It was a great year for copper, Ukrainian stocks, palladium. Uzbekistan’s currency, Venezuelan bonds and sugar not so much. It was a great year to hold bitcoin, but a bad time to have been invested in the Uzbek soum. Read Here – Bloomberg
Seven years ago, the U.S. led an effort to address a problem facing governments everywhere. Each year, people manage to avoid paying an estimated $2.5 trillion in income tax — a giant sum that could be used to combat poverty, update infrastructure or lower tax rates for law-abiding citizens. Now, however, the U.S. is becoming one of […]
In the more than four decades since Chinese leader Mao Zedong and US President Richard Nixon re-established diplomatic relations between the two countries – after a 25-year hiatus caused by Washington’s support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War – relations between the world’s most populous and most powerful nations have seesawed. Read […]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is merely the champion of a larger movement that seeks to push India in a more nationalist direction. Read Here – The National Interest
The more spontaneous interactions a president has, the greater the chances for the dreaded gaffe, which is why the president’s Twitter feed has been known to cause heartburn among U.S. national-security professionals. Trump relies not just on national-security and media-relations teams to craft anodyne public statements, but also on his ability to communicate directly with […]
And the way Forsyth tells it, drink has caused us to say yes to an awful lot. The desire for booze, he suggests, led to — among other things — fixed agriculture, civilisation, cities, Anglo-Saxon England, America and the Russian Revolution. (In 1914, the Tsar unwisely banned vodka.) It may even be the reason that […]
Donald Trump’s first year in office seems to have been marked, above all, by his verbal incontinence. America’s tweeter-in-chief kept several continents rapt with his early-morning offerings. In his lack of inhibition and tact, Trump is the opposite of Barack Obama. At the same time, Obama’s decorum managed to conceal many unpleasant realities, which we would […]
Like much else about Pakistan, it’s often infuriatingly difficult to determine whether or not its economy is on the brink of disaster. This week, as the Pakistani rupee lost 5 percent of its value in just three days, it looked like trouble was brewing. And sure, this might be a sign of the economy slipping […]
When a rising power challenges an incumbent one, war often follows. That prospect, known as the Thucydides trap after the Greek historian who first described it, looms over relations between China and the West, particularly America. So, increasingly, does a more insidious confrontation. Even if China does not seek to conquer foreign lands, many people […]
The first thing you need to understand about the building that, until very recently, housed the Russian Consulate in San Francisco — a city where topography is destiny, where wealth and power concentrate, quite literally, at the top — is its sense of elevation. Brick-fronted, sentinel-like, and six stories high, it sits on a hill […]
looking beyond borders 