Edie Lush

Nǐ hǎo Shanghai

Happily landed in Shanghai yesterday and am freshly back from the inaugural event of the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network – ‘Take Your Own Path Through Global Tech Strategies’ event held at the Glamour Bar at M on the Bund.

It’ll be a jam packed couple of days starting off with breakfast with Dell’s PH Ferrand in the morning but before I head to bed I thought I would jot down one interesting conversation I had about women in China. From 1949 women were treated equally under communism and you’re almost as likely to see a female doctor or engineer as you are a male one. The impact of the ‘one child’ policy means that women can go back to work much sooner than in other parts of the world where women take quite a few years out of full time work to look after kids. There is also a lot of family help around – that one child has four doting grandparents to help with the child rearing. I learned that it is written into the Chinese ‘constitution’ that women can breastfeed at work. but that with economic growth things are changing a bit. There is growing family pressure to get married, have a baby and quit working that didn’t exist before.

As green as it gets

I’m in Copenhagen, Denmark, where it has started to snow. You’d think with all of the hot air around here spouting from the various politicians the snow would have melted and we’d be sporting bikinis on the canals, but, in fact, it’s freezing.

Weather aside, I’m reporting for Hub Culture and hanging out with terrific friends Meg Thomson and Stan Stalnaker and terrific camera woman/editor Suvi Andrea Helminen . The Hub Culture is as hopping as it gets – and with delegates leaving the Bella Center in droves because they’re a) bored, b) can’t get in Hub’s Pavilion is rapidly becoming the center of action.

Islamic finance stakes its claim

The Spectator 17 October 2009

Banking governed by Koranic principles is a rare growth market in a shaken financial world, says Edie Lush — but is it really more stable than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent?

The clash of civilisations between the Muslim world and the West takes many forms. Even on the financial front, there are deep differences of philosophy in relation to money, debt and profit. But at a time when the Anglo-Saxon mode of banking is flat on its back after the credit crunch, its Islamic counterpart is gaining wider acceptance, and even laying claim to be a more stable alternative.

The requirements of Islamic finance — lower proportions of debt to equity, a condition that the lender share profits and losses with the borrower, and a focus on transactions based on tangible assets — mean that Islamic banks have not become entangled in the toxic debt instruments that sideswiped Western banking giants. And while most of the West’s banks were in crisis, Islamic finance continued to grow — by about 15 to 20 per cent in each of the last four years.

This was written for The Spectator , which you can Download