Category: Travel

As I have not traveled outside of the area since the last Cayman Islands Monetary Authority’s board meeting November 5, my usual excuse for these notes, I would like to share with you a recent twenty minute car trip into town.

November 18

The orchestra for this evening’s concert rose as its young director Gustavo Dudamel walked to the podium. Then, still standing, they broke into The Star Spangled Banner. For a moment this cause some confusion among the Kennedy Center audience, as concerts, plays, movies and other public events in our country do not generally begin with the National Anthem as in many other countries. But we quickly rose to our feet and some even sang along with the orchestra. They played our National Anthem more beautifully than I had ever heard it before and tears actually formed in my eyes. As the music played I quietly reviewed some of America’s many strengths and virtues. I was proud of America again. It had been a while.

Before we could take our seats at the end of the Anthem, the orchestra took up the Hatikvah (the Hope). The haunting, melancholy strains of the Israeli National Anthem kept us standing for a few minutes more. We took our seats and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra began Felix Mendelssonh’s Symphony No. 4, his “Italian” symphony. The young German composer traveled to Italy at the ago of 21 and wrote: “Italy at last. And what I have all my life considered as the greatest possible felicity is now begun, I am basking in it.” He began his Italian symphony during his nine month visit to Italy and premiered it three years later in London at the age of 24. And I was enjoying his symphony and even more Brahm’s (also German) much richer Symphony No 4 that followed it here in Washington DC performed by Israel’s premier orchestra.

The mix of nationalities reminded me of my first full Opera many years ago. Jean and Tom Dusenbery took me to the Berlin Concert Hall to watch Puccini’s Madam Butterfly. These beautify arias about an American in Japan where sung in Italian. I was watching it in West Berlin (my older friends will remember that there was a West Berlin for 28 years as well as a West Germany for about 45 years). For all its problems the world is a better place for most people.

December 24

Last months concert is one of the many experiences of rich cultural diversity that make life here so rich and exciting. It has been a trying and difficult year in many ways, but we do have so much to be thankful for as well and 2009 will be a new and I think exciting year. I wish you the very best for the coming year.

In the late 1980s my friend Tom Palmer, now Vice President for International Programs and Director of the Center for the Promotion of Human Rights at the Cato Institute, crisscrossed the captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe cultivating contacts sympathetic to free market capitalism. When I first went to newly “liberated” Bulgaria in February 1992, leading an IMF technical assistant team to the Bulgarian National Bank, Bulgaria’s central bank, Tom gave me the names of his two contacts in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital. Philip Harmanjiev and Ivo Prokopiev were young reporters for 24 Hours one of Bulgaria’s many newspapers and one of several English language business newspapers. I met with them and have met with them on every subsequent trip to Sofia. They were bright, ambitious, and eager to learn about the West. They were shining examples of the great good to the world resulting from the lifting of the shackles of Soviet repression from a new generation of men and women eager to make their mark on the world.

Today, still in their 30s, they created and own respected business and other publications in Bulgaria. Philip bought a small winery in southern Bulgaria as part of the country’s privatization program and is now a wine producer, wine importer and creator, owner, publisher of Bacchus, Bulgaria’s wine magazine. With Ivo he founded Capital Weekly, a respected political and business paper, then Dnevnik, the leading business daily. These are now among the many publications of Economedia, the leading Bulgarian provider for business media owned by Ivo and Philip. Ivo’s wife Galya is Editor-in Chief of Capital Weekly. Ivo is Chairman of the Board and CEO of Economedia, and of Alfa Finance (which includes among its holdings Capital Bank in Macedonia), and is Chairman of the Association of Employers and Industrialists of Bulgaria (AEIB). For three years now AEIB and Capital Weekly have put on a conference on business and government issues to which Galya invited me as one of this years speakers: "The Financial Crisis: Bulgaria in the Global Economy". This is my second trip abroad to address bankers and the business community on America’s subprime mortgage and related financial crisis that has resulted from friends reading my occasional travel and economic notes. The first was earlier this year to Amman, Jordan.

Yesterday was my 15 minutes of fame in Bulgaria, which lasted most of the day. I was up at 4:00 am (because I couldn’t sleep) and picked up at 6:55 am and driven to the studio of the Bulgarian National Television station. At 7:15 my face was powered to prevent it from shinning under the TV lights and from 7:30 to 7:45 am I was interviewed on the probable impact on Bulgaria of the global financial panic. The conference for which I had been brought to Bulgaria started at 10:00. Following the address of Ivaylo Kalfin, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Kristalina Georgieva, a VP at the World Bank, Fabio Ganzer, Head of the International Department, Shell International, and I spoke. Other speakers included, Ivan Iskrov, Governor of the Bulgarian National Bank and Plamen Oresharsky, Minister of Finance.

At the end of the conference in the late afternoon, two young Capital Weekly reporters interviewed me about the same topics. I could not help but marvel that this story had come full circle. The two young reporters worked for the newspaper established and owned by the two young reporters for 24 Hours I had met just sixteen years earlier. They were about the same ages as Ivo and Philip had been back then. In between Bulgaria experienced a banking crisis and hyperinflation in 1996 and adopted a currency board in 1997 since which it has become one of the most rapidly growing economies in Central and Eastern Europe (currently around 7% per annum). Capitalism, with its freedom for individuals to express themselves and develop their talents, has opened up the human potential and brought the world a very long way. It has always been an irregular path and I am here in Bulgaria to discuss one of its bigger bumps in the road, but I have no doubt that it will continue to open the way for man kind to reach ever greater and greater heights.