The free-market principles that drive global trade of goods, services and ideas often run counter to notions of institutional regulation. According to David Rothkopf, author and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this void in global governance has facilitated the...
Rich and powerful: Global elite gather at the World Economic Forum's
annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort Davos
WASHINGTON, DC: Like nature, power also abhors a vacuum. On the global stage this has meant that...
Western banks and companies have recently relied on huge savings accounts run by Asian and Middle Eastern governments for some financial rescues. But governments in the US and Europe also know that constituents can get uncomfortable over bailouts or foreign ownership of major companies,...
Click here for map
WASHINGTON -- Seeking to head off a political backlash against huge investments in Western companies by Asian and Middle Eastern government-run investment funds, the U.S. is prodding two...
While China is already a world economic powerhouse, it has produced virtually no global companies. Haier, arguably China's most respected business leader, aims to change this. With over US$10 million in debt in the early 1980s, the firm started from humbled beginnings. Today, though, Haier...
Click here for the original article on the Newsweek website.
“Prices [of food] are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally,” argues Lester Brown in Foreign Policy. Temperature increases, drying wells, mismanagement of soils, and ever-increasing population growth, with an additional 80 million of people to feed per year, are behind the price...
Click here for the article in Foreign Policy.
For quite some time, virologists have been issuing warnings about the possibility of an outbreak of pandemic influenza. Now they are focused on the strain of avian influenza (bird flu) currently endemic in Asia and are investigating measures to prevent widespread deaths, should the virus mutate...
Wal-Mart executives eventually realized that requiring employees to smile at customers or participate in the “morning Wal-Mart chant” at its German stores did not mesh well with either the staid employees or customers. Differences in corporate and national culture, combined with competition from...
Click here for the original article on The New York Times website.
Borrowing costs in Europe have fallen against dollar rates, to near half in some cases, and Bloomberg anticipates US firms to issue more bonds in euros. “Apple Inc. (AAPL), Verizon Communications Inc. and Albemarle Corp. led 68 billion euros ($83 billion) of bond issuance by American borrowers this...
Read the article from Bloomberg.
Climate change combined with war and a growing population could pose challenges of unimaginable magnitude. “Last summer’s Mediterranean crisis, a migration of Biblical proportions from Syria to Europe, is likely merely a preview of the dislocation to come,” writes Richard D. Lamm, former governor...
Biblical migrations: Syrian refugees stream into Kurdistan region of Iraq, top; Bangladeshi villagers are made homeless by flooding
DENVER: There is an ancient, perhaps apocryphal story in the Christian tradition of Martin of Tours, who was riding...
