In The News

BBC: Finland’s Basic Income Trial Falls Flat

Laurence Peter April 24, 2018
Populations grow yet automation and productivity reduce job numbers and security. To reduce poverty, governments consider guaranteeing a universal income for their citizens. Finland launched a pilot program in 2017, when the unemployment rate exceeded 9 percent, for 2000 unemployed people selected randomly to receive monthly payments of $685 per month. Results are expected in 2019, but the...

Harvard Gazette: Global Power Grid for Global Powers

Clea Simon April 20, 2018
Distributing power may be more challenging than discovering or producing power. State Grid Corporation of China is the world’s largest utility company, and its former Chairman and President, Liu Zhenya, describes how the company's work on transmitting power via ultra-high-voltage lines throughout China could be applied to a global energy grid, “effectively revolutionizing the practicality of...

Bloomberg: US Libor Replacement

Alex Harris April 18, 2018
In April, the New York Federal Reserve Bank launched a new US benchmark rate – the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, SOFR – to compete with the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. Libor offers a range of rates depending on currencies and loan duration, but is based on human expectations – a system deemed a problem after investigations revealed that some bankers had been rigging rates profits...

Japan Times: Japan and Fourth Industrial Revolution

Heizo Takenaka April 2, 2018
Big data, artificial intelligence and robotics are revolutionizing business, both increasing efficiency and reducing labor requirements. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, confronts two challenges, slow government response for labor and other reforms and the need for stronger corporate governance, explains Heizo Takenaka, a former fiscal policy minister for the country. Japan also has two...

Reuters: Brexit Transition Offers Little Certainty for Banks

Huw Jones and Andrew MacAskill March 21, 2018
The United Kingdom has reached a conditional agreement on a transition period, ending in December 2020, for withdrawing from the European Union. But banks and other financial firms may continue to make contingency plans including for relocating offices and staff from London. The agreement won’t be formally ratified until October, and uncertainty continues. British leaders are divided about a...

Fortune: US Deep in Debt

Shawn Tully March 20, 2018
A rising US stock market hinges on a treacherous mound of debt growing due to recent tax cuts for corporations and workers. “The U.S. government’s huge and growing budget deficits have become gargantuan enough to threaten the great American growth machine,” writes Shawn Tully for Fortune magazine. “On our current course, we’re headed for a morass of punitive taxes, puny growth, and stagnant...

Brookings: Globalization, Technology, Inequality

Zia Qureshi February 22, 2018
People even in the world’s most advanced and wealthiest economies are unhappy and politically fractured – this despite a full recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and growing economies. “The increasingly unequal sharing of the economic pie lies at the heart of the rising social discontent,” explains Zia Qureshi for Brookings. “Income and wealth inequalities have risen practically in all major...