How climate agreements and trade measures go together
Rather than focusing on international conferences like COP, we should direct our energies towards negotiating agreements that can achieve progress in narrow, but crucial, economic sectors.
Fixing global economic governance
Rarely have the shortcomings of world leaders and existing institutional arrangements been so glaringly obvious.
Inequality and democracy
Should we be surprised that so many people view the growing concentration of wealth with suspicion, or that they believe the system is rigged?
Double standards of Western industrial policy
US President Joe Biden’s administration should be commended for its open rejection of two core neoliberal assumptions.
No confidence in the Fed
The aftershocks of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), while seemingly fading, are still reverberating around the world.
Who stands for freedom?
We desperately need free markets, but that means, above all, markets that are free from the stranglehold of monopoly and monopsony.
How not to fight inflation
Anyone with any faith in the market economy knew that the supply issues would be resolved eventually; but no one could possibly know when.
All Pain and No Gain from Higher Interest Rates
In the name of taming inflation, central banks have set themselves on a path to cause a recession.
August 9, 2018
The US is at risk of losing a trade war with China
What was at first a trade skirmish—with US President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum—appears to be quickly morphing into a full-scale trade war with China.
April 8, 2018
Trump's trade confusion
The trade skirmish between the United States and China on steel, aluminium, and other goods is a product of US President Donald Trump's scorn for multilateral trade arrangements and the World Trade Organization, an institution that was created to adjudicate trade disputes.
March 19, 2018
When shall we overcome?
In 1967, riots erupted in cities throughout the United States, from Newark, New Jersey, to Detroit and Minneapolis in the Midwest—all two years after the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles exploded in violence. In response, President Lyndon B Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes and propose measures to address them.
February 5, 2018
Post-Davos Depression
I have been attending the World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland, where the so-called global elite convenes to discuss the world's problems, since 1995.
January 6, 2018
The US Donor Relief Act of 2017
Never has a piece of legislation labelled as both a tax cut and a reform been received with as much disapproval and derision as the bill passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump just before Christmas.
December 31, 2017
The global economy's risky recovery
A year ago, I predicted that the most distinctive aspect of 2017 would be uncertainty, fueled by, among other things, Donald Trump's election as president in the United States and the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union.
December 12, 2017
The globalisation of our discontent
Fifteen years ago, I published Globalization and Its Discontents, a book that sought to explain why there was so much dissatisfaction with globalisation within the developing countries.
November 5, 2017
Has Trump captured the Fed?
One of the important powers of any US president is to appoint members and heads of the many agencies that are responsible for implementing the country's laws and regulations and, in many cases, governing the economy.
August 1, 2017
Why tax cuts for the rich solve nothing
Although America's right-wing plutocrats may disagree about how to rank the country's major problems—for example, inequality, slow growth, low productivity, opioid addiction, poor schools, and deteriorating infrastructure—the solution is always the same: lower taxes and deregulation, to “incentivise” investors and “free up” the economy.
July 4, 2017
Trump and the truth about climate change
Under President Donald Trump's leadership, the United States took another major step toward establishing itself as a rogue state on June 1, when it withdrew from the Paris climate agreement. For years, Trump has indulged the strange conspiracy theory that, as he put it in 2012, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” But this was not the reason Trump advanced for withdrawing the US from the Paris accord. Rather, the agreement, he alleged, was bad for the US and implicitly unfair to it.
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