producers in the world, has reported disappointing H1 2010 results, posting a net loss of US$642mn for the period. Although the results offer little in the way of optimism for the performance of the construction industry, they do align well with the BMI infrastructure team’s core views [Read more...]

Over the past several weeks we have heard about the gloomy outlook for consumer demand in developed markets. Household deleveraging in the US and the growing debt crisis in peripheral eurozone states suggest that a return to robust demand levels will be hard to come by. In this context, we examine the outlook for the [Read more...]

 

 Standard Podcast [8:55m]
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Eight years after the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, the outcome of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ is still inconclusive.
Overall, I have not really changed my view from the blog post I wrote on the seventh anniversary.
Neither ‘the West’ and its allied governments nor al-Qaeda and its offshoots have scored a decisive blow. In any case, as [Read more...]

I have been talking about the possibility of an Israeli incursion into Gaza on Business Monitor Online for about a year now, and one of the possibilities I have flagged up was that of Egyptian troops manning a new, de-Hamasified Gaza Strip, to allow Fatah to regain and consolidate control. As I said at the [Read more...]