In The News

Missing Links: After the Fall

Moisés Naím October 27, 2008
The attacks of 9/11 were a watershed event in the institutional makeup of US and global security institutions. The push for rejecting old, seemingly outdated frameworks, explains Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, helped lead to the Iraq War, in addition to "the Guantánamo Bay prison, the erosion of civil liberties, disdain for the Geneva Conventions, and the belittling of mechanisms...

Do You Really Want This Job?

David Dapice October 24, 2008
An era of the US living beyond its means has come to an abrupt end, with a flailing stock market and credit freeze, mounting job losses, wages that do not keep pace with climbing housing prices, and the world’s costliest health care system that fails to cover all citizens. The next US president, to be decided in the November 4 election, will inherit a battered economy that restrains any US role...

How Can We Preempt Investment Protectionism?

Ernesto Zedillo October 23, 2008
Nations laden with debt fret about investments by overseas cash-rich sovereign wealth funds. “The most common fears are that the SWFs, being government-owned, may be used not only for the purpose of receiving attractive returns on their investments but also for pursuing geopolitical objectives, gaining control of strategic natural resources or extracting sensitive technologies; that they could...

Gulf to the US: Thanks, But No Thanks

Dilip Hiro October 22, 2008
Some financial analysts anticipated the cash-rich sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East to swoop down on giants in the financial and industrial world struggling with a global credit crisis – a notion arousing both fear and hope throughout Europe and the US. But such rescue investments have not materialized, explains author and Middle East analyst Dilip Hiro. Hiro reports that operations of...

How the US Financial Crisis Might Affect Kenya

Ochieng Rapuro October 20, 2008
The fallout of the US financial crisis has already spread to Europe's banks, and developing countries like Kenya also speculate on how the crisis could affect their welfare. Reporting for Kenya's Business Daily, Ochieng Rapuro and Jenny Luesby note that the nation’s banking sector is mostly insulated from foreign finance. In Kenya, concern centers on the increasingly likely chance that...

Asia's Fear of a Weak America

Philip Bowring October 17, 2008
East Asia has been the site of many "economic miracles" of the past half-century. Starting with Japan's post-World War II boom, continuing through the "Asian Tigers" and China, successes led to speculation that this is to be the "Pacific Century," as noted by columnist Philip Bowring in the International Herald Tribune. Yet those successes relied on the US...

Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold

Ernesto Zedillo October 15, 2008
Low interest rates and plenty of credit in recent years created a housing bubble with the attendant risk. Investment banks divided the loans into complex financial packages, many labeled as safe and even insured. But the investments were safe only as long as housing prices continued to climb. “Once again the markets forget that financial innovations are likely to be underpriced and therefore...