Global Carbon Pricing Generates Record $84 Billion In Revenue

Global carbon pricing revenue in 2021 increased by almost 60 percent from 2020 levels, to around $84 billion, providing an important source of funds to help support a sustainable economic recovery, finance broader fiscal reforms, or invest in communities as part of the low-carbon transition future, according to the World Bank’s annual “State and Trends […]

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How Wall Street Became A Cult Of Risk

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 […]

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Advancing CPEC By Stealth

The corridor is only minimally about transit trade. The power plants, too, are little more than the “early harvest projects”, on commercial terms, designed to jump-start the economy before the real game begins. The real game of CPEC is about granting access to Chinese enterprises to Pakistan’s domestic markets, raw materials and the agrarian economy. […]

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Perfecting Strategy

In the post-Cold War era, the biggest challenge for the U.S. is a rapidly rising China. During the Clinton administration, Washington had a clear hedging strategy toward Beijing — that is, both engagement and deterrence. At that time, China lacked the capability to challenge the U.S. Thus, Washington highlighted engagement in order to involve China […]

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Never Saw It Coming?

The demise of Bear Stearns was the beginning of a six-month erosion in global financial stability that would culminate with the failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, triggering possibly the greatest financial crisis in history. To be sure, the Great Depression of the 1930s involved a far greater collapse in economic activity. But […]

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The Big Fiscal Dilemma

The United States faces a dilemma. A persistently high level of government debt threatens future economic growth and constrains the ability of the government to act in pursuit of national interests, both international and domestic. Yet efforts to bring down the debt will further constrain government outlays and action — possibly for many years into […]

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