Over the past decade, the world’s largest central banks — in the United States, Europe, China and Japan — have expanded their balance sheets from less than $5 trillion to more than $17 trillion in an effort to promote the recovery. Much of that newly printed money has found its way into the financial markets, where it often follows the path of least regulation.
President Donald Trump announced that the United States will impose a 10 percent duty on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports as of next week, quickly escalating a trade war that has hit broad swaths of the global economy.
Also Read: U.S. China Trade War: Analysis of Latest Developments
The idea of “strategic autonomy”, at once vague and central to Indian foreign policy discourse after the Cold War, appears to be traveling and quite far. Countries — ranging from Britain to Japan and France to Australia — that once looked with much amusement at India’s prickly obsession with autonomy are now beginning to embrace it.
The United States’ use of sanctions has exploded over the past decade. An analysis by the law firm Gibson Dunn found that President Donald Trump’s administration added nearly 1,000 people, companies, and entities to U.S. sanctions lists during 2017, nearly 30 percent more than the number added during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
Ten years ago this week, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the world suddenly changed. That date, Sept. 15, 2008, was hardly the starting point of the Depression-sized financial crisis that would soon threaten to sink the entire world economy; it had begun more than a year earlier. But most scholars agree Lehman’s failure marked the moment when everyone realized at once that the so-called experts had no idea how deep the interconnections ran.
Are America and Pakistan finally breaking up? The short answer is no. As much as both states are fed up with each other, they remain far too co-dependent to simply walk away. What we are seeing instead is a tough and protracted re-negotiation over the terms of the relationship. The question of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan is not necessarily the hardest issue…The far bigger question… is what India and Pakistan’s role will be in the emerging cold war between the US and China.
Economic fundamentals have been kind to dollar bulls since early spring, but there is no guarantee of the rally’s life expectancy, especially if “crazy town” politics gain ground in Washington. Beijing had better be prepared to ride the coming storm as it might provide a valuable opportunity.
For China, the original idea behind MIC2025 was simply to catch up with other countries, a tall order even by its own admission. Look no further than the new-generation information technology sector, one of the plan’s 10 target industries. After more than two decades and billions of dollars spent, China has yet to commercialise a home-grown operating system for computers, or a microchip, not to mention breaking into the global computing market that Microsoft and Intel dominate.
Following the 9/11 attacks, successive U.S. administrations have promulgated three consistent objectives: First, to prevent additional mass casualty attacks on our homeland. Second, to find and punish those responsible. And third, to shatter the larger transnational terrorist movement’s capability and capacity to be a future threat.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the global financial crisis, the world economy has registered stronger growth than many realize, owing in large part to China. But in the years ahead, global economic imbalances and troubling trends in the business world will continue to pose economic as well as political risks.
