Last year was a memorable one for the global economy. Not only was overall performance disappointing, but profound changes — both for better and for worse — occurred in the global economic system.
Most notable was the Paris climate agreement reached (...)
NEW YORK: US President Barack Obama's nomination of Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank has been well received — and rightly so, especially given some of the other names that were bandied about. In Kim, a public-health professor who is (...)
YANGON: Here in Myanmar (Burma), where political change has been numbingly slow for a half-century, a new leadership is trying to embrace rapid transition from within. The government has freed political prisoners, held elections (with more on the (...)
KOLKATA: The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F. Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see (...)
NEW YORK: The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now (...)
NEW YORK: The Great Recession of 2008 has morphed into the North Atlantic Recession: it is mainly Europe and the United States, not the major emerging markets, that have become mired in slow growth and high unemployment. And it is Europe and America (...)
NEW YORK: Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology — the belief in free and unfettered markets — brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980's until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater (...)
NEW YORK: The annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund was notable in marking the Fund's effort to distance itself from its own long-standing tenets on capital controls and labor-market flexibility. It appears that a new IMF has (...)
DUBAI: The consequences of the Japanese earthquake — especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant — resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark (...)
NEW YORK: Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care — including heart surgery — for all. You might suspect that (...)
DAVOS: The whole world celebrates Tunisia's democratic revolution, which has set off a cascade of events elsewhere in the region — particularly in Egypt — with untold consequences. The eyes of the world are now set on this small country of ten (...)
NEW YORK: The time has come for New Year's resolutions, a moment of reflection. When the last year hasn't gone so well, it is a time for hope that the next year will be better.
For Europe and the United States, 2010 was a year of disappointment. (...)
NEW YORK: The global economy ends 2010 more divided than it was at the beginning of the year. On one side, emerging-market countries like India, China, and the Southeast Asian economies, are experiencing robust growth. On the other side, Europe and (...)
NEW YORK: In the aftermath of the Great Recession, countries have been left with unprecedented peacetime deficits and increasing anxieties about their growing national debts. In many countries, this is leading to a new round of austerity — policies (...)
NEW YORK: The mortgage debacle in the United States has raised deep questions about “the rule of law,” the universally accepted hallmark of an advanced, civilized society. The rule of law is supposed to protect the weak against the strong, and (...)
NEW YORK: With interest rates near zero, the US Federal Reserve and other central banks are struggling to remain relevant. The last arrow in their quiver is called quantitative easing (QE), and it is likely to be almost as ineffective in reviving (...)
NEW YORK: A sure sign of a dysfunctional market economy is the persistence of unemployment. In the United States today, one out of six workers who would like a full-time job can't find one. It is an economy with huge unmet needs and yet vast idle (...)
CANBERRA: The Great Recession of 2008 reached the farthest corners of the earth. Here in Australia, they refer to it as the GFC — the global financial crisis.
Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister when the crisis struck, put in place one of the (...)
NEW YORK: It was not long ago that we could say, “We are all Keynesians now.” The financial sector and its free-market ideology had brought the world to the brink of ruin. Markets clearly were not self-correcting. Deregulation had proven to be a (...)
NEW YORK: It has taken almost two years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and more than three years since the beginning of the global recession brought on by the financial sector's misdeeds for the United States and Europe finally to reform (...)
NEW YORK: The Greek financial crisis has put the very survival of the euro at stake. At the euro's creation, many worried about its long-run viability. When everything went well, these worries were forgotten. But the question of how adjustments (...)
NEW YORK: The battle with the United States over China's exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great (...)
NEW YORK: A wave of fiscal austerity is rushing over Europe and America. The magnitude of budget deficits - like the magnitude of the downturn - has taken many by surprise. But despite protests by the yesterday's proponents of deregulation, who (...)
NEW YORK: Defeat in the Massachusetts senatorial election has deprived America's Democrats of the 60 votes needed to pass health-care reform and other legislation, and it has changed American politics - at least for the moment. But what does that (...)
NEW YORK: Pretty speeches can take you only so far. A month after the Copenhagen climate conference, it is clear that the world's leaders were unable to translate rhetoric about global warming into action.
It was, of course, nice that world (...)