The ballots hadn’t even been counted yet when the deals were announced. On April 26, just two days after Election Day, Indonesia signed 23 memorandums of understanding with China, worth $14.2 billion in all, for several major infrastructure projects. They came after months of silence about Chinese investment in Indonesia—by design, as President Joko Widodo […]
Policymakers need to ask what Wall Street’s mighty money machine exists for in the first place. Should the financial business exist primarily as an end in itself, or should it be, as in the original meaning of “finance,” a means to an end? …When finance becomes an end in itself, the public is liable to […]
More to the point, when it comes to China, we are dealing with a unique and very formidable cultural organism. The American foreign policy elite does not like to talk about culture since culture cannot be quantified, and in this age of extreme personal sensitivity, what cannot be quantified or substantiated by a footnote is […]
The biggest challenges to the brittle present system in China don’t come from outsiders concocting destabilizing plots in an imaginary, inimical West, but from Chinese people themselves, which is precisely what the people of Hong Kong are, as Beijing itself has always insisted. Once they get a whiff of them, people everywhere, it turns out, […]
Trump can’t turn back to campaigning from governing, because he never really bothered to start governing in the first place. With the exception of cutting taxes and especially building a wall on the Mexican border, he’s never shown much interest in learning how the levers of power work or in using them. Read Here – […]
Trump is wrong about a lot of things when it comes to trade, including that the trade arrangements to which the United States is a party reflect poor negotiating skills. To the contrary, they overwhelmingly reflect U.S. negotiating preferences. But Trump does have a point that some of the negotiators’ priorities don’t reflect those of […]
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden state visit to Pyongyang this week may signal an economic re-engagement with the hermit kingdom, according to Chinese state media. Ahead of the visit, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily has suggested, via its social media account, that restoring bilateral economic relations would be on the agenda. Read Here – South China Morning […]
Forty years after the revolution that ousted the Shah, Iran’s unique political-religious system and government appears strong enough to withstand US pressure and to ride out the country’s current economic difficulties. So how should the US minimize the risks to the region posed by the regime? Read Here – Project Syndicate
Beyond the US, the fragility of growth in debt-ridden China and some other emerging markets remains a concern, as do economic, policy, financial and political risks in Europe. Worse, across the advanced economies, the policy toolbox for responding to a crisis remains limited. The monetary and fiscal interventions and private-sector backstops used after the 2008 […]
In the inquiry into who would be the strongest Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020, Donald Trump is what might be called a hostile witness. “Joe Biden is a dummy,” the President said last week, on his way to Iowa, where Biden, who spent more than three decades in the Senate and eight years as Barack Obama’s Vice-President and one […]
