In The News

Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down

Robert F. Worth February 12, 2009
Globalization bestows and eliminates wealth with speed. A global credit crisis has struck tourism and financial industries hard, even for fast-growing economies like Dubai. Recent investors and home-buyers in Dubai have watched values plummet in the past year. Unpaid debt is a crime punishable by imprisonment. With a workforce that is about 90 percent foreign, many want to escape the downward...

US Recession: Spend Now, Save Later

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller February 11, 2009
To fend off an economic disaster, governments around the globe, from China to the US, lower interest rates, increase the money supply, enact stimulus packages and urge their citizens to shop to save jobs and fix the economy. All eyes are on the US, the worlds' biggest economy, where personal consumption makes up 70 percent of the gross national product. But US citizens are not buying into...

A Global Credit Squeeze Is Felt Unevenly

Floyd Norris February 11, 2009
A “downside” to globalization struck when the US credit crisis had a global effect that neither Europe nor Asia could diminish or avoid. Many countries cannot borrow money to stimulate their economies as the US does and lack the savings of China, and some government leaders fear that the big economies will focus on domestic investments at the expense of poorer nations. Greater government...

Obama Risks Flap on “Buy American”

Neil King Jr. February 9, 2009
Anyone who has read recent reports on the global economic crisis should understand that protectionism is dangerous and that protectionist legislation prolonged the Great Depression during the 1930s. Despite modern agreements that regulate open trade, some US workers and politicians can’t help but be tempted to direct public spending to domestic firms and workers. In preparing a multibillion...

Made in America

Nayan Chanda February 6, 2009
As jobs vanish by the hundreds of thousands, the desire to intervene from politicians is only natural, an attempt to restore economic order and prevent social unrest. In capitals throughout Europe, workers protest and vow to remove politicians who fail to provide immediate economic relief. The US is no different, as the president and Congress race to save jobs with a stimulus package now valued...

Is Protectionism Unavoidable?

Jeffrey E. Garten February 6, 2009
The warnings on protectionism are dire. Economists and historians repeatedly remind us about the danger of sliding into protectionism embodied in the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. By raising import tariffs on thousands of goods, inviting retaliation, causing collapse of international trade, the act transformed a US recession into a Great Depression. Deepening anxiety about vanishing...

India's Diamonds Lose Their Luster

Neeta Lal February 5, 2009
Hit by gloomy news of global recession, consumers sharply curtailed purchases of luxury goods, putting millions of jobs in jeopardy. It took India four decades to position itself as a world leader in processing diamonds, reports Neeta Lal for the Asia Sentinel, but recession in the US reduced demand by 60 percent."The industry had been witnessing exponential growth for over two decades,...