Blog entry | February 22, 2012 - 10:47am
NEW DELHI – Thirty-three years ago, then-US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke of an “arc of crisis” coursing through the Middle East and into Central Asia. Today, events in Syria and Pakistan, as well as the recent bombings in Bangkok and New Delhi, which some are linking to Iran, suggest that Brzezinski...
Blog entry | February 21, 2012 - 10:32am
LONDON – 'Deficits are always bad,' thunder fiscal hawks. Not so, replies strategic investment analyst H. Wood Brock in an interesting new book, The American Gridlock. A proper assessment, Brock argues, depends on the “composition and quality of total government spending”.
Blog entry | February 21, 2012 - 9:22am
China has been deploying troops in the area of Gilgit-Baltistan for quite some time. In October 2011, the Indian Army Chief General V K Singh had mentioned the unease created by the presence of thousands of Chinese soldiers in the area. Some 4,000...
Blog entry | February 20, 2012 - 9:49am
This winter has been cold and ugly. You could say it was a Greek 'Winter of Discontent', minus Margaret Thatcher.
Blog entry | February 18, 2012 - 12:04pm
WASHINGTON, DC – Robert Zoellick will depart in June as President of the World Bank, once again raising the thorny issue of leadership of the Bretton Woods twins (the Bank and the International Monetary Fund). At their birth, John Maynard Keynes memorably warned that if these institutions did not get good leaders they would “fall...
Blog entry | February 17, 2012 - 2:45pm
MILAN – Markets and capitalist incentives have great strengths in promoting economic efficiency, growth, and innovation. And, as Ben Friedman of Harvard University argued persuasively in his 2006 book The Moral Consequences of Growth, economic growth is good for open and democratic societies.
Blog entry | February 16, 2012 - 5:02pm
TEL AVIV – The current drive to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal reflects two important, and interrelated, changes. From Israel’s perspective, these changes are to be welcomed, though its government must remain cautious about the country’s own role.
Blog entry | February 16, 2012 - 4:39pm
COPENHAGEN – One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere.
Blog entry | February 16, 2012 - 3:40pm
LOS ANGELES – Capitalism’s greatest strength has been its resiliency – its ability to survive the throes and challenges of crises and business cycles to fuel innovation and economic growth. Today, however, more than four years into a credit crisis, a conspicuous enigma calls this legacy into question.
Blog entry | February 16, 2012 - 11:37am
During the crisis, Deutsche Bank AG has once again reported yet another record pre-tax profit of €5.4 billion.
Blog entry | February 16, 2012 - 10:41am
NAIROBI – Nineteenth-century European explorers called Africa the 'Dark Continent', because to them it was vast and largely unknown. Today, Africa may still be dark, but for a very different reason: it is chronically short of electricity. Indeed, nocturnal satellite images show that, except for some parts of southern and...
Blog entry | February 15, 2012 - 2:54pm
NEWPORT BEACH – Let me set the scene: an increasingly discredited economic policy approach gives rise to growing domestic social and political opposition, street protests and violence, disagreements among official creditors, and mounting concerns among private creditors about a disorderly default.
