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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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Taking news headlines as face value, the current financial and real estate crisis affects only some rich countries, not all of them, but definitely none outside the rim of the 'golden billion'. The media corporations are ethnocentric, which shouldn't be considered as huge anomaly; all of them are controlled by few centers of decision-making, all of them being centered either in North America or in Western Europe. So if you're thinking that the current crisis is rich nations' problem only, it's because you're told to think so and because your social practices make you assured in this thinking. Thinking constantly about your dwindling pension fund, about your own insecurity on the job market, you may miss the point that everything that may occur to you pales in comparison to what can happen in not so rich countries, some of them at just couple of hours flight-time from your home.

The rich nations provide some safety nets for destitute; these nets vary enormously from countries like the United States, on the one hand, to Sweden, on the other hand. The problem with most of the developing nations is that except through the jobs, of course not all of them, there is almost no alternative protective social policy. If the question for many 'westerners' is how much they will lose, for those outside the golden billion the question is whether they will survive?

One region where this question will be asked, and you will probably never learn this from the American and Europe-centered media until it's too late is Africa. Particularly about this part of Africa that, despite the common stereotypes, has opted for larger and deeper integration with the West, including in financial and real estate markets. The Mediterranean countries on the African coast had striving for many years to take their economic niche vis-à-vis the rich North. In fact, the revenues coming from bilateral trade and providing tourism and other services for the Europeans is the single most important engine of growth for many nations from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east passing through Tunisia in the middle.

These countries, after decades of autarchic economic models, have gradually opened their markets for financial, real estate and other forms of cooperation with the world since 1980s. Ironically, with the current financial crisis that affects all forms of economic cooperation, a crisis that hasn't been caused by the global South, these more open developing markets will be harmed more painfully than the countries that had never even tried to open. This crisis will punish the market reformers and will bless the autarchists.

It's not the poverty that causes rebellions in the modern world, but rather the perception of broken promises for economic prosperity. And neither these promises would look more broken than in countries that had already to change profoundly in order to satisfy the global markets in one or another area. If I had investments in such developing countries, especially in real estate, I'd consider very seriously selling it no matter how promising the local market looked right now. The interdependence is a factor that may quickly change the current promises into deep despair, and a social unrest will quickly find scapegoats for all social malaise in the foreign-owned properties and their owners.

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