This past Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden gave a troubling speech at the 45th Munich Security Conference. Heritage Director for Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom calls the speech “one of the weakest projections of U.S. leadership on foreign soil in recent memory. The message was confused, apologetic, over-conciliatory, and remarkably …
MOSCOW – The past week’s developments gave lots of food for conjecture and speculations among Kremlinologists both within Russia and beyond. The regime – President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – sent out an array of signals that could be interpreted as both the attempts at somewhat liberalizing …
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a front-page story on soaring unemployment among China’s rural migrants. While official Chinese employment statistics are spotty, the gigantic figures being thrown around are no surprise. The Journal and other outlets emphasize the Communist Party’s overwhelming fear of political instability caused by job loss. This …
Does the financial crisis reveal a failure of American deregulation compared to better conceived European regulatory schemes? This thesis is shared by many, especially here in Europe where some see the current financial crisis as the proof of the superiority of the European “social market economy” over “cow-boy capitalism”. This …
In its latest issue, the Economist reports on the state of Britain’s armed forces. It answers the question posed in the title of the piece, “Losing Their Way?,” with a resounding “Yes,” blaming underfunding, recruiting shortfalls, and a loss of institutional confidence. The joke among Americans in Afghanistan, it reports, …
Professor of European Political Economy at the London School of Economics, Willem Buiter, writes at the Financial Times: I used to be optimistic about the capacity of our political leaders and central bankers to avoid the policy mistakes that could turn the current global recession into a deep and lasting …
