About politicians and courage: Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened… Read More »
The crash of 2008 revealed the flaw in the euro’s construction, as each member country had to rescue its own banking system instead of doing it jointly. The Greek debt crisis brought matters to a climax. If member countries cannot take the next steps forward, the euro may fall apart, with adverse consequences for the… Read More »
NYTimes A Balanced Global Diet: Global imbalances — roughly defined, the different emphasis the world’s leading economies place on savings, spending and debt — is a phrase much used and little acted upon. Well before the current financial crisis began, world leaders pledged to address this disconnect. At an International Monetary Fund meeting in 2007,… Read More »
Emerging Economies and the WTO Ms. Mariarosaria Iorio of the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN) thinks, among other things, that the fact that the insistence of emerging economies on keeping the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) during the last Doha Round, an insistence that led to the breakdown of the round, shows that the world… Read More »
From The Economist: Though banking standards have certainly risen a lot in recent years, they still lag behind those of America and the European Union, particularly in terms of transparency. In April, United Bank for Africa, one of the country’s biggest, fell foul of American regulators who served the bank with a $15m fine for… Read More »