Israeli Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak can now add another title to his resume: real estate mogul. On Sunday, it was reported that Barak had sold his notoriously luxurious Tel Aviv apartment in the Akirov Towers, a five-room compound on the 31st floor whose amenities include a gym, outdoor pool, spa, and breathtaking views, for $7 million. In 2003, he paid a mere $3.87 million for the 450-square-foot space.

Naturally, Barak took to Facebook to explain his decision:

"My wife Nili and I decided that the sale was inevitable faced with the recognition that this place of residence created a sense of alienation and detachment from vast sectors of the public."

In true Ehud Barak fashion, the apartment was sold to a foreign company. The veteran kibbutznik, who was raised in a 12-by-9 foot room with no running water or toilets and described his childhood as "happy" and "warm," entered the private sector after stepping down from a failed premiership in 2001. His business ventures included oil shale rock in Jordan, a stint as president of Satcom Systems, Ltd., a mobile communications company with ties to repressive African regimes, a post on the advisory board of venture capital firm Tamir Fishman & Co., and a network of parking lots in Istanbul (which failed). All of these expeditions, though, were peas and carrots compared to his passion for working with international hedge funds. According to son-in-law Zvi Lotenberg, "the bulk of Barak's activity takes place abroad, for a number of the world's largest hedge funds and investment firms, whose names he declined to reveal."

Barak may maintain that he has been transparent regarding his business transactions, and that he has paid his taxes, but in 2006 he put away some money in a favorite tax haven, using "an account of 38 million Japanese yen (the equivalent of $380,000) in the Cayman Islands branch of Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank as collateral to obtain a loan from the bank."

Compared with the corrupt financial escapades of Israeli leaders like former prime minister Ehud Olmert, this is pretty vanilla, but there are certainly more than enough former government officials with extensive tastes in the world. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, built the 95-acre estate of Hala Ranch in 1991 just miles from Aspen, which was the "most expensive single-family residential property in the nation on the market" when it was listed for $135 million in 2007. Former British prime minister Tony Blair bought  a house in London's posh and swanky Connaught Square for 3.5 million pounds. When Jacques Chirac stepped down from the French presidency in May 2007, he rented an apartment overlooking the Seine on Paris' Quai Voltaire. What makes Barak notable is that he's still on the government payroll.

So where will Barak end up next? Perhaps the David Promenade? Or maybe he'll downsize to this four-bedroom stunner on Atzuk Beach? Wherever he ends up, the next home for this cigar-chomping pol promises to be far from the kibbutz.

The Taiwanese animators strike again, taking on the currency wars and the Nobel Peace Prize controversy:

The scary panda even has a cameo, unleashing a "smorgasbord of pain" on some Norwegian beauty queens.

Hat tip: Matt Yglesias

Germaphobic consumers can take heart here in the United States, where dollar bill circulation is fairly short-lived -- only about 20 months of wallet-hopping before the Federal Reserve pulls the plug , destroying on average about 7,000 tons of over-the-hill greenbacks each year. In Zimbabwe, however , where U.S bills are much preferred to the country's own collapsed currency, a day in the life of a dollar is not quite so hygienic. If you're thumbing through a wad of cash in Harare, chances are you won't be able to appreciate the satisfying sound or unmistakable scent of crisp, fresh-from-the-ATM bills: most U.S. bank notes continue changing hands in Zimbabwe for years on end, only slipping out of circulation once they've truly gone to pieces (when Scotch tape can no longer work its magic).

The delicacy of these "well-seasoned" bills isn't worst of Zimbabweans' concerns: their dirtiness is an even bigger problem. Indeed, among the country's poorest, underwear and shoes often serve as the most convenient "wallets." But Zimbabweans have found a simple way to combat the grime: they've started literally laundering their money. The most diligent cleaners recommend washing the flimsy bills by hand, then hanging them out to dry (bills are often pinned to clotheslines alongside more conventional linens). In a pinch, however, a time-saving machine wash will also do the trick. Experts do warn against giving bills high-class treatment: one trip to the drycleaner's and George Washington's face may well lose its authentic green pallor...

Goldman Sachs may have taken a lot of heat lately, but they may have done themselves a great favor by releasing their 2010 World Cup Research Report earlier this month. Running a little over 70 pages, it's a remarkably in-depth summary of each country in this year's finals, including football prowess, economic state, and political situation. Furthermore, it provides a primer on the potential hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and, unsurprisingly but more than interesting, an examination of economic growth and decline vis-a-vis the international football teams of respective countries.

Some of the most noteworthy things to take away: like most of the speculation has focused on, the report predicts a European-hosted cup in 2018, and a return to the U.S. in 2022. (Also included are bid pitches from Russia, England, and the U.S.) Interestingly, this is what it says about the U.S. bid:

The sport has taken roots in the USA and the market is quickly becoming one of FIFA’s most important. They already pay one of the largest television rights fees to FIFA of any country. However, the perception is still otherwise.

For U.S. soccer fans, that perception is extremely frustrating. It is somewhat accurate: for a team that has qualified for the last six World Cups (granted, a Foreign Policy* staff team could probably qualify for the finals out of the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football -- CONCACAF), interest would appear to be lower than warranted. (Six out of six is, by the way, quite impressive: England, France, and the Netherlands can't claim that streak.)

But that's changing. Go to many bars in the District on Saturday or Sunday morning, and you'll see European football -- usually the English Premier League -- on the TV. From my own observations (be wary of perception bias), the sport with the most jerseys worn on the streets of Northern Virginia and D.C. is soccer, by far. Moreover, 24.5 million Americans play football, the second most  (behind China's 26.2 million) in the world. Since 1994, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. soccer fans, but among casual or non-fans, there still remains an idea that soccer is not an "American" sport. (It should also be noted that the U.S. Women's team is the dominant global powerhouse.)

UEFA's (Union of European Football Associations) selection of the 2012 Euro Cup host proved prescient, as well. Picking in 2007, Poland won the rights to host the tournament (OK, co-host with Ukraine, but since then UEFA has suggested Poland be the sole host, which the Poles have graciously declined to accept). Poland, however, was the only bid country that hasn't suffered economic decline since -- and yes, Greece was the first bid country eliminated.

Other notable findings: the Growth Environment Scores (a Goldman-devised figure of sustainable economic growth and productivity) of respective countries loosely correlate to soccer performance, but a much stronger connection exists between the improvement of economic conditions and national soccer teams. (Algeria, which did not qualify for the 2006 finals in Germany, posted the highest GES improvement among developing countries over the last four years.) The report also argues that success is partially dependent on the number of males aged 18-34 in countries, and provides a UN chart with predictions for 2050. If the claim is accurate, the Nigerian Super Eagles are going to be really, really good in a few decades.

Lastly, Goldman offers their own predictions of the semi-finals (I won't spoil, though I will say it's what my predictions are as well), and lists the probability (with their metrics) that each country will become World Cup champions.

It's lengthy, but an extremely interesting read, and provides the best rundown of the Cup to come that I've seen. Check it out.

*No matter what anyone says, I'd play right wing.

It seems like just yesterday that we were asking ourselves if the United States was Rome. In light of the financial collapse in the other great cradle of Mediterranean civilization, the New York Times' David Leonhardt poses the inevitable follow-up question:

It’s easy to look at the protesters and the politicians in Greece -- and at the other European countries with huge debts -- and wonder why they don’t get it. They have been enjoying more generous government benefits than they can afford. No mass rally and no bailout fund will change that. Only benefit cuts or tax increases can.

Yet in the back of your mind comes a nagging question: how different, really, is the United States?

The U.S.'s national debt, Leonhardt notes, is projected to rise to 140 percent of GDP within the next twenty years -- Greece's is 115 percent today.

Elsewhere at the Times, Paul Krugman questions the credibility of that long-range projection and argues that the U.S. shouldn't worry:

Basically, the United States can expect economic recovery to bring the deficit down substantially; Greece, which has a larger structural deficit and also faces a grinding adjustment to overvaluation with the eurozone, can’t.

About that eurozone: in a phenomenally awkward bit of timing, Estonia happened to be trying to join it today, and succeeded. Other countries like Poland and Bulgaria, however, are having second thoughts. Greece's current predicament, and the looming crises in Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, have offered a cautionary tale. The Associated Press looks at the divergent experiences of Hungary and Romania, which are members of the European Union but not the eurozone, and Greece, which is in both: When the IMF bailed out Hungary and Romania in 2009, the countries were able to make the necessary adjustments quickly, if painfully, by letting their currencies fall. Greece, however, can't, and is now looking at far harsher, more drawn-out austerity measures attached to its 110 billion euro bailout.

Bad news from the World Trade Organization: Global trade crashed a whopping 12 percent last year, around 20 percent more than anticipated and the most since the end of World War II.

Pascal Lamy, the head of the WTO, used the occasion to call for the resumption of the Doha trade talks, which fell apart in 2008 and which he described as "imperative." Just yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama promised to complete them, with unnamed officials saying the White House wants it to happen this year. But then again, Doha would need to be approved by these guys...

If I weren't Annie in Washington, but were, say, Anthea in Athens, I'd consider moving right about now. The Greek economy is cratering. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Taxes are rising. Social services are being slashed. Greece's participation in the European Union means that I can move and get a job anywhere in it, without a visa. So, I'd figure -- I'm young, childless, and college-educated. I'll try my prospects in Strasbourg for a couple years. 

The problem is: I'm useful to the Greek economy. I work hard and pay taxes, but don't use much in the way of social services like healthcare. I do spend plenty of my income on things like clothes and food, though, and might even open a business if given the chance. Alas, it seems, I am leaving Greece by the thousands.

I used Eurostat to make this chart of the growth changes in the Greek population, broken down by age group. Blue bands are growing and red are shrinking. Eurostat only had data up until 2009, but I imagine we will see trends accelerate in 2010, with a veritable exodus of young members of the work force. On one hand, this might leave jobs for other workers and therefore lower unemployment somewhat. On the other, the trend just does not bode well for the Greek economy. 

At the Financial Times, Harvard professor Martin Feldstein argues for letting Greece take a holiday from the euro, allowing it to devalue its currency and ease its severe economic woes. It's a nice idea, but a bit pie in the sky. Barry Eichengreen explains why:

The insurmountable obstacle to exit [is] procedural. Reintroducing the national currency would require essentially all contracts -- including those governing wages, bank deposits, bonds, mortgages, taxes, and most everything else - to be redenominated in the domestic currency. The legislature could pass a law requiring banks, firms, households and governments to redenominate their contracts in this manner. But in a democracy this decision would have to be preceded by very extensive discussion.

And for it to be executed smoothly, it would have to be accompanied by detailed planning. Computers will have to be reprogrammed. Vending machines will have to be modified. Payment machines will have to be serviced to prevent motorists from being trapped in subterranean parking garages. Notes and coins will have to be positioned around the country. One need only recall the extensive planning that preceded the introduction of the physical euro.

The introduction of the euro did require extensive planning -- and extensive costs, costs Greece might not want to pay for. Let's do a bit of back of the envelope math. When the eurozone adopted the physical currency, in 2002, the French bank BNC Paribas calculated the price tag for the switch at 160 to 180 billion euros -- 188 to 212 billion euros today. Greece is about 2.5 percent of the eurozone economy -- so the government might be looking at something like a 4.7 to 5.3 billion euro cost.

That is not much. In fact, it is so little Greece might be able to afford it; the government already needs to borrow 53 billion euros to service its debt this year. But that doesn't include the dramatic cost to businesses, individuals, and banks, or the political and plenary trouble of executing such a maneuver. Alas, Feldstein's is a nice idea, but not one I see working.

Via FP contributor Ashby Monk, here's an interesting story from Bloomberg News that hasn't gotten much attention. It seems that Russia tried to use its vast financial holdings and conspire with China to create "economic disruptions" in the United States in 2008. An astonishing scoop, if true.

The source of the tale is Hank Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury secretary whose memoir, On the Brink, is coming out soon. 

Says Bloomberg:

The Russians made a “top-level approach” to the Chinese “that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings to force the U.S. to use its emergency authorities to prop up these companies,” Paulson said, referring to the acronym for government sponsored entities.

China rejected the idea, according to Paulson, and the Russians are denying the story. Monk, an expert on sovereign wealth funds, comments:

If true, it would appear that Russia was plotting economic warfare against the US during the summer of 2008; I don’t really know what else to call it. Their intention was to use their sovereign wealth to purposely weaken and damage the US economy. The fact that all this apparently occurred around the same time that Russia was engaged in a traditional war with Georgia, a US ally, lends some credibility to the idea.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

P.T. Barnum, the great American circus showman, may or may not have actually said of his customers, "there's a sucker born every minute," but it's a maxim that could just as well have applied to the recent financial crisis.

I'm reminded of the apocryphal quote after reading Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story's somewhat convoluted, but nonetheless interesting report in today's New York Times on how the investment bank Goldman Sachs allegedly played both sides of the market for mortgage-backed securities and is now being scrutinized by various regulators looking to determine whether any laws or industry rules were broken:

While the investigations are in the early phases, authorities appear to be looking at whether securities laws or rules of fair dealing were violated by firms that created and sold these mortgage-linked debt instruments and then bet against the clients who purchased them, people briefed on the matter say.

One focus of the inquiry is whether the firms creating the securities purposely helped to select especially risky mortgage-linked assets that would be most likely to crater, setting their clients up to lose billions of dollars if the housing market imploded.

Some securities packaged by Goldman and Tricadia ended up being so vulnerable that they soured within months of being created.

I'm no lawyer, but my take is that it's not Goldman's fault if its customers were suckers; the bank correctly saw that the U.S. housing sector was headed south and adjusted accordingly, while less prudent financial institutions were still making big bucks on complex securities tied to mortgages and couldn't wean themselves away in time to save themselves from disaster. As the firm's spokesman says in the story, it's not like these customers, pension funds and insurance companies, were rubes who didn't know what they were getting into. They were sophisticated financial players looking for high returns and willing to take risks.

Still, Goldman stands accused of some breathtakingly cyncial behavior here: selling products it didn't believe were worthy investments and then betting against them. It's as if McDonald's were caught investing in defibrillators and plus-size clothing companies. Nobody can deny, however, that Goldman made very smart moves and has come out far ahead of its competitors.

One thing I'm struck by in recent accounts of the financial crisis is the extent of "Goldman envy" among other Wall Street firms. Executives at J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and other big banks were obsessed with emulating Goldman's huge profits and resented its employees' reputation for being the smartest, boldest players on Wall Street. In some cases, the interfirm jealously was kind of like that of the character Jan on The Brady Bunch; just replace "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!" with "Goldman, Goldman, Goldman!"

Yet somehow, with the possible exception of J.P. Morgan, which avoided the worst of the mortgage junk thanks to smart risk management by CEO Jamie Dimon, the other banks didn't follow Goldman's lead when in December 2006 the firm turned bearish on the mortgage sector. Why didn't they catch on?

UPDATE: Be sure to read Felix Salmon's informed analysis. Money quote:

The real lesson here isn’t that Goldman did anything scandalous. It’s just that if you’re making a bet and Goldman is your bookmaker, don’t be surprised if you end up losing.

See also Goldman's response and Salmon's custom answer to my last question.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A "scurrilous idea" -- better known as the Tobin tax, a levy on foreign-exchange transactions -- seems to be taking on a life of its own.

This week U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio is expected to propose a tax on all financial transactions (like stock purchases -- excluding those connected to health, education, and pensions). The idea of funding job creation in this way has the backing of a variety of groups, including the NAACP, AFL-CIO, and the National Council of La Raza.

Although the idea of a financial transactions tax has been floating around since Nobel economics prize winner James Tobin proposed it in the 1970s (to stabilize currencies), it has gained recent traction since Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown brought it up at a meeting of G20 finance ministers meeting earlier this month. He discussed using some form of a tax on all financial transactions, to stabilize whole markets.

Much of the debate focuses on justice, the idea seems to be to tax the bad guys and use the money for any number of just causes. It's hard to argue with that sort of logic. As Brown pointed out, the banks should have to bear some of the costs of the massive bailouts they received.

It cannot be acceptable that the benefits of success in this sector are reaped by the few but the costs of its failure are borne by all of us."

At the request of the G-20, the IMF is preparing a report on the tax -- despite opposition by IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Opponents avoid philosophy and stick to economics, arguing that countries instituting such levies might risk pushing financial operations into friendlier markets and that it would be technically difficult to implement.

In the meantime, Brazil has unilaterally implemented a tax on currency transactions, intended to stabilize the real by reducing speculation.

Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images

European leaders are starting to follow suit; Britain's five largest banks have agreed to publish the pay of their key staff members, and will spread bonus payments over three years. French president Sarkozy has announced a set of even tougher and more broadly applied regulations.

Of course, not everyone thinks that bonus reforms are the way to go. Nobel prize-winning conomist Robert F. Engle III says

We shouldn't ban bonuses, but restructure the way they're paid so they're more commensurate with the risk the company is taking....What's important is we give the banking system the right incentives to figure this out. When companies get too big and too complex to fail, they would face a higher tax rate, which would go into a rescue fund. The banks are not excited about it, they would rather go back to business as usual."

Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück have been at the forefront of the international campaign to crack down on tax havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland. But they may be overlooking a problem much closer to home, according to Beat Balzli and Michaela Schiessl:

[T]he minister's rage against tax havens risks obscuring a much bigger problem: A completely legal tax avoidance industry is flourishing right at home in Germany. It is an industry that thrives on the mistakes made by ministries and the parliament in drawing up tax legislation. And hardly any other industry is as successful, irrespective of the current economic situation, or operates as efficiently.

While ordinary German workers are at the mercy of the tax authorities, millionaires and corporations use aggressive tax models to make themselves appear to be artificially poor -- and it's completely legal. In fact, seminars on "International Tax Structuring" are even tax-deductible in Germany as professional training.

What the national treasury loses in the process is far from insignificant. The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has calculated that there is a gap of €100 billion between the demonstrated profits of corporations and partnerships and the profits they have reported for purposes of taxation. "This points to tax breaks and structuring options with which companies can lower their taxable profits or shift them abroad," writes the DIW.

In fact, German corporations structure their international subsidiaries in such a way that the most profitable ones are located in the countries with the lowest tax rates. Corporate tax paid by corporations makes up only 2.8 percent of the government's total tax revenues of €561 billion. Germany's army of wage-earners contributes the largest share.

"Germany is a tax haven for large companies," says Wiesbaden-based economist Lorenz Jarass. "People with normal incomes are being robbed."

Remember U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to ease the credit crunch, the byzantine "Legacy Loans" program released to much hand-wringing this winter? It was, perhaps, the most ambitious, most confusing, most surprising governmental response to the Great Recession.

The idea was to help price and start a market for mortgage-backed assets on the banks' books. The government would assess and tranch the assets to sell at auctions to public-private investment partnerships; the government would eat the losses if the assets went sour.

Remember hearing about it recently? No?

That's because it's dead in the water, the New York Times reports.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation indefinitely postponed a central element of the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan on Wednesday, acknowledging that it could not persuade enough banks to sell off their bad assets.

In a move that confirmed the suspicions of many analysts, the agency called off plans to start a $1 billion pilot program this month that was intended to help banks clean up their balance sheets and eventually sell off hundreds of billions of dollars worth of troubled mortgages and other loans.

Many banks have refused to sell their loans, in part because doing so would force them to mark down the value of those loans and book big losses. Even though the government was prepared to prop up prices by offering cheap financing to investors, the prices that banks were demanding have remained far higher than the prices that investors were willing to pay. 

The blogosphere's been all over sorting out what this means -- see Yves Smith and Ezra Klein, for examples.

Part of me thinks: goodness, isn't this the best of all worlds for everyone? The banks will be forced to mop up their own mess, and mark down the proper (low but existant) value of these assets at some point. (The i-banks' counterproductive and unethical desire to mismark and misprice concerns me a lot on this point, to be fair.) But if they want to wait for the assets to mature rather than moving them now, spreading their losses out over several years -- that's fine with me.

The government won't have to cajole hedge funds into participating, promising them some oversight concessions in return. That means hedge funds and the like can use their free capital, hopefully, on more productive investments. The government also won't have to subsidize the banks' losses on these assets, leaving those precious funds for other better purposes.

Plus, if the Geithner plan was always in part a confidence thing -- born of the perceived need to reassure banks that the government would not let them fail and would help ease the credit crunch -- this part of the plan seems to have worked. And without costing anything.

Here's looking forward to the other pieces, though.