In The News

Project Syndicate: The Geopolitics of Environmental Challenges

Giulio Boccaletti March 8, 2017
Crises with immediate impact, including economic downturns or war, distract governments from the steady and creeping dangers of climate change. “Environmental degradation and natural-resource insecurity are undermining our ability to tackle some of the biggest global issues we face,” writes Giulio Boccaletti for Project Syndicate. “Environmental insecurity is a major, though often underestimated...

SmartCompany: Human Error Causes Amazon Web Services Outage, How to Protect Cloud Systems

Dominic Powell March 5, 2017
Businesses and others rely on cloud computing and experts to save money and time, but also they relinquish control over how their data is handled. And data and software stored with off-site servers are crucial infrastructure for many. “An outage of Amazon Web Services… that led to disruptions for huge numbers of cloud-based businesses and websites was caused a technician inputting an incorrect...

Financial Times: Trump Team Looks to Bypass WTO Dispute System

Shawn Donnan and Demetri Sevastopulo February 28, 2017
The United States is searching for legal ways to impose unilateral trade sanctions against some countries, including China, as faster and more direct alternatives than the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement process. “Since being established in 1995 the WTO has become the pre-eminent venue for resolving trade fights between member countries, which its proponents say has helped prevent...

The Guardian: Teacher, Children’s Author and Citizen Stopped at US Border

February 28, 2017
The Trump administration promised extreme vetting to prevent terrorism. A first step was an attempt to ban travelers from seven Muslim nations, quickly blocked by courts. Still, travelers describe intrusive questions, delays and rude behavior from border agents, the Guardian reports. A British Muslim schoolteacher, traveling to New York for a school trip was in his words, “treated like a criminal...

Vanity Fair: The Curious Case of Paul Manafort

Abigail Tracy February 24, 2017
Questions continue about alleged connections between Russia and the US election. A report suggests that a Ukrainian official had tried to alert Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the Trump campaign, about compromising information, later revealed after a phone of Manafort’s daughter was hacked. The Ukrainian official denies that he was the source of the messages. “Manafort, however, confirmed the...

Project Syndicate: The WTO Reborn?

Arvind Subramanian February 23, 2017
The World Trade Organization, a multilateral trade group with 164 members, has been marginalized in recent years due to increasing preference for bilateral and regional deals, explains Arvind Subramanian, chief economic adviser to the government of India in an essay for Project Syndicate. He points to three developments that could prompt the world to reconsider multilateralism and revive the WTO...

The Weekly Standard: Of Debt and Detriment

Benn Steil and Emma Smith February 21, 2017
Macroeconomic theory predicts that indebted countries have negative net foreign investment income, while creditor countries have positive flows. The US and China, however, are bucking the trend due to the idiosyncratic natures of both their currencies and governments. One element is China’s willingness, and the world writ large, to accept low returns on the dollar in exchange for stability. About...