The second term Obama administration is taking office facing challenging economic conditions. The economy continues to expand, yet the pace is disappointingly slow. The unemployment rate has fallen below 8 percent for the first time in almost 4 years, but is still unacceptably high. The economic expansion remains fragile and vulnerable to risks associated with […]
President Hamid Karzai’s visit to India comes at a time when his nation’s future, more than at any point since 9/11, is shrouded in a fog of fear. This weekend, shells fired by his troops were reported to have killed five civilians in Pakistan’s South Waziristan agency, the latest in a series of cross-border skirmishes. […]
Recent anti-Japanese street demonstrations in China may signal the start of economic decline for a nation that won its reputation as the “world’s manufacturing factory” in the late 1990s and surpassed Japan in 2010 to become the second-largest economy after the United States. Although the riots were ostensibly meant as a protest against the Japanese […]
The usual story about African development over the last few decades is, simply, that it hasn’t developed. It is a region mired in permanent poverty—destined by geography or disease burden or corruption or ethnic division to everlasting misery. That story should be placed in the fiction aisle. Quality-of-life measures have been improving for decades across […]
Five years have passed since the advent of the current crisis, and while the beast has since morphed from a financial crisis into a confidence and debt crisis, some mantras have become so deeply engrained into our collective psyche after loud proclamations and endless repetitions that they feature is almost any discussion about the future […]
As Egypt struggles to revive an economy battered by last year’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak, private lawsuits are attempting to overturn the sale of state assets during his rule. The court actions present the new government with a dilemma: It’s trying to attract foreign investment while addressing the demands of a population that stages protests […]
The Middle East is undergoing a historic transformation. Parts of the region are up in flames, and Asia’s primary powers either have no role or a destructive one. Pakistan, Indonesia and other Asian Muslim countries, as well as India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, are largely uninvolved, as if events in the region have no […]
Like many of you I am eagerly awaiting the new James Bond film Skyfall, especially Javier Bardem’s star turn as Raoul Silva, the classic Bond villain with his outlandish plot to pay 60% over market price for a Canadian oil company. No, wait, that’s from the business pages, isn’t it? You’ll forgive me: the stories sound […]
It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in Mongolia, the large country of high desert plains sandwiched between China and Russia, and much has changed. Some, education and food supply, is for the better, and a lot – including urban sprawl and rising inequality – is for the worse. Much of the change has to […]
AFTER giving a speech at a business conference in London a young analyst chatted with investment executives in the audience, then followed two of them to a nearby hotel lobby. Over glasses of Chablis the executives raved about their company’s worldwide network of extravagantly decorated offices and their fat annual bonuses. Then they offered the […]
looking beyond borders 