Articles
The Merchant’s Plight
The Majalla 2012-28-12
Mazen Kalab arrives an hour late for his interview with me, a Western journalist. He twitches nervously as he settles into his chair at the café of the hotel in Istanbul where he has been living on and off since August, when he gathered his family and fled his home in the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo.
(more...)
The Syria Report Survives as Independent Publication
International Herald Tribune 2012-19-12
ISTANBUL — Jihad Yazigi concedes that he owes a debt to Bashar al Assad. Without the now-besieged Syrian president, there would have been no free-market reforms, no surge in foreign investment and no modern banks in Syria. As Mr. Yazigi acknowledges, there also would not ha...
Gas Field Off Cyprus Stokes Tensions With Turkey
International Herald Tribune 2012-12-12
NICOSIA, CYPRUS — In October, the government of Cyprus announced it was negotiating possible licensing deals with 15 companies to explore for natural gas in a deep-water zone off the island’s southwest coast. The government says it expects to sign four contracts early next yea...
War Drives Businesses of Aleppo Into Exile
International Herald Tribune 2012-12-5
ISTANBUL — In an unheated apartment in Istanbul, Mohammed Sahsoun, a businessman who fled the fighting in Syria, has set up a tiny garment factory. Here, on a chilly day, Mr. Sahsoun and the other proprietors of the shop welcomed a 32-year-old exiled trader from Aleppo with c...
Egyptian Farmers Make Themselves Heard
International Herald Tribune 2012-6-27
FAYOUM, EGYPT — Even as the struggle for control of Egypt’s future has played out in Cairo between the military power brokers and the Muslim Brotherhood, a parallel struggle has been playing out in the farm belt between dispossessed peasants and cronies of the old regime.
(more...)
Egyptian Bank Deal Threatened by New Turmoil
Institutional Investor 2012-6-22
With his country in crisis, Mahmoud Abdel Latif — Egyptian banker, turnaround artist and patron saint to an economy of small, credit-starved business owners — is nurturing a revolution of his own.
(more...)
Banking Sector a Possible Bright Spot for Egypt
International Herald Tribune 2012-6-13
CAIRO — Depending on whom you talk to, Egyptian bankers deserve either garlands for the prudential way they avoided financial catastrophe or thorns for throttling their country’s small businesses with miserly, short-sighted credit policies. (more...)
Egypt at War With Itself
The Nation 2012-6-8
Cairo has always had its slums, among them tidy neighborhoods like Shobra and Agouza, which were once middle-class but have been abandoned over time to the poor and homeless—the “Egypt of rags and sores,” as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it. Over the past decade, however, a new and more sinister species of urban blight has advanced along the city’s outskirts: great honeycombs of mostly uninhabited apartment blocks, products of a vast unregulated eco...
In Egypt’s bread, signs of economic weakness
Washington Post 2012-2-10
CAIRO — There is no more potent symbol of Egypt’s economic fragility than the pocket bread that is a staple of life here.
(more...)
Iraqi Economy (NPR – Talk of the Nation)