The first hints that extremely low oil prices could plunge many petro-states into crisis came at the beginning of March, when the price of Ecuador’s sovereign bonds fell to record lows. Oil accounts for about a third of Ecuador’s export earnings and a similar portion of its public-sector revenue. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
The fog of war obscures much about the novel coronavirus pandemic. But two facts seem absolutely certain. First, China’s Communist authorities have lied, concealed and misled about the origins of the epidemic and the toll of the virus in China. Second, the World Health Organization has acted as Beijing’s handmaid. The result: The global toll of […]
Watching the Trump carnival from afar, the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt summed up the week’s events, and those of the many painful weeks to come: “This is the first great crisis of the post-American world,” he wrote on Twitter. “The UN Security Council is nowhere to be seen, G20 is in the hands of the […]
For more than a century, countries have wrestled with how to improve international cooperation in the face of major outbreaks of infectious diseases. A pandemic of a new coronavirus that originated in China in 2019 underscores the urgency. Read Here – CFR
Predicting the stock market at a time like this is hard. To do so well, we would have to predict the direct effects on the economy of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as all the real and psychological effects of the pandemic of financial anxiety. The two are different, but inseparable. Read Here – Project […]
The coronavirus pandemic has completely changed patterns of consumer psychology across the world, experts say. Complexity of the crisis, the number of variables and its magnitude make a consumer recovery unprecedented and difficult to predict. Read Here – South China Morning Post
The coronavirus pandemic could seriously disrupt global food supply chains and send prices soaring, especially for those economies with vulnerable supply structures, if major producing countries increase export restrictions, international agencies and food experts have warned. Read Here – South China Morning Post
The timing could not have been worse for Russia to provoke a spat with Saudi Arabia over oil production quotas in early March. Moscow’s decision to withdraw from the OPEC+ agreement restricting oil production in order to maintain higher oil prices triggered a harsh reaction by Riyadh that sent oil prices spiralling down to below […]
While the US’s $2 trillion stimulus bill is hogging headlines stateside, governments around the world are rolling out their own sweeping rescue packages in an effort to mitigate the economic consequences of COVID-19 containment efforts. Read Here – Fisher Investments
We are facing a crisis of historic proportions. But if what we are going through can indeed be called a war, it is certainly not a typical one. After all, today’s enemy is shared by all of humankind, and the mobilisation of state resources must go hand in hand with the demobilisation of most of the […]
looking beyond borders 