Selling Home, Foreign Loans
oday is Friday morning, Juma, the day of religious rest. Closing on my house should have occurred Thursday, but I have no word from e-mail on what went down. Even my bank's website is down, so I can not check my account balance. It is still 11:30 P.M. Thursday on the East Coast. Guess I'll wait and see if anyone contacts me Friday.
In my running around, I've found various neighborhoods that have abandoned houses without roofs; I call these places Kharabaa (badlands) and people seem to know what I'm talking about. There is construction in every quarter of K-Town. My own economic analysis (remember my undergrad degree was in economics, from Universidad Latina de Costa Rica):
So much money in foreign loans is pouring in that a post-Taliban national banking system has had no chance to develop. Opportunities to give loans using national money are non-existant due to the easy money that is coming from overseas (negative interest rates - most foreign loans do not need to be paid back in full). Since right now no one would want to receive a loan in national currency and agree to pay a positive interest rate , no deposits in national money would make any profits for banks. In fact, the mattress, not the bank, is where large sums of national money are being kept. No one here deposits money - national banks are not in business to receive them.
In a conversation I reccommended that the goverment quickly take up some of the Karabaa in central K-Town (before anyone builds on it) and make a park - plant some trees. (K-Town has a continual dark cloud, not of smog, but of dust - no trees/plants hold down the topsoil.) Khalid shook his head. There used to be a huge park in the center of town. The Taliban cut it down and built a huge mosque (that very few people attend). Once a mosque is built, it must remain. Still, I believe, someone must have the foresight to replace those trees. Construction is booming - what K-Town is today is not what it will be even three months from now.
In my running around, I've found various neighborhoods that have abandoned houses without roofs; I call these places Kharabaa (badlands) and people seem to know what I'm talking about. There is construction in every quarter of K-Town. My own economic analysis (remember my undergrad degree was in economics, from Universidad Latina de Costa Rica):
So much money in foreign loans is pouring in that a post-Taliban national banking system has had no chance to develop. Opportunities to give loans using national money are non-existant due to the easy money that is coming from overseas (negative interest rates - most foreign loans do not need to be paid back in full). Since right now no one would want to receive a loan in national currency and agree to pay a positive interest rate , no deposits in national money would make any profits for banks. In fact, the mattress, not the bank, is where large sums of national money are being kept. No one here deposits money - national banks are not in business to receive them.
In a conversation I reccommended that the goverment quickly take up some of the Karabaa in central K-Town (before anyone builds on it) and make a park - plant some trees. (K-Town has a continual dark cloud, not of smog, but of dust - no trees/plants hold down the topsoil.) Khalid shook his head. There used to be a huge park in the center of town. The Taliban cut it down and built a huge mosque (that very few people attend). Once a mosque is built, it must remain. Still, I believe, someone must have the foresight to replace those trees. Construction is booming - what K-Town is today is not what it will be even three months from now.
posted by Terry at
7:59 PM
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