The food crisis rages on. Though prices overall are a bit off their record highs reached earlier this year – the much-watched global food price index calculated by the Food & Agriculture Organisation dipped slightly in May – they are still way above the level a year ago. And with new fears of bad weather creating bad harvests, the …
It’s hard to argue that the rise of China, taken on the whole, is anything but good for the global economy. New wealth for China’s 1.3 billion people means 1.3 billion more people who can buy stuff from the rest of the world, creating jobs from American research labs to Japanese industrial zones to Brazilian mines. A global economy …
I was reading the ever-fascinating Martin Wolf in The Financial Times the other day as he bluntly laid out the stark choices facing Europe’s great experiment with the euro:
The eurozone, as designed, has failed. It was based on a set of principles that have proved unworkable at the first contact with a financial and fiscal crisis. It
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A few months back I voiced concerns that some economists were being overly rosy about the outlook for global growth this year. And there are more and more reasons to be gloomy. The U.S. economy is disappointing, Europe is tied in knots over the Greek debt crisis, Japan’s earthquake sent the economy back into recession, and commodity …
The title of this post may make some of you suspect that I’m smoking something. How can I think genteel Europe could see public upheaval massive enough to overthrow long-entrenched, democratic regimes, in the way Arab countries have witnessed popular movements upset the political order? Well, maybe the Europeans aren’t ready to storm …
I just arrived in Cairo, perhaps the country changed most so far by the “Arab spring” pro-democracy movements sweeping across the Middle East, and it got me thinking about the future of authoritarian regimes back home in Asia – and most of all, China. There has been much talk about whether or not China is vulnerable to the sort of …
Japan’s economy always seems to surprise – unfortunately, on the downside – and it has done so once again in the wake of the devastating quake and tsunami that hit the northeast coast on March 11. GDP in the January-March quarter contracted by a staggering annualized rate of 3.7%, sending the economy into yet another recession. …
The arrest in New York of International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual-assault charges (to which he is expected to plead not guilty) will probably end his career at the Washington-based organization. But what will it mean for the global economy and the IMF’s future?
The biggest short-term impact of …
Wang Qishan, China’s vice-premier, caused a bit of a stir this week when he accused Americans of having “simple” ideas about his nation during an interview on “The Charlie Rose Show.” According to a transcript, Wang said:
It is not easy to really know China because China is an ancient civilization and we are of the oriental
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If you’re watching recent developments in Europe with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu, you have good reason. It was almost exactly a year ago that the European Union stepped in with a 110 billion euro ($158 billion) bailout for debt-plagued Greece. Yet here we are, a year later, and Greece’s debt is again the primary focus of …
Or should I say, it never really left.
Americans got a scary reminder this week of something that the rest of the advanced economies had figured out some time ago — that mounting sovereign debt is one of the great threats to the future economic stability and prosperity of the world’s richest nations. Just ask the Europeans. They’ve …
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, U.S. leaders have believed in the concept of American exceptionalism, that the U.S. is a special country with a special mission. It is a notion that continues to this day. And when it comes to the threat its deteriorating national finances present to the world economy, the U.S. is truly …
