collounsbury

and even morbid.

I'd like to note I prefer this journal gather dust and not be deleted should something go wrong with me cancer treatment. Just for the record. Not that I am not an undying optimist.

I Aqoul working out?

My entries - although sadly not the comments - have migrated to a new site. This livejournal will go offline (I will not delete it however) sometime in the near future. There will shortly be a new place for my scummy expat musings tied in with real value added information on the region. Some portions may, however be restricted.

update: I may as well link to the draft site as I added a new entry (envtually some portion of Livejournal entries will show up there, with some crossing over into Aqoul on a cross post basis. http://lounsbury.aqoul.com/ )

As you see, eerie sees me as an Afriit.

A self indulgent reflexion.

First, a funny message yesterday from an overseas colleague who I saw while travelling two weeks ago brought home a rather simple lesson which may be summed up as follows: "It is always a mistake to go with a colleague of the opposite sex to a scummy bar that involves stripping." I note that I was not the author of the destination decision. Silence, only possible reply.

Also probably should not have had quite so much to drink during said visit insofar as I can only vaguely recall leaving - thank God that I did though. Very uncomfortable that.

Second, the new apartment is working out not badly. The somewhat unfortunate walls are growing on me, although I have now learned that the co-owner of said apartment has scheduled an irrevocable partnership signing date. Well, I creatively forgot about this twice, but barreling down on me now. Bloody hell, ah well most multinational joint ventures end in failure. Will this one beat the odds?

I have no idea, I can only share that in confiding this to a longtime friend, he told me that when he told his wife -who has had the misfortune of both being married to him and knowing me- she dropped the phone. That seems a bit excessive.

Otherwise, one of the things I enjoy about my new terrace is (besides its better sun facing, although have to find ways to deal with the apartment heating up – hate air conditioning, window fans are probably the best choice) that there is a highly sporting woman across the way – I mean across the street at a similar balcony level – who besides (despite wearing something of a traditional hijab) being rather fetching makes interesting noises late at night. Not that one would hear if one was not out on one’s balcony late at night, but nevertheless.

I have to ponder, is she a professional?

One of those things that should remain a mystery, for either answer is likely to take the bloom off the rose, as it were.

Nevertheless, the fetching young maiden in the head wrap (I hope I am not getting my hearing wrong, should be very disappointed if I were) I think will amuse me for months to come.

Otherwise, this new Fund negotiation seems positive so far except for their tedious insistance that I come to the United States. Have not yet succeeded in selling them on the value add for them of my continuing my scummy existance as an expat.

Finally from Central we have received yet another absurd "question / demand" regarding why in our reporting we have not been providing receipts for taxis, parking and the like. I wonder how many times I have to explain "THE MOTHERFUCKING TAXI DRIVERS ARE LARGELY FUCKING ILLITERATE, AND THERE ARE NO FUCKING METERS, AND THE BLOODY 'STREET GUARDIANS' ARE ALSO FUCKING ILLITERATE MIGRANTS STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BLOODY BLED, FOR IF THEY WERE FUCKING LITERATE THEY'D WORK A SLIGHTLY LESS AWFUL AND POORLY PAID JOB, YOU CLUELESS IDIOTIC TIME WASTING VALUE SUBTRACTING DIMWITTED GITS."

I expect this will continue until my resignation. I've set a deadline, the New Year, resigning and fucking off. Let the Titanic sink beneath the waves. Or maybe end of First Quarter, insofar as I have recently had my analysis and propositions on what business they should be focusing on validated by outside sources, and I would get some strange pleasure out of leaving them just as they were trying to ramp that up.

I note - thanks to a comment by Pantom - that I now live closer to a famous landmark, and am considering, why not the Blue Parrot? It should exist.

I got this comment on my brief comment on an Iraqi brokerage (http://www.livejournal.com/users/collounsbury/360731.html), which somewhat puzzled me and certainly amused me at some level :


We read with interest the comments made on isx-aman.com especially the critical remark questioning why the site of the firm is written wholly in English.

Perhaps some background information will suffice to explain the position of Aman Financial Services.

The Company has been in operation since 1995 as an official licensed brokerage firm. In its ten years of operations it has consistently been ranked among the top biggest brokers in Iraq in terms of volume of trade. Currently it has about 10% share in the market.

The client base of the company consisting of hundreds of small and large accounts are composed in the main of Iraqi cliental.

The company has stressed a policy of opening up to the expatriate Iraqi community and to international investors after the liberation of Iraq in 2003. This policy has been encapsulated in a decision to maintain the web site in English which is the most commonly used language globally. Even most of our Iraqi clients speak English.

We would have maintained the site in both Arabic and English were not for cost considerations.

On line Interment maintenance of accounts and placing of orders is best conducted in English. AFS remains the only Iraqi financial company to offer on line services.

Your readers must be assured that AFS maintains the highest standards which are being revised always to those adopted internationally as best practices.

AFS is proud that some prominent Iraqi economists and businessmen who have been living in Iraq prior to 2003 sit on its board of directors.

AFS

In some ways a reasonable explanation of my side note in re site language, although I would note that I know other sites that manage to maintain both Arabic and English and given what I know on the market, I find it hard to credit it as so terribly onerus. Nevertheless, a reasonable business decision on its face. What amused me was the corp PR speak. I mean really, anyone reading my bloody journal should know I have no patience for that here. In any case, the owners of AFS should be content to know that no one who reads my journal is going to be quite so mad as to put money on the Iraqi exchange, so no business is being lost via my sceptical comments on them. Caveat Emptor.

Regardless, best of luck to AFS, they will certainly need it.

Checking email from afar, I am touched to find that Embassy wants to know if I am still alive. I helpfully let them know that as of yet I have had the good graces to not get blown up on their watch and was not doing vac in Egypt, although suffering from the attentions of a European airport staff is almost as bad.

Also Central has suddenly sent around a note to overseas staff requesting emergency contact information in case "of need." I suppose they're counting the days until one of us gets blown to bits. Wonder if it would be entirely tactless to raise the concept of danger bonuses. Not that I need one, but why not extract a concession or two?

Finally, a note from a colleague asked me to transfer to his office as he needs people "with well developed character" around.

This last item puzzled me - "well developed character."

Hard to read that.

At present stuck in a European airport whose benighted service (one can guess which one) almost approaches the horrors inflicted upon one flying international to the United States (I share for you the near universal disdain among my fellow business travellers for the chicken little over the top insanity of US airport security which since my last visit has gotten yet more idiotic. But details are for another time).

I note via this entirely inadequate wireless connexion that I see Egypt has had another bombing. Looks bloody bad. It has been an interesting week.

Regular collounsbury service resumes when back to home base, next week.

Back in the States for the first time in quite a while. Always amused by how fat people are. Tubby people everywhere. Of course ever escalating portions I note seems to be reaching Roman levels of gluttony. Connexion?

Regardless, going to be very busy packing in meetings in my rare pilgrimage to the centers of power and the like.

Everyone seems to taling about the Karl Rove and Plame issue. I find the topsy turvey politics peculiar, but unsurprising. Rather clearly they leaked a secret agent's name for sordid political score settling. Law aside, that should be punished, sordid political score settling should be within certain bounds. I'm unhappy the "Conservatives" - or as I have taken to refering to these people, Right Bolsheviks - do not see that sometimes one has to cut out from the fold for one's own good. Having Agency people involved in open political warfare is a bad, period.

Well, no matter, not my concern in the end.

Else I draw attention to this important article in The Washington Post.
In Egypt's Countryside, Farmers' Anger Seen As 'Silent Time Bomb'
Recent Revolt Over Rents and Evictions Draws Support of Mubarak Opponents
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 17, 2005; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/16/AR2005071601172.html

Will comment on later.

On the road at the moment, I note reports of the resort bombings in Turkey, one of which is reported to have a Kurdish connexion.

Well, at the request of Jerry I had a look at the brokerage site of www.isx-aman.com and company.

Interesting to be sure. My remarks are inherently superficial as I haven’t much time, but some initial thoughts.

First, I found it interesting, if not to say indicative of anything, that the site is entirely in English without any Arabic. Certainly much effort has been put into a confident presentation nearly up to established firms standards. I can not say I am impressed by the news feed – it smells of PR and pure boosterism – but in the proper context could be useful (i.e. if you realise it is not new but spin). In the context of the deluded idiots on the ill informed twits of Iraq small time currency speculators’ site, I am afraid it’s somewhat disturbing. But that is not the brokerage’s fault.

Drilling through I see the backer is an Iraqi who lived in Great Britain and returned to found this firm and a consulting house. There is some typical vagueness about client base, which is not surprising in this context.

I suppose something sets my radar off in regards to the complete lack of Arabic – it tells me that the site is aimed at foreigners and is perhaps something of a Potemkin village. That is not necessarily bad – but I would definitely want to do my due diligence on the backer’s background, history and record before running any serious money through the brokerage. In a lawless environment, an ounce of caution is worth its weight in gold.

I have to say there is something about the all English presentation in the context of my Middle Eastern experience that some how rubs me wrong, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. That is not to say that merely have an English dominated site is wrong – as investment officer for one of the most successful (but I make no claim on the original investment decision) regional online services group backed by private equity, I recall that they regularly reported Arab world traffic for their services skewed heavily towards the English language rather than Arabic language services. On the other hand, this was skewed by Dubai, which overweighted their market significantly. Regional data suggested non-Dubai online traffic was weighted towards Arabic.

Trivia – I am thinking out loud as it were about what the absence of Arabic tells me. In the end I have to say it merely tells me that their online presence has nothing to do with their domestic market operations, and one should look into what they are really doing. The Potemkin Village marketing that is the website might be merely early brand building in a bid to be “the” site for any foreign portfolio flows that may arrive, or it may suggest some more problematic things.

No substantive commentary, but I draw attention to this:
Lebanon Deputy Premier Wounded in Blast
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050712/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_explosion

The target, a pro-Syrian politician.

I opined months back that I did not like the US supporting a maximalist approach to opposition politics because of the chances of playing into returned inter (and intra) communal violence.

The overall analysis behind this is that while, yes, a majority of Lebanese do not want a return to civil war, as in Iraq, and as in Lebanon - it is not the majority that makes these things happen. One simply needs enough hard men on either side who can make a profit in some manner, via power or money, to push it, and enough weakness on public authority side to be unable to choke the trend off.

Lebanon probably can choke the trend off, but the state is just weak enough that this can't be dismissed.

I also note the potential for a currency crisis which could help precipitate serious tensions.

Well, looks like I bet wrong on who gets the new telcom license. Thought the Egyptians would weasel their way in. Still looks like a well run tender and decision.

This was written for comments re investing in Iraq, thought I would reproduce as I rather like it on some level:

The Problems

That aside, 30 percent is a quality return, if and when you realise it. Thin illiquid markets can often show "quality returns" without being able to deliver the liquidity to realise. [In short, a market under buying pressure but little liquidity may appear to be delivering healthy returns, but when it comes sales time to realise, the same mechanics can make it impossible to sell without serious discounts, i.e. price decline - liquidity is the key, else one is trappe, many an emerging markets investor learned that in the gogo years of the emerging markets stock market boom of the mid-1990s.]

Further, electronic trading systems [noted in relationship with Iraq] have never stopped front running, playing with orders and the like. They make it a slight bit harder, but w/o oversight you have false confidence. Among the many things you need is delivery against payment with an operative guarantee system (still doesn't remove the risk as I have seen personally, but helps), and one has to be sure it is operative.

But what the fuck do I know, I've only seen it done in these markets under an electronic trading platform that was and is state of the art.

Finally on the underlying peg discussion, Frankel's theoretical proposal [in an article in the Financial Times suggesting a basked peg with roughly 1/3 Euro, 1/3 dollar, 1/3 weighted price of oil] is an interesting one as a variation on a crawling basket peg, although your online discussion takes his phrase rather far too literally in a classic case of seeking justification for a desired result. The obvious item, rather than the appreciation issue itself or false analogies to post-WW II Germany, to analyze is what a large appreciation means to the Iraqi economy. Any large, short term currency move is a shock to the real economy and few real world policy makers generally avoid such for very good reasons. In Iraq the play off is between current cost of consumption versus current income. That breaks out between consumption of domestic goods and that of tradeables - imports - although obviously some domestic goods depend on imported inputs. Immediately exporters lose the X percent of income, consumers of imports gain X percent of buying pozer, an implicit subsidy to consumption of imports and an implicit tax on domestic production that competes with imports. In short a penalty to the domestic producer economy ex-hydrocarbons.

Second of course, is the impact on real investment (in explicit contrast to speculative hot money such as yours). An X percent appreciation due to a revaluation on a peg immediately raises the cost faced by foreign currency investors for Iraqi assets, with no change in potential returns in the near term, insofar as no economic fundamentals, ex the penalty to real productive economy that is import competing (but with a boost to productive economy that has imported inputs, to the degree they are import factors and cost drivers). It is an effect a penalty to incoming money - as say for example the private equity fund I have consulted with which has USD 70 million in hard currency raised. [I of course did not touch on the disruptive effects of serious real price deflation]

Now, obviously Iraqi policy makers should be looking at these real economy choices, and not things that make hot money speculators happy. It may be that they will decide that subsidising current consumption of imports and current capital imports is more important than creating a stable real economic environment that is well-priced in regards to real assets and allows export competivity. Choosing near term "gifts" to urban consumers, who are heavier consumers of imported goods and services (running from food to white goods) than others typically in this kind of environment, and subsidising capital imports to the detriment of labour competivity is a frequent choice in these economies - certainly Egypt managed to do this ever so brilliantly over the last 30 years with a "strong pound" regime partially backed by its nat gaz and petrol exports.

I certainly hope they don't - but then to you this is merely being "negative." Contemptible speculation aside, I favour the real market and policies to grow it.

Do not, I repeat, do not call it an "Islamist payment facility" - it's "Islamic" - Islamist means something else you idiot illiterate marketing goon.

Bloody hell, these idiots will want to roll out an Qaeda Basic Islamist Finances Services Platform next.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006691.php

Nothing to do with my rebranding exercise, have to get a report out and then travel on some extremely tedious business.

From a moroccan paper, in English for you all, on reactions to London:
http://www.moroccotimes.com/paper/article.asp?idr=6&id=7973

As a rebranding excercise, I am renaming this little blog
"Collounsbury Random Rant on MENA & Other Items"

Also, in the near future I am going to impose some .... controls and accessing some portions. I note issue of "interesting" site readership and my own aversion to spotlight has arisen.

This looks really unpleasant:

Explosions cause chaos across London
By Matthew Jones and Christopher Adams
Published: July 7 2005 09:48 | Last updated: July 7 2005 11:02

Multiple explosions on the London Underground and on three buses have left dozens with “terrible injuries” and caused services to be suspended across the city in what appears to be a co-ordinated terrorist attack.


Have to email the friends.

updated

Well, no one I know was involved.

Rather expect serious death toll in the end.

Interesting exchanges on items, talked about the IPO the head of the small cap exchange, who was glad to hear some positive news, given his offices were evacuated and he was trying to run things from off site. Promised to send couscous. Had a surreal meeting with an asset manager in town prospecting for clients (probably should have done his homework on the capital controls here before coming, but no matter. Talked about Abraaj and the like); convo turned to his London meetings next week and the awkward question of whether any of his contacts might not be available.

One rather suspects an al-Qaeda connexion here, but should not jump to conclusions.

Had the usual fights about our quarter report, which central wants to get out early - why the fuck they have to do these things in such a disorganized manner escapes me, but growing used to it. Remains a puzzle their bizarre management style, devolving shit to the field and micro-managing.

Very tired, bit drained from this London nonsense. Odd how draining these things can be. Stressful I suppose.

Very good arty from FT on MENA markets:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a66c3ca8-ed8a-11d9-9ff5-00000e2511c8.html

Will try to do an Aqoul item on this.