Monday, January 28, 2008

Media-Whore D'Oevres



"Dramatic (Sundance) jury head Quentin Tarantino provided a round of laughs as he took to the stage Saturday night in Park City to present the winner of the jury award for best feature (awarded to 'Frozen River' by Courtney Hunt). He reminisced that when he came to Park City with 'Reservoir Dogs' he never won an award, 'and it felt shitty...'" (Indiewire)

"Saturday morning in Davos is the time when the chief executives who attend the World Economic Forum like to head for the ski slopes. The skies are blue, the snow is pristine and the best runs are empty of holidaymakers. Only the hard core remain in the ugly conference centre listening to the session on the global economy chaired each year with brio by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. This year, though, the hall was packed: what Wolf rightly called the 'high tide of complacency' in 2007 has been replaced by a deep pessimism about the possibility of a US - perhaps even a global - recession ... As Larry Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, noted waspishly, this was a mildly historic moment - the first time in a quarter of a century that the fund had deviated from its iron belief in balanced budgets and fiscal consolidation to call for a classic Keynesian approach to economic slowdown. Strauss-Kahn, though, is clearly worried. He wheeled out the cliche of the moment - a perfect storm - to describe how the world had got itself into its fine old mess: a period of low interest rates leading to too much cheap money sloshing around the globe; a breakdown in credit and risk management due to the failures of self-regulation in the private sector; and short-comings in financial regulation and supervision, particularly in the US." (Guardian)

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