Another year has sped by with more change and economic uncertainty throughout the global markets. From a journalist’s viewpoint, 2010 was filled with some of the most dynamic and complex economic trends and global market events possible. For instance, the Euro zone debt crisis, the global currency war, coverage of the international currency war – announced by Brazilian Finance Minister and precipitated by Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing monetarist policy – the perils of high-frequency trading, and the burdensome economic impact of two-front warfare on the domestic agenda are just a few issues that led the Global Markets through a year of risk, volatility, turmoil and uncertainty.
This is Part II of a two-part post on lawfare. Click here for Part I, in which I critiqued the way in which Brooke Goldstein, director of the non-profit, The Lawfare Project, envisages lawfare. In this post, I examine the solutions she proposes. d One of Goldstein’s primary concerns is the many lawsuits against people […]
The United States House of Representatives is back in full swing and with that renewed and new debates are brewing. One such debate that the House will soon vote on is a bill to repeal the health care reform, which was signed into law last March by President Obama. The repeal of the Affordable Care […]
Today we marked the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. I have to admit to certain amount of awe at that period of history called Camelot. From this more cynical present I find it amazing that there was a time not so long ago in our past in which idealism was […]
Credit Suisse today reported that a number of emerging market (EM) economies are experiencing rising inflation; and in some, central banks are countering with interest rate hikes (see excerpt below). Might seem strange to those of us who live in a country where policy interest rates are at zero and the Federal Reserve seems to be more […]
Haiti’s former “President for Life” Jean-Claude Duvalier made a surprising return to Haiti on Sunday after 25 years in exile. He stated that he hoped to take part in the “rebirth” of the nation, and aging friends said they had begged him to come back and visit. But a simple Duvalierist reunion in the luxurious […]
(For more on this graphic, go here.) The venerable Matt Wald at the NY Times reported the other day that CO2 emissions in the US peaked in 2005 and, according to the latest estimates, we’re not going back to those numbers until ten years down the road. How come? In part – and in part […]
Every once in a while, FPA Afghanistan blogger Patrick Frost emails me an article with which I very much disagree and I, in turn, write a post criticizing it. (See a post of mine from last year on preventive war.) The tradition continues with an interview, published by AviationWeek, with Brooke Goldstein, director of the […]
Why Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires is made crystal clear in this short documentary. Journalist Paul Johnson made this film last year by traveling to Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s deadliest regions that breeds young Taliban converts. He shows the aftermath of roadside bombs in part by turning the camera on civilians. The lack […]
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has released their “Rural Poverty Report” for 2011. Some of the major points of the report are as follows: The population of the developing world is still more rural than urban: some 3.1 billion people, or 55% of the total population, live in rural areas. At least 70% […]
To day we honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as all who followed and continue to follow in his footsteps. King’s fight for human rights is a legacy left for all children regardless of race, religion, or color. The fight he led for civil rights in the United […]
What a difference a few days make. Since writing my post on the demonstrations in Tunisia on Wednesday, President Ben Ali went from claiming that only terrorists and fanatics were protesting to announcing that he would not run for re-election when his current term expires in 2014. He also assured the population that […]
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