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Come here for my reports ranging from the shanty towns of Kenya to the boardrooms of the City as I cover an agenda of "people, planet and profit".
12:42 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012
"At the very end of our dinner I propose we discuss recent developments in the eurozone."
So wrote Herman Van Rompuy in the last paragraph of a long and detailed letter of invitation spelling out the agenda for tonight's informal Euro summit. There's been much ribaldry about Van Rompuy's missive: as if it embodies the very lack of focus, the bureaucratism and awareness-free bubble in which the elite of Europe are trapped.
13:42 UK time, Wednesday, 16 May 2012
One way the current crisis could nix Greek euro membership is if the bailout fund - the EFSF - refuses to dole out the relevant billions on a date coinciding with the Greek state having to use said billions to repay its debts.
That is the "political trigger" to euro exit. But market participants are watching something else: the flight of deposits out of Greek banks and into other Euro currencies.
08:49 UK time, Monday, 14 May 2012
This is less of a blog more of a series of notes to try and enhance understanding of who Syriza and its leader Alexis Tsipras actually are, and how they might behave if, as polls suggest, they become the winning party in a second Greek general election. I've been troubled by the lack of historical depth; and of course my own knowledge is limited to English sources. Get ready to hear about parties and political currents that most commentators believed were insignificant just a few years ago.
1. Syriza is an acronym signifying "Coalition of the Radical Left". It's key component is a party called Synaspismos, itself an umbrella group of the far left in Greece.
11:06 UK time, Wednesday, 9 May 2012
I've interviewed Greek leftist leader Alexis Tsipras once, on a street demonstration. He is, as all commentators say, very smart. Too smart to do something as dumb as take over the government of Greece at this juncture.
In any case, the unwillingness of the Greek communist party, the KKE, to participate in a Syriza-led left government means Tsipras will, like the leader of New Democracy, fail to form a coalition.
14:24 UK time, Thursday, 3 May 2012
Sunday night may conjure up a perfect Euro storm. Total political instability in Greece, a new French president elected on a wave of opposition to the Merkozy austerity plan, plummeting growth across the continent and everywhere the rise of non-centrist parties.
The story so far: in December, after the disastrous Cannes summit had unleashed a second euro debt crisis, the EU countries finally committed to a form of fiscal union.
17:07 UK time, Monday, 30 April 2012
Put on your shades and pull the high collar of your black robe high like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix - we are going to be talking about reality, and its depiction on film. Or on digital video to be precise. We are going to be talking about bokeh.
Bokeh is a Japanese term used by photographers to describe that pleasing effect where the background of a photo is defocused, often into blobs or hexagons, while the subject is razor sharp. It's what you need a real lens for, and it's produced by the effect of the little blades that open and close the aperture, letting the light onto the sensor.
12:51 UK time, Monday, 30 April 2012
There has been so much art centred around the Occupy protests that it is beginning to feel like a new artistic movement. I been to meet the New York artists at the forefront of this movement, finding out what defines it and assessing whether this accessible, share-able art could it supplant the world of the galleries.
Read my full article - Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art? - here. And you can watch my film on Monday's Newsnight at 10.30pm on BBC Two. The film will also be posted in the article after transmission.
12:00 UK time, Thursday, 26 April 2012
Detroit was the birthplace of the auto-industry but in 2009 it nearly died here. General Motors and Chrysler stood on the brink of bankruptcy, their finance arms busted by the credit crunch, their manufacturing busted by the resulting downturn and massive overhanging pension problems.
But now Detroit has come back to life.
13:02 UK time, Wednesday, 25 April 2012
There's a parallel universe I always go back to when we get big GDP figures, as we have with today's announcement that Britain is in a double-dip recession.
In that parallel universe, the British economy recovers rapidly on the back of a shrinking state, booming exports and a rapid switchover to high-tech manufacturing.
13:06 UK time, Tuesday, 24 April 2012
Last December Europe decided to outlaw expansionary fiscal policy. Twenty-five countries pledged to get their debts below 60% of GDP, and their "structural deficits" down to 0.5% - and keep them there - by 2014.
David Cameron vetoed an attempt to write this into the fundamental treaty of the European Union, so the participants - everybody except Britain and the Czech Republic - signed up to a "Fiscal Stability Treaty".
23:37 UK time, Friday, 13 April 2012
Outside an abortion clinic in Toledo, Ohio, the protesters gather silently. They clutch crucifixes. Some kneel in the road.
Inside it is quiet, calm and the facilities are pretty basic. Because of the protesters, most mainstream hospitals have stopped providing abortions, gynaecologist Dr Martin Ruddock tells me. Here they serve many women from low-income neighbourhoods.
13:55 UK time, Thursday, 8 March 2012
Even as the Greek default process moves towards completion, the wider problem in the developed world is the size of the debt overhang. How to solve it?
Well first, consider the dirt storm that has been stirred up by the writing off of one country's debts - a country whose entire GDP makes up 2% of eurozone GDP - near meltdown of the G20 summit; numerous riots, deaths, political chaos.
10:55 UK time, Thursday, 1 March 2012
There was an immediate buzz in the world of seven-year-old boys when The Monkees first aired in the UK. We knew about, and could sing, The Beatles. We knew about, but had not a clue as to the significance of, the Rolling Stones.
I personally do not remember seeing the film Help! or A Hard Day's Night until I was in my teens - but we could intuit that the series was a general reference to "that thing", whatever it was, that was going on in the outside world.
16:24 UK time, Tuesday, 28 February 2012
She might be wrong, because the cops have been wrong before, but here's what Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers said on Monday at the Leveson Inquiry: that there is a "network of corrupted officials" spanning not just the police but "a wide range of public officials" including military, health, government, prison and others".
My ears pricked up at the words "and others" because it's one of those police-speak terms that could just mean "everybody else" or it could be a codeword for even more sensitive categories, like "the Royal household" or "the intelligence services". We'll have to wait and see: "government" itself is a tantalising word, suggesting as it does not just politicians but, perhaps, civil servants. But, like I say, she could be wrong.
13:49 UK time, Friday, 17 February 2012
The breeze block homes that cling to the sides of the cliffs above Piraeus harbour are painted typical Greek colours: cream and pink. The bare twigs poking out of hanging baskets and trellises stand ready to sprout, as soon as some warmth arrives.
At the clinic, on the corner, people hang around the doorway. Some have sunken cheeks. Others emerge carrying that international brand identifier of poverty - the multicoloured plastic sack - filled with old clothes and basic food.
12:24 UK time, Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Mention the word "agency" right now in the government offices of Europe and you'll get a frosty response. Ratings agency S&P's downgrade of almost everybody and everything (and they're not done yet with banks and insurance funds) annoyed those trying to sort out Europe's crisis.
But "agency" is the word uppermost in my mind now for a different reason. Rarely in economics do you find so much dependent on the actions and decisions of a few human beings. In its philosophical sense, "agency" is the key to understanding the present situation, which I will summarise as follows.
13:39 UK time, Wednesday, 4 January 2012
In a few weeks time, if Ron Paul gets swept aside by the GOP's machine, it may seem like just an interesting historical footnote that a man came within 4,000 votes of winning a Republican primary who is in favour of abolishing America's central bank. But probably it won't.
Right now, on the other side of the world, Hungary's government is staging a standoff with the European Union about the constitutional role of its central bank. And conservatives everywhere are relooking at the role of central banks as they morph from lenders of last resort to effectively underwriting - some say controlling - fiscal policy.
15:10 UK time, Friday, 30 December 2011
In a normal year predicting economics is like predicting the outcome of a card game: there are too many variables and the only certainty being that the suckers will lose and the stealthily self-interested will win.
In 2012 however, the shape of the crisis is heavily predetermined: there are a series of crucial stages the eurocrisis has to go through and the way they're resolved will affect everything else.
12:19 UK time, Friday, 9 December 2011
We had been kidding ourselves. It always felt, when you covered a Brussels summit, that Britain was there on sufferance, but the rules said otherwise: technically we were and are an equal member of a 27-nation union whose oft-explained "three pillars" of governance were applied for the common good.
Now, as is clear from Thursday night's summit statement, these common institutions are to oversee a selective "fiscal compact".
12:38 UK time, Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Yesterday will be seen as a landmark in British economic history, and in British politics. It will relegate George Osborne's emergency budget of June 2010 to a footnote and elevate Robert Chote's happy-go-lucky assessment of our economic prospects in November 2010 to the status of a case study in predictive failure.
Because yesterday's Autumn Statement will set the political tone of the decade: it will tie the hands of future governments; and it has already brought a philosophical debate on the British right to an abrupt end.
Paul joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. He covered the corporate scandals that followed: Enron and Worldcom.
His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He has covered stories as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, gang violence on Merseyside, the social impact of mobile phones in Africa and the rise of Aymara nationalism in Bolivia.
Paul was one of the BBC's first bloggers and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
He covered the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and, "has hardly stopped for breath since then", reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos.
Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 1960 he studied music and politics at Sheffield University, switching to journalism in the early 1990s.
He is the author of two books: Live Working or Die Fighting, How the working class went global; and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed.
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