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Anyone who knows how Wall Street works will not be surprised to learn that when the novel coronavirus epidemic began to turn into a full-fledged pandemic in the first two months of 2020, people in the know saw a major opportunity to play Monopoly. Any major shift affecting society and people’s...
China’s footprint in global foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased notably since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. That served to bring Chinese overseas FDI closer to a level that one would expect, based on the country’s weight in the global economy. China...
An article written by Henry M. Paulson Jr. should attract the attention of anyone trying to keep pace with the evolution of a battered global economy in a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment. Paulson is not some lightweight journalist. He served as the United States secretary of the...
In a Reuters article dated August 5, with the title “As dollar slides, some investors fret about its status as world's reserve currency,” Saqib Iqbal Ahmed signals what may be the indicator of a looming seismic shift in the global economy. The article highlights the ever more visible fragility...
Despite more than 3,000 years of Chinese history, many of the world’s countries had little to no direct experience with China or Chinese investment prior to the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). There was a presumption on the part of many governments that international best practices...
Many countries are facing declining growth rates due to the coronavirus pandemic, and Morocco is no exception. Given lockdowns and flight restrictions implemented worldwide from March, the tourism and hospitality sectors — usually the third-largest component of GDP — have suffered enormous...
Some news items manage to sum up in a simple and succinct narrative the entire madness of a phase of human history. We are now living in the era of hyperreality, in which everything that appears superficially ordered by logical principles is in reality structured by forces we have been trained not...
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are businesses with revenues, assets or employees below a certain threshold. SMEs are important to the health of any country as they tend to form the backbone of the economy. When compared to large enterprises, SMEs are generally greater in...
July 15 was a very good day for Apple. Not so much for the European Commission, nor for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). What happened? In 2016, the European Commission (EC), following a lengthy investigation, ruled that Ireland had granted Apple “illegal tax...
Wirecard AG, the Munich-based payments and financial services company that was a member of the DAX index of Germany’s 30 leading blue-chip stocks, collapsed spectacularly and filed for insolvency on June 25. Among many lessons, this disaster has revealed major gaps in audit...
Editor’s Note: These are unprecedented times. A global pandemic has changed life as we know it. In recent months, Fair Observer has examined the crisis through political, economic and social lenses, publishing articles from around the world. The result is three 360° series that we urge you to...
