Despite the surprise and very rapid election of Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s 87-year-old outgoing President for a second seven-year term, Italy remains politically gridlocked. His election may have won querulous lawmakers a short breather, but for the moment at least, no permanent end to the crisis is in sight. Read Here – The Hindu
It’s not just Chinese firms that are seeking to profit from America’s energy boom. Roughly 20 percent of the $133.7 billion invested in U.S. tight oil and shale gas from 2008 to 2012 came from abroad. To date, from Asia, Japanese companies have invested $5.3 billion; Indian companies $3.55 billion; and Korean companies $1.55 billion. […]
Once upon a time, global foreign direct investment flowed from only a few sources: the traditionally wealthy states of Europe, North America, and Japan. But cross-border investment from countries such as Brazil, India, and China is now flowing not just to other emerging and transitional economies, but also to the “old” FDI-exporting states. These changes have […]
While Washington is consumed by political furor over how to get the federal budget deficit under control, strangely few people are talking about its troublesome twin sister. Unlike the budget deficit, the half-trillion-dollar U.S. trade deficit does nothing to stimulate the economy even in the short term. Rather, it is sucking jobs out of the […]
Why is gold plunging? The most important factor is that global inflation is falling, reducing gold’s value as a hedge against rising prices. Gold bugs who were betting on an outburst of inflation are scrambling to reverse their bets and exit their gold positions at any price. Read Here – Bloomberg
U.S. Web users are searching for information about North Korea with astounding, unprecedented frequency. Google searches for “North Korea,” currently seven times the previous peak during the country’s 2006 nuclear test, are dramatically outpacing those for Beyonce or even President Obama. Last week, North Korea was the third most-popular term on Twitter, following only Easter and Good Friday. […]
Soon after protests erupted outside the U.S. embassy in the Egyptian capital last September, inspired by the posting on the Internet of an American-made anti-Islamic video, the embassy posted a statement saying, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.” The […]
The longest-serving leader of a central bank of a major world economy is not to be found in Europe, or North America, or Japan. It is a 65-year-old man named Zhou Xiaochuan who was recently reappointed to the job he has already held for a decade, namely governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). […]
The reason why Xi has chosen Russia as his first state visit is simple and clear: to raise China-Russia cooperation to a new level and inject new vigor into bilateral relations by continuing with the past and opening up the future,or, as Putin put it, to vigorously promote cooperation and people-to-people exchange between the two […]
Even as Obama hesitates to thrust the United States into the rolling cauldron that is Syria, critics accuse him of coddling a dictator in Cairo. Read Here – Foreign Policy
looking beyond borders 