Word: trading
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Talk to business owners, though, and the picture is a lot more complicated. A poll conducted at the end of last year by the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business trade group, found that companies were overwhelmingly more concerned about slow or declining sales than access to credit. A full 51% of businesses cited sales as their top concern, while only 8% cited the ability to borrow money. An additional 22% cited uncertainty as their biggest worry. In unstable times, even healthy companies are unlikely to want to take on debt. (See the top 10 bankruptcies...
...appointment is no accident. North Sinai is not a territory the Egyptians take lightly. Bordered on the west by the Suez Canal Zone and on the east by Israel and the volatile Gaza Strip, North Sinai is home to a thriving cross-border smuggling trade and a sometimes rebellious local Bedouin population. Mwafi says the skills of his previous job have come in handy in governing Egypt's wild east. "As the director of military intelligence," he explains, "I had very good relations with the director of Israeli military intelligence." He adds that representatives of the two forces meet "every...
...Gaza via underground tunnels has skyrocketed in the past two years, driven by an Israeli blockade on the Strip. Smuggled goods have become the Palestinian territory's only lifeline outside of aid and a valuable source of income to Sinai's marginalized Bedouin. But from a security standpoint, the trade is a round-the-clock law-and-order concern - particularly guarding against the transport of weapons and persons - and one that Mwafi says yields daily intercepts and arrests. "We are always in a situation because we are near Gaza and Israel," says a local official, referring to the constant police...
...that hasn't quieted a modern history fraught with tension and mutual distrust. Cairo has received sharp local criticism in recent months for its construction of a new subterranean barrier along Egypt's Gaza border, meant to cut off smuggling. Analysts say the heightened crackdown on the lucrative underground trade, coupled with years of harsh treatment and sweeping arrests by security forces after terrorist attacks on Sinai beach resorts in 2004 and '06, has increased tense exchanges between security forces and the local population...
...endowed with a newfound sense of thrift. The explosion in credit-card and home-mortgage debt before the recession tells us the demand that was there was never sustainable. This is why the President now talks about doubling exports over the next five years and the importance of passing trade agreements with countries like South Korea, Panama and Colombia. If we can't sell to ourselves, there is at least partial salvation in selling to others...