SEPA moves to China

Y'know I was going to write an indepth analysis of the ECB's 5th report on
SEPA titled: "SEPA:
from Concept to Reality" (31 page pdf download) only to find my Dutch friend
Donald at the excellent blogspot Linkdump on Payments had
beaten me to it. 

If you can't be bothered reading his whole write-up, the gist is that the
report only makes "political sense" and the ECB is "no longer objectively
analysing the world; they just join in the political game and produce papers
that they think may get them a good press." 

In other words, the document is all guph, hype and political conniving
according to Linkdump. 

So I thought I'd take a different tack.

I recently signed up with the Financial Times alerts service and have entered
various keywords that interest me, such as MiFID, Banking and Women.

It came as a surprise therefore that I kept getting these headlines about
China. 

Today's was "China's gung-ho economy exacts a heavy price" and last week's
was "OECD urges China to act on pollution".

Nothing to do with any of the keywords I had entered. 

Then I found out that these were all related to SEPA, the State Environmental
Protection Administration, which manages pollution and environmental issues in
China.

So I then entered SEPA into Google and guess what?  It also stands for the
Scottish Environmental Protection Agency which looks at National Waste
Strategies; the Spanish Language School in Costa Rica; the South-Eastern
Planetarium Association; the Solar Electric Power Association; and many
more.

Now this could be a very dangerous situation.

After all,  a Chinese Airline Director worried about carbon emissions may one
day encounter a weird bunch of people including a Scottish Sewage Expert, some
Latin-American Spanish chappie, a couple of Aliens from Essex and some Druidic
Sun-worshippers, intermingled with a bunch of bankers talking about the Euro. 

Watch out for the day of the Global SEPA Conference!