Recent history – the Latin America debt crisis, the US subprime mortgage crisis and now the European debt crisis – offers a lesson that global imbalances are unsustainable. Lured by false promises of future growth, countries borrow big, risking prosperity and stability. Global growth is in question...
Balancing the shopping cart: American consumers run up debt in shopping malls (top); malls empty as the Chinese hang on to their purse (below)
NEW HAVEN: Time and again, the lessons of a troubled world economy are the same: An unbalanced world is an...
As China and the United States negotiate a trade deal, currency manipulation is among the contentious issues. The US president announced agreement has been reached on currency manipulation, but did not release details. Control is easier said than done. Currency values are fluid, moving in relation...
Weighing the money: A customer decides which currency to purchase, and an Indian shopkeeper counts his rupee notes.
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY: Currency overvaluation or undervaluation can have advantages or disadvantages, depending on a country’s...
Though Botswana relied almost exclusively on its diamond wealth, its economy has grown steadily since 1966, rivaling China and South Korea’s growth rates. Good governance allowed Botswana to avoid the resource curse that afflicted many of its neighbors. Botswana’s diamond-producing industry is...
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Pakistan's conflicting policy of fighting Al Qaeda while supporting Islamist militants against India has boomeranged spectacularly. Former intelligence official Bruce Riedel, now senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in the Brookings Institution, discounts the notion that...
Playing with fire: Pakistan’s dalliance with extremists backfired with their attack on a naval base in Karachi (top); Pakistan’s former spy chief Gen. Nadeem Taj suspected of complicity (left) and slain journalist Syed Salman Shahzad
WASHINGTON: The...
To the surprise of its neighbors, Japan has taken action to protect itself from North Korea. After North Korea tested a ballistic missile in 1998, the usually slow-moving Japanese assembly decided immediately to build a space-based surveillance system. Japan launched two information-gathering...
Japanese rocket lifts two spy satellites on March 28, 2003: Fear of being surprised by North Korea. (Photo: National Space Development Agency of Japan)
As the US-led coalition is fighting in Iraq - significantly enabled by space-based...
The heart-wrenching and horrible daily accounts of suicide bombings rarely reveal the underlying cause of the bombers’ motivations. But a comprehensive database at Australia’s Flinders University that has compiled information on these types of attacks from as early as 1981 can shed light on such...
A model grandma: Family member holds up a picture of Fatma Omar An-Anajar, the oldest Palestinian sucide bomber who blew herself up in Gaza on November 23rd, 2006
ADELAIDE: Suicide bombing attacks have become a weapon of choice among terrorist...
As flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans, Louisiana, the full scope of damage due to Hurricane Katrina has yet to be discerned. Nine oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico – 12 percent of US refining capacity – are now closed. As a result, gas prices in the United States spiked immediately...
Hundreds were feared dead and thousands left homeless on Wednesday in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which has paralyzed the Gulf of Mexico's oil industry and sparked fears of an energy crisis.
As the scale...
Critics point to the war in Iraq and President Bush's subsequent denial of reconstruction contracts to dissenting nations as proof of Washington's hegemonic tendencies. However, argues security expert Michael Kraig, the Iraq War is just the latest manifestation of a US foreign policy that...
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta in 1945: During the Cold War that followed, the US could employ old mercantilist techniques against the Soviet bloc - but now times have changed.
MUSCATINE, IOWA: Critics have...
