Articles by Sam Vaknin

Interview with Ray Power, main shareholder and General Manager of iDevelop, Macedonia and Chairman of the British Business Group Conducted by: Sam Vaknin, Associate Editor, Global Politician and Regional Correspondent, Chronicle Media Group, USA 1.

Countries around the world - from Vietnam to Kazakhstan - have adopted these measures to reduce their burgeoning inflation and trade deficit: Hedging (fixing the future prices of foodstuffs, oil, and commodities by purchasing forward contracts in the global markets) Removal of import duties, excise taxes, VAT, and other taxes and fees on all energy products and foodstuffs Subsidizing the consumption of the poorest 10% of the population Introducing price controls and freezing the prices of essential products Banning the export of foodstuffs (or introducing customs duties and quotas on such exports) Raising interest rates and reserve requirements in the banking system to prevent new credit formation Forcing banks to purchase government bonds to reduce liquidity in the market Administratively capping credit growth and tightening lending to consumers and for real-estate transactions Freezing, reducing or waiving public sector fees and charges Releasing commodities, oil, and minerals from strategic reserves Capping interest rates on deposits (to prevent credit formation using money from new deposits) Reclaiming agricultural lands and modernizing farms and agriculture (long-term measures) Declaring a World Trade Organization (WTO) emergency and introducing import quotas and duties on non-essentials and luxury goods Introducing an inflation target Allowing for a gradual devaluation of the currency, within a band or range or as a crawling peg.

Do we have a moral obligation to become parents Some would say: yes. There are three types of arguments to support such a contention: (i) We owe it to humanity at large to propagate the species or to society to provide manpower for future tasks (ii) We owe it to ourselves to realize our full potential as human beings and as males or females by becoming parents (iii) We owe it to our unborn children to give them life.

I. Waste in Nature Waste is considered to be the by-product of both natural and artificial processes: manufacturing, chemical reactions, and events in biochemical pathways. But how do we distinguish the main products of an activity from its by-products In industry, we intend to manufacture the former and often get the latter as well.

Psychological laboratory tests suffer from a series of common philosophical, methodological, and design problems. A. Philosophical and Design Aspects Ethical â€" Experiments involve the patient and others.

I. The Meaning-Egg and the Context-chicken Did the Laws of Nature precede Nature or were they created with it, in the Big Bang In other words, did they provide Nature with the context in which it unfolded Some, like Max Tegmark, an MIT cosmologist, go as far as to say that mathematics is not merely the language which we use to describe the Universe - it is the Universe itself.

II. Meaning and Language: it's all in the Mind Many theories of meaning are contextualist and proffer rules that connect sentence type and context of use to referents of singular terms (such as egocentric particulars), truth-values of sentences and the force of utterances and other linguistic acts.

The most accurate yardstick of inflation is the GDP deflator (which includes the prices of capital goods and export and import prices). Regrettably, it is rarely used or mentioned in public. The Consumer Price Index is not the same as the Living Expenditures Index.

II. Foreign Direct Investment FDI 2000-2003 in Eastern and Central Europe How will the credit crunch of 2007 affect foreign direct investment in Central and Eastern Europe What if it develops into a full scale recession in the West and especially in the USA It is instructive to study the effects on the region of a previous recession at the beginning of the decade (2000-2002).

I. The Credit Crunch of 2007 The global credit crunch induced by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, in the second half of 2007, engendered a tectonic and paradigmatic shift in the way central banks perceive themselves and their role in the banking and financial systems.