Asia’s march to greatness sometimes has an inevitable quality about it. The center of economic gravity is relentlessly shifting from West to East. China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s No.1 economy. India won’t be far behind. We’ve heard these types of predictions so many times that we’ve come to accept them as undeniable …
I’d like to congratulate the United Nations for finally catching on to what the real world has known about alleviating poverty for decades: Poor people need good jobs. The U.N. Research Institute for Social Development released a report earlier this month called Combating Poverty and Inequality that assessed the progress made by …
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero declared to The Wall Street Journal this week that the economic crisis in Europe has ended. “I believe that the debt crisis affecting Spain, and the euro zone in general, has passed,” Zapatero said. He probably hasn’t been watching the ongoing trials and tribulations of Ireland. …
I was reading The Wall Street Journal the other day and came upon an essay that made me feel as if I had been shoved into a time machine and sent back to 1985. No, it wasn’t about or a new Molly Ringwald movie or a longing for acid-washed jeans. The essay, written by Jeremy Wiesen, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of …
Frustration in Washington is growing over China’s contorted policy on its currency, the yuan. And for good reason. A so-called “reform” of the regime introduced in June, in which Beijing finally ended a de facto two-year yuan-dollar peg and permitted its currency to “float” in a narrow band, has proven to be a big yawn. The …
After threatening to intervene for weeks, Japan’s economic policymakers finally jumped into the currency markets to depress the value of the surging yen. The intervention was Tokyo’s first in six years, and had an immediate impact, softening the yen from under 83 to the dollar to around 85 by the afternoon. The Japanese have been …
In one of the most significant reforms to global finance to emerge from the Great Recession, regulators from around the world agreed to new standards for banks on Sunday, called Basel III. The rules are aimed at making the world’s financial system safer and less susceptible to the sort of recession-inducing meltdown we endured in 2008 …
One of the most important questions facing currency markets these days is: What’s China up to? How Chinese policymakers decide to invest their staggering $2.5 trillion in reserves can have a huge impact on currency values worldwide. Making matters more perplexing, Beijing usually doesn’t let us in on what those decisions are, and the …
If I had hair, I’d be pulling it out. That’s because I’ve been watching the latest, frustrating round of political hari-kari taking place in Tokyo. With Japan’s economic recovery stalling and national debt mounting, the last thing the country needs is a fruitless political squabble, but that’s exactly what the Japanese public …
About six weeks ago, there was some seriously gleeful backslapping going on in Europe. A perception took hold that Europe’s leaders, employing promises of bail-outs, budget austerity programs and Eurozone reform, had managed to stem the debt crisis that ravaged through the continent in the first half of 2010. Bond markets stabilized …
While most of the world is worried about the prospects of a double-dip recession, India is facing just the opposite problem – managing supercharged growth. The Indian economy, oblivious to the meager recovery in the West, is roaring. GDP surged 8.8% in the April-June quarter, the fastest clip in two-and-a-half years. There’s some …
A couple weeks ago, I mused a bit about how developing countries graduate into the leagues of the world’s richest nations, specifically looking at the case of Malaysia. That country has been stuck at a moderate level of wealth for some time – in other words, it’s caught in the “middle income trap.” There is one issue I wanted …
