Word: frenchness
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...normal times, a French President's call for an overhaul of the world's financial system would cause eye-rolling and dyspepsia among the world's free market purists. But these are not normal times: on the weekend, U.S. President George W. Bush echoed Nicolas Sarkozy's push for an international summit to that end, and on Monday world markets seemed to endorse the initiative with a positive fillip. Though the specific goals, attendees, and even exact date and venue of such a meeting have yet to be determined, the mere agreement by U.S. and European leaders to update...
...Despite Monday's mostly rosier mood, there were developments that could have given markets as much to choke on than cheer about. Over the weekend the heads of French savings bank Caisses d'Epargne were forced to resign following revelations that unauthorized derivatives trading last week produced a $810 million loss. On Sunday, meanwhile, the Netherlands said it would inject a further $13.5 billion into troubled finance company ING - another indication that European banks may not yet have entirely accounted for all the toxic debt they assumed...
...that it seemed to matter. "The fact that these are two conservative politicians that business leaders feel they can trust had a lot of impact," says French economist Bernard Maris, who also thinks markets were comforted by the decision to hold the conference in the U.S. - with an eye to historical continuity with the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, NH, that established the International Monetary Fund. But Maris also notes those same markets - whose boom years relied largely on minimalist regulation - should logically be freaking out at Sarkozy's calls to "moralize" finance and limit pay to the world...
...widely reported? Will masses of readers notice, as they did the recent accusations? And, of course, Kaavya’s alleged indiscretions would have had a more limited impact if they had occurred before the age of blogs and mass media. In the words of Yasmina Reza, a French playwright who wrote an excellent piece about the Kundera affair for Le Monde, “one can broom someone’s entire life in 30 seconds” these days...
Jiri Zak, who translated some of Kundera's French writings into Czech, told the Czech news agency CTK that the reports were "a nasty and incomprehensible surprise" - not least because the accused spy was nearly sentenced to death - but that it would not alter his views of the writer's work. "Everything that the writer lives through can somehow reflect in his work," wrote Czech novelist and playwright Ivan Klima, a contemporary of Kundera's in a Czech newspaper. "Perhaps only a subconscious need to come to terms with [an experience] can ignite the creation of great work. That...