In 2010, I was invited to hold a presentation titled “Will Russia someday close the gas tap?” It was a rookie mistake, early in my career, so I didn’t think about how the presentation would be advertised. I just suggested general topics I wanted to talk about in the broader context of...
For most of the 20th century, Westerners had one word to sum up any thoughts they may have had about China: inscrutable. Several decades of globalization have radically changed that perception. Fully integrated into the world economy, China plays a dominant role today and is expected to become the...
The far right would like to impeach Joe Biden, kick him out of the White House, perhaps even throw him in jail. “Lock him up” has been a predictable chant at Trump rallies going back to before the 2020 election. Even Republicans in Congress have joined this chorus. Bipartisanship? As...
The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing inequality globally and even advanced economies have not been spared. Before the pandemic began in 2020, inequality was on the rise. Decades of globalization, loose monetary policy and the rise of oligopolies have contributed to this phenomenon. In many ways,...
China has been recognized by Washington as the major rival to the United States in nearly every field. However, this isn't the first time an Asian country has posed a threat to America's economic dominance. In the mid-1980s, Japan built up a massive trade surplus with the United States, igniting a...
Retail investors are non-professional investors who, instead of keeping their money in the bank or investing it in mutual funds, invest directly in the stock market for higher returns. Often, retail investors don't have in-depth or professional knowledge of the stock market. Can an...
When experts look back at the early 2000s, they will observe that India embarked on a construction spree to develop its transport infrastructure. The country is emulating what the United States and Europe did in the previous century and what China and East Asia have done more recently....
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, there has been a notable decline in public investment in European countries over the last decade. As a result, states are turning more frequently to the public-private partnerships (PPP) system, whose structure based on...
In August, the Daily Devil’s Dictionary appears in a single weekly edition containing multiple items taken from a variety of contexts. This week, before glancing at political division in the US, we look at what is shaping up to be a game-changing development in China. Bloomberg’s reporters...
The World Bank issued a stark warning in its 2018 outlook for the Saudi economy: “The Kingdom likely faces a looming poverty problem.” The bank has since noted in its 2019 and 2020 outlooks that “while no official information is available on poverty, identifying and...
It’s been 18 months since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are finally getting indicative statistics on its economic impact. Some of these numbers confirm what we’ve long suspected: that online sales boomed during lockdowns and that workers aren’t all that keen to start commuting...
