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The TED website describes Kishore Mahbubani, a career diplomat from Singapore, as someone who “re-envisions global power dynamics through the lens of rising Asian economies.” This description is not just apt for Mahbubani but also for his new book, “Has the West Lost It?” The title may...
Since Matteo Salvini took over the leadership of the Northern League party (rebranded as the League before last year’s elections) in late 2013, the focus of his harsh political campaigns shifted from southern Italians — the so-called “Terroni,” or people of the countryside — to...
The Amazon is still burning. This isn’t new. The people who live there know that fires are set in the Amazon rainforest all the time. Tens of thousands of fires are set in the Brazilian Amazon every year and have been for decades. But the scale is unprecedented this year, and the secret is...
Nearly 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, powerful images come to mind from those heady days of 1989: people dancing on walls and the related assumption that from now on freedom would reign around the world. Global capitalism had prevailed over the state-run socialist model, and people...
Reading tea leaves, even great Moroccan mint tea, is always challenging, especially with data that doesn’t always seem to match up. So, depending on what you’re measuring and where you gather your statistics, the message can vary from so bad to almost great, when it comes to economic...
Interviewed on CNBC, Leon Cooperman, described by Marketwatch as the “billionaire boss at Omega Advisors,” complained ominously about the prospect of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders being elected US president. He explained why it would be bad for the economy. The author of the article,...
Recently, the proclaimed “death” of the Iran nuclear deal has been presented as the reason behind the rapidly escalating tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and the basis for pessimistic speculations regarding an imminent war between Iran and the United States. Interestingly enough, hard-line...
President Xi Jinping, the modern-day emperor of China, clearly has a deep sense of history. On September 8, 2013, he gave a speech at Nazarbayev University in Almaty at the invitation of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Xi quoted a Chinese saying — “ near neighbor is better...
Demographic experts increasingly agree that the extraordinary trend of population growth that took place over the past 200 years has already changed course. Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, the authors of the book “Empty Planet,” suggest that a complete reversal of the trend may be at hand....
Dark times loom for the US economy in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s latest threat on August 1 to levy 10% tariffs on some $300 billion of imports from China. In response, China allowed the yuan to weaken against the dollar and thereby cushion the impact for Chinese exporters. In...
A group of Italians started the Slow Food movement back in the 1980s. Stay away from fast-food restaurants, they urged: Eat local, focus on traditional recipes, relax and enjoy your meal. The Slow Food movement began as a protest against McDonald’s, which opened a new franchise near...
