Bylined Articles
Ruchir has contributed to a number of publications. Click on the following links for a sampling of his work:
Recent Articles:
Foreign Affairs — Where Capitalism Is Working
What the World Can Learn From Switzerland, Taiwan, and Vietnam
Widespread disaffection with the current capitalist systems has led many countries, rich and poor, to look for new economic models. Defenders of the status quo continue to hold up the United States as a shining star, its economy outpacing Europe and Japan, its financial markets as dominant as ever. Yet its citizens are as pessimistic as any in the West.
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Financial Times — Make Homes Affordable Again
One reason Americans are so disenchanted with capitalism is that the national dream of home ownership is no longer within reach for much of the population. As a rule, housing becomes unaffordable when it takes up more than 30 per cent of a buyer’s income. Prices have been unaffordable in big cities for decades and have spiralled out of reach for a median US home in recent years. Roughly half of the 20-something generation now live with their parents, which is why so many are pessimistic about their future and prefer socialism to today’s distorted form of capitalism.
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Financial Times — The world should take note — the rest are rising again
In the 2000s, as a broad economic boom in emerging economies was drawing billions of dollars into their financial markets, author Fareed Zakaria captured this historic moment as “the rise of the rest”. Now a similarly encouraging story is unfolding in the emerging world, but few observers have noticed, and still fewer foreign investors have acted on this momentous shift.
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Financial Times — Capitalism is in worse shape in Europe
A widening transatlantic gap is inspiring glee in the US and angst in Europe. Though their per capita income levels were similar a couple of decades ago, growth (in constant dollars) has been twice as fast since 2010 in the US than in the UK and the EU’s Big 4 economies—Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
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New York Post — Why bashing billionaires won’t solve the inequality crisis
These days many liberals embrace the “easy money” culture of generous government relief and low central bank interest rates as a way to pay for social programs and ease the wealth gap.
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Financial Times — Why markets like to see new political faces
It has long been clear that 2024 would be a historic year for democracy, with more than 30 national elections worldwide. But only in the last few days have commentators started to focus on the economic impact of these battles.
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Financial Times — Biden’s challenge runs deeper than ‘bad vibes’
A key question still looming over the US election is why voters give Joe Biden so little credit for an apparently robust economic recovery. Many observers dismiss this as a “vibecession” — a case of bad “vibes” created by partisan media and divorced from reality — with only occasional apologies for how condescending this sounds.
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Financial Times — What Went Wrong With Capitalism
In his farewell address Ronald Reagan described America as the “shining city on a hill”, open to “anyone with the will and heart to get here”. I was one of those inspired to try, and today the dynamic mix of academics and entrepreneurs who energise the world’s technology leader still strikes me as a marvel.
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Financial Times — The overstimulated superpower
When the US reports GDP growth later this month, it is expected to come in at a solid pace of at least 2 per cent for the seventh quarter in a row, defying the once universal expectation that Federal Reserve rate hikes would trigger a recession. First economists dialled those forecasts back to a “soft landing,” now they are talking about “no landing.”
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Financial Times — Indian democracy with East Asian characteristics
Having covered Indian elections since the 1990s, I have never seen a contest more predictable than the one beginning later this month. The only point still in debate is how big Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s re-election victory will be.
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Financial Times — The weakest links in the global economy are on the mend
Emerging world powerhouses such as India and Indonesia weathered the turbulence of recent years in solid shape and are widely recognised for their success. Now many of the emerging world’s most troubled economies are reforming their way towards recovery as well, and markets are starting to reward them for it.
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Financial Times — Bitcoin bulls are not the bigger fools
Once dismissed as fanatics, the bitcoin bulls must be feeling vindicated. They made an accurate call on the cryptocurrency’s potential for gains – witness the staggering rally under way – and were right, at least in part, for the right reasons.
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Financial Times — A Tale of Two Bull Markets
While most global investors are consumed by the ascent of stock prices in the world’s financial hegemon, the United States, there is an even more intense bull market underway in India.
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Financial Times — A popular anti-populist’s exit poses a challenge for Indonesia
At a time when leaders around the world are struggling with record low approval ratings, Indonesian president Joko Widodo is ending his time in office on a high. At 80 per cent, Widodo’s latest approval rating is the highest for the leader of any major democracy and very unusual for a politician who has spent a decade in power.
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Financial Times — Why Political Leaders Are So Unpopular Now
Joe Biden’s record low popularity ratings get a lot of attention, yet leaders across the developed world are in a similar predicament to the US president – they have rarely been this unpopular.
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Financial Times — Immigration crackdowns are good politics but bad economics
As migrants poured over the southern border last year, they became an even hotter political issue in the US, with many Democrats joining Republicans in calling for measures to control the illegal flows.
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Financial Times — The Top 10 Trends of 2024
The year gone by played out as if the pandemic had never happened. The widely anticipated global recession never came. Markets surged. Disinflation was the buzzword. The post-pandemic world unexpectedly resembled 2019, the year before the pandemic began, and supposedly changed our lives forever.
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Financial Times — The world economy’s biggest problem is Africa
A global baby bust is slowing growth in every major economy, from China and Japan to Germany and the United States. But the flip side of this story goes untold: even economies that could still get a big boost from population growth are failing to do so.
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Financial Times — Why Modi is cruising to a third term
Though Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is in his tenth year in office, his position is as strong as ever. The Bharatiya Janata party’s overwhelming victory in the Hindi heartland states confirms Modi’s grip on the world’s largest democracy, as well as the shadow he casts over its hapless opposition.
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Financial Times — China’s Rise is Reversing
In a historic turn, China’s rise as an economic superpower is reversing. The biggest global story of the last half century may be over. After stagnating under Mao Zedong in the 1960s and 70s, China opened to the world in the 1980s – and took off in subsequent decades. Its share of the global economy rose nearly tenfold from below 2 per cent in 1990 to 18.4 per cent in 2021. No nation had ever risen so far, so fast.
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Financial Times — The coming battle between world leaders and bond vigilantes
An epic clash is brewing in 2024. In a boom year for elections, with national contests from the US to India, incumbents seeking another term will be tempted as always to ramp up public spending before the vote. That puts them on course to collide with the global bond vigilantes who, reawakened from a long slumber by the new era of high interest rates, will be quick to punish profligate politicians.
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Financial Times — Why markets are relatively calm in the geopolitical storm
The attacks this month on Israel have raised fears of a wider Middle East conflict, even of a third world war. Serious voices call this the most dangerous time in living memory, with threats looming from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
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Financial Times — Is there such a thing as smart money?
The new movie Dumb Money tries to turn Wall Street’s pecking order on its head, casting professional investors as the dummies and amateurs as the smart ones. Set during the meme stock craze of 2021, the plot ends before the real life story did – with losses for the retail investors who tried to outsmart big hedge funds. Sorry Hollywood, the underdogs did not win. The movie did, however, leave me pondering a bigger question: is there such a thing as “smart money”?
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Financial Times — America’s mini economic miracle may be fleeting
The American economy is estimated to have grown at a rate of 3 per cent or more this quarter, a pace as blistering as it was unforeseen. Economists had not predicted a recession before last year, but then most began to think a US downturn was inevitable, as a result of interest rate hikes. Instead, we got a mini growth miracle. So what happened?
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Financial Times — The trouble with American exceptionalism
(Deepening deficits now make the US one of the most fiscally irresponsible nations)
The buzz around “American exceptionalism” keeps on growing, boosted by the strength of the US economy and markets compared with other developed countries – and to a stumbling China. But this confident talk overlooks the extent to which US growth now depends on deficits and debt.
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Financial Times — What’s Wrong With Tech Giants Riding the AI Wave
(It is dysfunctional for the same firms to dominate another innovation surge)
As the artificial intelligence wave powers the tech sector higher, giants such as Microsoft and Alphabet are not only gaining dramatically, they are gaining in ways that are changing the arc of technological progress.
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Financial Times – Billionaires find big wins in big government
In 2010, amid the global boom in billionaire fortunes, I began combing the annual Forbes list for clues to which countries were most vulnerable to anti-rich populist revolts. When I last published the results in 2021, warnings were flashing red for France, where billionaire wealth was rising fast and concentrating in family firms such as LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate.
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Financial Times – Europe’s new success stories are built on high luxury, not high tech
European markets have received a big lift from the global boom in luxury sales – a piece of unambiguously good news for the region. Nonetheless this success story also raises a troubling question: has Europe become too reliant on a sector many see as a symbol of decadence?
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Financial Times – ‘Boomy’ talk about the Chinese economy is a charade
Something is rotten in the Chinese economy, but don’t expect Wall Street analysts to tell you about it. There has never been a bigger disconnect, in my experience, between some of the rosier investment bank views on China and the dim reality on the ground.
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Financial Times – An economic miracle in India
In 30 road trips over 25 years, following elections in India with a band of writers, I’ve seen endless surprises, none more encouraging than the story we found last month in the southern state of Karnataka. It’s a new economic miracle, unfolding in a vibrant local democracy that defies widespread worries about one-party rule in India.
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Financial Times – What Strong Gold Says About The Weak Dollar
Today commentators overwhelmingly agree that a weakening US dollar cannot possibly lose its status as the world’s dominant currency because there is “no alternative” on the visible horizon. Perhaps, but don’t tell that to the many countries racing to find an alternative, and complacency will only accelerate that search.
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Financial Times – Why America’s Big Companies Keep Getting Bigger
The irony of the Silicon Valley Bank saga is now complete. The crisis started inside the American tech sector’s favorite bank but the government rescue has benefited big tech the most. As calm returns to the market, fueled by mega cap tech stocks, investors are naturally relieved. They need to be aware though of where a system built on bailouts is headed.
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Financial Times – The unstoppable rise of government rescues
As bank runs spread, it has become clear that anyone who questions a government rescue for those caught underfoot will be tarred as a latter day liquidationist, like those who advised Herbert Hoover to let businesses fail after the crash of 1929.
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Financial Times – Three global cities are pulling ahead in the post-pandemic world
New York is greeting the exodus of its wealthy citizens with a shrug. The local elite seems a bit too sure that Manhattan is, and always will be, the gravitational centre of the cultural universe, or that the city is better off – as a professor recently put it to me – without all the “rich douchebags migrating to Miami”.
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Financial Times – The markets are alive with the sound of echo bubbles
The recent surge in tech stocks had true believers buzzing that the downturn of late last year is over and the boom of the last decade is back underway. But the opposite case is more likely. This surge had all the hallmarks of an echo bubble – a brief rebound of the kind that has punctuated the long decline of every major bubble in the past century.
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Financial Times – The untold story of the world’s most resilient currency
In February of 1998, twenty-five years ago this month, I was in Bangkok, ground zero of the Asian financial crisis. The implosion of the Thai baht had triggered a serial meltdown of currencies and markets with protesters in the streets across the region and chaos spreading. As world leaders scrambled to slow the global contagion, Thailand and its neighbors had sunk into a depression.
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Financial Times – The world is not ready for the long grind to come
Over the past half century, as governments and central banks teamed up ever more closely to manage economic growth, recessions became fewer and farther between. Often they were shorter and shallower than they might have been. After so much mildness, most people cannot imagine a painfully lasting business cycle. But the global economy is heading into a period unlike any we have seen in decades.
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Financial Times – The Xi nobody saw coming
In late October, when Xi Jinping consolidated his hold on China’s communist party at its five-yearly Congress, the world cringed. Xi seemed determined to push China back to the age of Mao Zedong, his role model. Hardline ideology would tighten its grip on the world’s second-largest economy, with dire implications for the rest.
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Financial Times – Ten trends for the year to come
Talking to leaders these days in any walk of life – business, politics, markets – I have a sense that people are frozen. They see that inflation is back in a serious way for the first time in decades, forcing central banks to raise interest rates at the fastest pace since the early 1980s. They understand that this sudden change in the price of money – the most important driver of economic and financial behaviour – marks a fundamental break with the past. But they are not acting. After living with easy money for so long, they find it difficult even to contemplate a different world. There is a term for this state of mind: zeteophobia, or paralysis in the face of life-altering choices.
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Financial Times – How private markets became an escape from reality
If a bubble is a good idea gone too far, the $10tn global market for private investing in everything from debt to companies to real estate may be one.
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Financial Times – The easy money era is over but world leaders have not got the memo
While global investors increasingly recognise that the easy money era is over, many world leaders do not – and the markets are punishing them for free spending in the new age of tight money.
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Financial Times – The Gulf Is Partying, While It Can
If you want to escape the global gloom, just take a flight from its epicentre, London, to any leading capital of the Gulf, the only region in the world where economic growth forecasts are rising. As host of the Fifa World Cup Doha has been bubbling over with anticipation, as have its neighbours, who are welcoming the overflow from Qatari hotels. Dubai is enjoying yet another real estate boom. Regional rivals like Riyadh are racing to be the next Dubai, funnelling oil profits into property mega-projects.
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Financial Times – Economists see recession coming, so maybe it’s not
For the first time, economists as a group not only expect a recession in America in the next year, but give it a very high probability, more than 60 per cent. Given their record, it’s worth asking whether the consensus is, in fact, unlikely.
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Financial Times – China’s economy will not overtake the US until 2060, if ever
As he embarks on a third term, Xi Jinping’s goal is to make China a mid-level developed country in the next decade, which implies that the economy will expand at a pace of around 5 percent. But underlying trends – bad demographics, heavy debt and declining productivity – suggest the country’s overall growth potential is about half that rate.
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Financial Times – Biden should act now on the wrecking ball dollar
The surging dollar has demonstrated its power over the world in recent months, exacerbating the stress in financial markets and in every country alarmed by the prospect of paying bills and loans in increasingly expensive greenbacks.
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Financial Times – The Seven Wonders of a Worried World
In periods of gloom like this one, when commentators see nothing but faults in most countries, it is worth highlighting the few that defy the prevailing pessimism. Here are seven that stand out in a world tipping toward recession and higher inflation: Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Greece, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.
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Financial Times – Robots Need to Move Faster to Save the World
Not so long ago authors were churning out dire books on how “The Rise of the Robots” would lead to “The Jobless Future”, amid authoritative forecasts that half of all US jobs would be at risk from automation starting right about now.
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Financial Times – A post-dollar world is coming
The currency may look strong but its weaknesses are mounting
Last week as the dollar surged to levels last seen nearly 20 years ago, traders were predicting more gains ahead for the mighty greenback, based on the discredited TINA (there is no alternative) argument.
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Financial Times – At 75, India is finally ready to join the global party
Today India marks its 75th birthday, no richer relative to the rest of the world than it was at independence, but very much on the upswing. India started out as the world’s sixth-largest economy, fell to 12th by 1990, and has since staged a comeback – to sixth place. Its average income was 18 per cent of the world average after independence, but that figure too fell until the early 1990s before climbing back up – to around 18 per cent today.
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Financial Times – How to solve the productivity paradox
By late 2020, many economists saw a silver lining in the pandemic. Stuck at home, people were adopting digital technology at an accelerating pace. Productivity was surging. Perhaps the long, debilitating decline in productivity growth was over. Alas, after peaking above 3 per cent the surge collapsed, exposed as a blip typical during the early stages of a recovery, when businesses are slow to hire new workers.
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Financial Times – Emerging markets are in better shape than you think
These days major emerging market leaders must be feeling the chagrin of Roger Moore, often criticised as the worst James Bond ever. The British actor once quipped that long after he stopped playing the iconic secret agent, he still got a bad review each time a new 007 movie came out. Now every time dire news breaks on the global economy, from rising interest rates to increasing commodity prices, pundits say “emerging markets” are in the worst spot.
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Financial Times – Why China Isn’t Rising as a Financial Superpower
China’s rise on the world stage is perhaps this century’s most frequently repeated news story. The country’s economic footprint has expanded spectacularly. Its widening military reach has made recent headlines. Yet as an aspiring financial superpower, China is going nowhere.
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Financial Times – There Is Another Act to Come in This Market Drama
US stocks have pulled back from the edge of the cliff – the 20 percent drop that defines a bear market. Now many people are wondering how this drama, still the worst start of any year since 1970, ends. My view is that this is the intermission, and that the next act will bring another step down.
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Financial Times – How shadow banks threaten the global economy
As the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates, debate rages over whether this tightening cycle will trigger a recession or not. History suggests an interesting answer: since the second world war, Fed tightening has led to a range of outcomes for the economy, from hard to softish landings, but has always led to financial crises somewhere – including every major global crisis in recent decades.
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Financial Times – Thanks but no Faangs – the folly of investing in acronyms
Given the battering markets have dealt so far this year to tech stocks, led by the Faangs, it is worth stepping back and recognising what is coming apart: the whole concept of acronym investing.
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Financial Times – The Fat French State is About to Get Fatter
French president Emmanuel Macron’s re-election victory may be a triumph for what remains of Europe’s pragmatic political centre, but voters in France are in no mood for more economic reform. Though increasingly angry about the state of the nation, they won’t support any leader who tries to fix what ails it most: the bloated state.
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Financial Times – How Putin aged into a classic oil state autocrat
On a visit to New York in 2003, Vladimir Putin pitched himself to investors as an economic reformer willing to engage western capitalists, telling us that Russia was more than just another petrostate and shared the values of a “normal European nation.”
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Financial Times – China is less likely to back Russia while facing troubles of its own
After building for months, financial stress emanating from the Chinese property sector has blown out to unprecedented levels in recent weeks, destabilising an already brittle economy and making it less likely that Beijing will aggressively support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Financial Times – Modi’s wins show how the power of his personal story endures
After years of decline India was demoted in 2021 into the ranks of “partly free” democracies by Freedom House, which cited the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party’s increasingly harsh handling of both its critics and the country’s Muslim minority. Now, the perception that India leads a global “retreat” of democracy is likely to deepen as the BJP bulldozes its way to victory in this month’s elections in four of five contested states, including India’s most populous, Uttar Pradesh.
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Financial Times – Slower growth and higher inflation are the hallmarks of a post-Covid world
A hot spurt for global growth is generating breathless headlines. India is on pace to be “the world’s fastest growing large economy” and France is posting its “strongest growth in 52 years”. President Joe Biden cites the latest quarterly growth data as evidence that the US is growing “faster than China’s” for the first time in two decades and is “finally building an American economy for the 21st century”.
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Financial Times – Covid losers outnumber the winners among leaders and nations
Joe Biden is a diminished leader, with approval ratings pushed below 40 per cent by rising prices and a persistent global virus. But the US president is hardly unique, as the Omicron variant is helping to undermine many leaders who once appeared to be beating back the pandemic.
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Financial Times – A quiet comeback is starting in emerging markets
After their worst decade since the 1930s, emerging stock markets continued to underperform as a group in 2021, deepening the isolation that surrounds this sprawling asset class. So it will come as a surprise to many that eight of the top 10, and 13 of the top 20, best-performing markets of 2021 were in the developing world.
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Financial Times – Ten economic trends that could define 2022
For the second year running the pandemic has reshaped the world — not changing everything, but accelerating many things, from population decline to digital revolution. Here is how these trends could define 2022.
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Financial Times – Retail investors riding the bull market could spur a populist backlash
Arguably, the bull market of 2021 is the same one that started in 2009, with one big change. Retail investors, who sat on the sidelines for so many years, rushed in after the pandemic-induced flash crash last year and have since been buying every dip with mounting enthusiasm. They represent not only a new cohort of investors but a new voting bloc, increasing the risk of populist backlash should one of the dips turn into another bear market.
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Financial Times – China is faltering but the world is not feeling the effects
China’s surprisingly rapid slowdown is eliciting familiar warnings that, as China goes, so goes the global economy. Only China may not matter as much as it once did.
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Financial Times – There is no easy escape from the global debt trap
One of the big mysteries in the global economy is why, though inflation is making a strong comeback, long-term interest rates have barely budged in recent months.
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Financial Times – The quest for the perfect measure of human progress is distracting
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar recently joined a growing list of political leaders pushing to supplement gross domestic product with a broader measure of human progress, an idea conservatives lampoon as “squishy indeed”. But this movement dates to Simon Kuznets, the Nobel laureate who invented the precursor to GDP to quantify US losses during the Depression.
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Financial Times – The pandemic stimulus has backfired in emerging markets
From the start of the pandemic, many emerging nations watched the US and other large developed countries “go big” on economic stimulus, and wished they could afford to follow. It turns out they were lucky if they couldn’t and wise if they chose not to.
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Financial Times – Merkel’s shrewd avoidance of the stale leader syndrome
Much has been written about how Angela Merkel is about to become the longest-serving German leader since Bismarck, but even that underplays her achievement. Come the new year she will have served a little over 16 consecutive years, longer than any leader of a major, advanced democracy since the 19th century, but for one, Tage Erlander of Sweden.
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Financial Times – China is just as susceptible to capitalism’s ill effects
For much of this year commentators have been warning that falling yields suggest the bond market is increasingly irrational, out of touch with a rapid global recovery and misled by heavy central bank buying or the ebbs and flows of the pandemic. Now, events in China suggest the bond markets are far from clueless or crazy.
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Financial Times – The rise of eastern Europe is a forgotten economic success story
Feted as a cradle of new democracies after the fall of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe is now widely criticised as an incubator of reactionary populism, particularly in Poland and Hungary. But the political backsliding only makes its economic progress even more intriguing.
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Financial Times – How the US tech giants could fall
The world’s tech giants have embedded themselves so deeply in the popular imagination that few people can picture a digital world led by any other names. But this assumption overlooks how quickly capitalism can cut giants down to size.
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Financial Times – ‘Greenflation’ threatens to derail climate change action
The world faces a growing paradox in the campaign to contain climate change. The harder it pushes the transition to a greener economy, the more expensive the campaign becomes, and the less likely it is to achieve the aim of limiting the worst effects of global warming.
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Financial Times – This is as good as it gets for the US economy
Driven by the success of America’s vaccine rollout and massive government stimulus, the US economy is expected to grow as fast as 7 per cent this year and is currently leading the world recovery. The commentariat is talking up an “American Renaissance” as the nation marks its 245th Independence Day.
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Financial Times – Latin America isn’t booming, but that could change
For all the Marquezian dramas of civil and class war, colonialism and corruption that have wracked Latin America, history shows that its economic fate rises and falls with just one thing: the prices of oil, iron ore, copper and other commodities.
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Financial Times – The Bubblets of 2021
Amid much loose talk of “bubbles” popping all over the financial markets, it’s worth pausing to consider if these upheavals really qualify as bubbles. If so, what does history tell us about how far they might deflate from here? It turns out the answers are quite a few, and quite far.
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Financial Times – The Billionaire Boom
Over the past two decades, as the global population of billionaires rose more than fivefold and the largest fortunes rocketed past $100bn, I started tracking this wealth, not for the voyeuristic thrill, but for warning signs. Rising inequality was becoming ever more of a political issue, threatening to provoke popular backlashes against capitalism itself.
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Financial Times – Technology will save emerging markets from sluggish growth
Emerging economies struggled to grow through the 2010s, and pessimism shrouds them now. People wonder how they will pay debts rung up during the pandemic, and how they can grow rapidly as they did in the past — by exporting their way to prosperity — in an era of deglobalisation.
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The New York Times – Is Vietnam the Next ‘Asian Miracle’?
Within days of China’s announcing the first case of Covid-19, Vietnam was mobilizing to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Using mass texts, TV ads, billboards, posters and loudspeakers, the government exhorted the nation’s 100 million citizens to identify carriers and trace contacts, contacts of contacts, even contacts of contacts of contacts. Rapid isolation of outbreaks has kept Vietnam’s death rate among the four lowest in the world — well under one death per million people.
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The New York Times – Is the Stock Market Rooting for Trump or Biden?
For months the S&P 500 rose this year — despite a deadly pandemic, the resulting economic devastation and the rise of a Democratic Party increasingly sympathetic to democratic socialism. Then, this month, with Joe Biden doing well in the polls, stock prices finally stumbled.
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The New York Times – Is Gaming the Future of the Virtual World?
Even before the pandemic and the lockdowns, digital games were fast emerging as one of the world’s favorite pastimes. But when live entertainment came to a halt, the virtual kind just took off.
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The New York Times – Why Is Everyone Buying Gold?
Gold bugs — investors perpetually bullish on gold — have long been seen as a paranoid fringe of the financial world, holding the shiny asset as a hedge against a disaster they always think is near. But lately they appear to be on to something. This year gold is the best performing traditional asset in the world. Its price just topped $2,000 an ounce for the first time. From serious investors to newly minted day traders, everyone is talking up its virtues.
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The Wall Street Journal – The Rescues Ruining Capitalism
Modern society looks increasingly to government for protection from major crises, whether recessions, public-health disasters or, as today, a painful combination of both. Such rescues have their place, and few would deny that the Covid-19 pandemic called for dramatic intervention. But there is a downside to this reflex to intervene, which has become more automatic over the past four decades. Our growing intolerance for economic risk and loss is undermining the natural resilience of capitalism and now threatens its very survival.
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The New York Times – Which Country Will Triumph in the Post-Pandemic World?
Imagine a country, a major Western economic power, where the coronavirus arrived late but the government, instead of denying and delaying, acted early. It was ready with tests and contact tracing to “flatten the curve” swiftly and limited its death rate to orders of magnitude lower than that of any other major Western industrial nation. Containing the virus allowed for a brief and targeted lockdown, which helped limit unemployment to only 6 percent.
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The New York Times – Small is the New Big Thing
I landed in Delhi on a work trip in mid-March and just over a week later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced what was soon recognized as the world’s strictest lockdown. He warned Indians to imagine “a sacrosanct line” around their homes, not to be breached for work or travel of any kind, not even a walk outdoors. Evoking the 18-day war described in the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic, Modi said it would take 21 days to win the war on the coronavirus.
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Foreign Affairs – The Comeback Nation
As the 2020s dawn, it is hard to find any member of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who does not believe that the United States is in decline, and that the waning of its influence has accelerated under a president who seems to revel in attacking U.S. allies and enemies alike. The debate is not over the fact of American decline but over how the United States should manage its diminishing status.
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The New York Times – How Coronavirus Can Bring Down Zombie Companies — and the Economy
Though the Federal Reserve moved over the weekend to slash rates and buy treasuries, markets around the world fell on Monday anyway. The coronavirus threatens to set off financial contagion in a world economy with very different vulnerabilities than on the eve of the global financial crisis, 12 years ago.
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The New York Times – Small is the New Big Thing
After the turn of the millennium the United States suffered its weakest decade of economic growth in the post-World War II era, and served as ground zero of the global financial crisis. Extrapolating from recent events, as they often do, forecasters began predicting a long American decline. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the United States staged a comeback as an economic superpower and, even more, as a financial superpower.
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The New York Times – Why Wall Street Loves Strongmen
Wall Street has long existed as a parallel universe where leaders cast by critics in the media as autocratic villains can be feted as heroes, if their actions bode well for the economy. Lately, this split has reached new extremes.
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The New York Times – What’s Wrong With the Global Economy?
Just about every year for a decade, the world has been seized by bouts of despondency over slumping economic growth, and last week brought the latest episode. Wall Street trembled over signs that trade wars are slamming growth in Germany, China and even the previously Teflon-like United States.
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The New York Times – Why We Should Fear Easy Money
To widespread applause in the markets and the news media, from conservatives and liberals alike, the Federal Reserve appears poised to cut interest rates for the first time since the global financial crisis a decade ago. Adjusted for inflation, the Fed’s benchmark rate is now just half a percent and the cost of borrowing has rarely been closer to free, but the clamor for more easy money keeps growing.
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Times of India – East Asia Is No Model for India
There was a lot of buzz about how India should follow the East Asian model even before the Modi government explicitly embraced it in its latest Economic Survey, which argues that the rise of East Asian economies demonstrate that heavy investment and export manufacturing offer the clearest path for India, too, to achieve a long run of 8 percent growth.
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The New York Times – When Dead Companies Don’t Die
The United States’ recovery from the Great Recession recently turned 10 years old, matching the longest American expansion since records were first kept in the 1850s. The global recovery will also turn 10, in January, if it lasts that long — and that, too, would be a record.
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The New York Times – I Wanted Ronald Reagan. India Kept Electing Bernie Sanders.
Like many global investors I am leery of big government. But I did not come to this view on Wall Street. It came to me growing up in India, watching lives ruined by the broken state, including the public hospital that hastened the death of my grandfather by assigning an untrained night aide to attempt his emergency heart surgery.
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The Washington Post – As Modi Discovered, India’s Economy Will Never Look like China’s
When Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, one hope was that he would do for the country what he had done as chief minister in the state of Gujarat: build a fast-growing economy with an efficient bureaucracy and advanced factories attracting billions of dollars in investment from multinational corporations. A Modi-led India was even touted as the next China.
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The New York Times – Trump’s Dangerous Obsession with Markets
From Day 1 in the Oval Office, President Trump showed a unique obsession with the financial markets, tweeting that high stock prices proved he was making America great again. But a new chapter opened in October, when the market dropped sharply, and Mr. Trump began making critical presidential decisions with an eye to pushing stock prices back up.
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The New York Times – Should We Worry About A Slowing Economy?
Last year looked like the time when President Trump had delivered on his promises to strengthen the economy. His tax cuts appeared to juice growth above 3 percent, a pace the United States had not topped since 2005. But on Thursday the Commerce Department revised 2018 growth downward to below 3 percent, even as forecasts for 2019 were also trending lower, toward 2 percent. It all has triggered another wave of disappointed commentary about doggedly “slow” growth in the United States.
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Foreign Affairs – No Country for Strongmen
Like most national elections in India, the one coming this spring will be decided in the mofussil. Originally a colonial term for any town outside the commercial capitals of the British Raj, mofussil now refers to the provincial areas beyond the burgeoning megacities of Mumbai and New Delhi, that is, to the rural and impoverished stretches where two out of three Indians live.
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The New York Times – Casting Their Votes by Voting Their Caste
When I was growing up in India in the 1970s and 80s my father’s job as a naval officer took our family from one big city to another, from Bombay to Singapore. But every summer, we spent a month with my maternal grandparents in Bijnor, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and one of its poorest states.
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The New York Times – When the Bubble Bursts, Consider the Anti-Bubble
After a decade of extraordinary gains, the American stock market has come unhinged in recent weeks, with the technology sector leading the rapid decline. American tech giants are down on average 25 percent from recent peaks, and it appears the big global bubble of the 2010s is bursting. The question on everyone’s mind is what comes next.
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The New York Times – How The Next Downturn Will Surprise Us
After the fall of Lehman Brothers ten years ago, there was a heated public debate about how the leading American banks had grown “too big to fail.” But it overlooked the larger story, about how global markets where stocks, bonds and other financial assets are traded had grown worrisomely large.
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The New York Times – Worried About Turkey’s Economic Problems? China’s Could Be Worse.
Falling back on a standard excuse of besieged strongmen, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is blaming traitors and outside powers for his nation’s financial crisis, and describing the strong United States dollar as among “the bullets, cannonballs and missiles” foreigners are using to wage “economic war” on his country.
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The New York Times – The Coming Tech Battle With China
Arriving in Beijing last month, I knew I would not be able to access Google, Facebook or Uber. As strange as it was to go without these staples of online life in the west, it was even stranger to find that local Chinese didn’t seem to feel deprived at all. They search through Baidu, get their social media fix on WeChat, hail rides on Didi, curate news through sites like Toutiao. And while they know Beijing is watching, they accept this surveillance as normal.
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The New York Times – The Millionaires Are Fleeing. Maybe You Should, Too.
Tracking the rich has become a voyeuristic global industry, a form of celebrity worship. But it can also provide serious clues about where countries are headed.
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The New York Times – Actually, It’s Not the Economy
With Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron visiting Donald Trump this week, much of the commentary has focused on how wildly different the staid German chancellor and the globally minded French president are from the mercurial American president. But the three do share one trait: They are all unpopular at home despite the good economic times.
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The New York Times – A Tiger Abroad, Putin Plays a Cautious Economic Game At Home
There was never much suspense about whether Vladimir Putin would win the election on Sunday, but there is at least some question about which Putin will show up for his fourth term as Russia’s president.
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The New York Times – Is Trump About to Start a Trade War?
The announcement that President Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn, plans to resign after losing a battle over raising tariffs ratchets up concern that the White House is turning sharply toward protectionism. The deepest fear is that the planned steel and aluminum tariffs will echo the mistake of the infamous Smoot Hawley tariffs of 1930, which provoked a global trade war and helped start the Great Depression.
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The New York Times – The Stock Market Is Volatile Again. Get Used to It.
The fear generated by Wall Street’s sharp fall has been greatly magnified by the calm that preceded it. Before the eight percent decline in United States stocks over the past week, the S&P 500 had gone two years without suffering a drop that large. Spoiled by this unnaturally placid stretch, many Americans had forgotten what a routine market setback even looks like.
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Foreign Policy – Where The Next Global Downturn Could Come From
Nine years after the 2008 global financial crisis, the recovery has spread to every major economy, and the consensus among financial analysts is that nothing can trip things up in 2018. So widely shared are the expectations of accelerating global growth that former doomsayers have turned into hopeful converts. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Nov. 6 cover story gushed “Even the skeptical Germans sound happy.”
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The New York Times – Why Experts (Always) Get It Wrong
To borrow from Yogi Berra, it is tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But 2017 was particularly difficult. On many of the biggest forecasts — global growth, inflation, the trajectory of the big powers — the experts got the year wrong.
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The Wall Street Journal – In 2017 Markets Rose Above Politics
As Donald Trump and other populists sent TV viewership and news readership soaring this year, commentators cast these new-age leaders as a threat to world peace, democracy, Western civilization, the postwar order, race relations, women, the free press, the open internet and more.
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The New York Times – Which Nation Does the World Trust Most? (Hint: Follow the Dollar.)
There is a popular narrative these days that President Donald Trump is undermining America’s standing in the world and ceding the mantle of global leadership to China. By insisting that America should act like any other country and put its own interests first, these declinists say, Mr. Trump is demoting America to the status of any other country and straining its postwar alliances to the breaking point.
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The New York Times – To Grow Stronger, China Has to Grow More Slowly
When President Xi Jinping of China took power in 2012, digital cash hardly existed. Last year, the Chinese made $9 trillion in mobile payments, 80 times more than Americans. Chinese consumers pay for 25 percent of their purchases with digital cash delivered by a mobile phone app, and about one in seven carry no paper currency. In big cities like Shanghai, it’s hard to use paper to pay taxi fares or restaurant bills.
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The New York Times – No, That Robot Will Not Steal Your Job
The recovery from the crisis of 2008 has been one of the weakest on record, but never in postwar history has so little growth created so many jobs. The unemployment rate in the developed world is down to 5.5 percent and approaching a 40-year low. This flies in the face of all the dire warnings about a “jobless future.”
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The New York Times – What Trump Can Do to Prevent the Next Crash
Arguably no government agency has more influence on the daily lives of Americans than the Federal Reserve, and in the coming year President Trump has a chance to appoint or replace five of the central bank’s seven governors, including the vice chairman, Stanley Fischer, and possibly the chairman, Janet Yellen.
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The New York Times – Is the Tech Bubble About to Burst?
At the height of a market mania in 1967, the author George Goodman captured the mood perfectly, comparing it to a surreal party that ends only when Black Horsemen burst through the doors and cut down all the revelers who remain. Though the guests know they must bolt before it is too late, “The music and wines are so seductive that we do not want to leave, but we do ask, ‘What time is it? What time is it?’ Only none of the clocks have any hands.”
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The New York Times – The Next Economic Powerhouse
If getting rich is hard for individuals, it is harder still for nations. Of more than 190 countries tracked by the International Monetary Fund, fewer than 40 count as wealthy or advanced economies. The rest are known as emerging nations, and many of them have been emerging forever. The last large country to make it into the advanced class was South Korea, 20 years ago.
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The New York Times – Throw the Bums Out, Global Edition
Only a few weeks ago, much of the global commentariat still saw the rise of right-wing populism as the defining trend of our times, but recent election results upend that notion. This month an old-fashioned socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, scored an unexpectedly strong showing in Britain. On Sunday, the new-school centrist Emmanuel Macron won a parliamentary majority in France. And conservative, Wall Street-friendly reformers are gaining momentum in, of all places, Latin America, once a hotbed of anticapitalist radicalism.
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The New York Times – Why There is No Trump Slump on Wall Street
After a brief stumble, the stock market returned to its upward march last week and hit another high. This optimism has left many people confused, even infuriated. Why isn’t Wall Street being affected by all the crazy news — including rumors of impeachment — coming out of Washington? Where is the Trump Slump?
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The New York Times – America Needs Immigrants to Be Great Again
What makes America great? The standard answers point to qualities that the United States is said to have in greater abundance than its peers in Europe and Japan. There are the innovations that pour out of Silicon Valley companies and elite universities, the flexibility of a work force relatively unconstrained by union rules, the dynamism of entrepreneurs less hamstrung by an oversize welfare state and of a more mobile population willing to move to where the cutting-edge jobs are mushrooming.
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The New York Times – How Macron Would Fix the French Economy
The world keenly watched the first-round vote for president in France last Sunday because of the rise of Marine Le Pen, who wants to take the country out of the European Union and shut immigrants out of France. But she came in second to a centrist, Emmanuel Macron, who positioned himself as anti-Le Pen and “anti-system.” He attributes the nation’s woes not to outsiders — European officials and immigrants — but on France’s own “sclerotic” and unsustainable welfare state.
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Foreign Affairs – The Boom Was a Blip
The global recovery from the Great Recession of 2009 has just entered its eighth year and shows few signs of fading. That should be cause for celebration. But this recovery has been an underwhelming one. Throughout this period, the global economy has grown at an average annual pace of just 2.5 percent—a record low when compared with economic rebounds that took place in the decades after World War II.
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The New York Times – A Strongman Strengthened
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a mesmerizing orator, in the way of a talk-show host with an acerbic tongue, and this month a campaign crowd of more than 50,000 showed up in Deoria, a hardscrabble town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, to hear his story. They knew and loved the part about how this son of a tea seller rose through the party ranks with no help from family connections. But the rest of his rags-to-power tale is changing fast.
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The Wall Street Journal – Mexico’s Bad Luck Gets Even Worse
If Trump pushes America’s neighbor into a slump, no wall will be high enough to keep the immigrants out.
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The New York Times – Why Trump Can’t Make It 1981 Again
As if Donald J. Trump’s victory wasn’t surprising enough, the economic reaction has been even more stunning. Despite forecasts of a stock market meltdown if he won, the market registered one of its strongest postelection rallies in more than a century. Now the euphoria is spilling into the wider economy, with business confidence skyrocketing and consumer confidence hitting a 15-year high. Much of this excitement is inspired by a growing consensus that Mr. Trump could be the most-business friendly president since Ronald Reagan.
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The Washington Post – Robots won’t kill the workforce. They’ll save the global economy.
Across the world, the labor pool isn’t growing fast enough to support our needs.
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The New York Times – When Borders Close
The age of globalization generated great prosperity. As the flow of goods, money and people across borders surged, millions benefited. But the elite gained the most. And as inequality rose, it stirred pockets of fierce resentment among those left behind. When the great shock came, the discontented turned to nationalist firebrands, who promised to impose controls on free trade, global banks and immigrants. Globalization stalled. A new age of deglobalization hit full stride.
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The Wall Street Journal – Trump Tees Up a Necessary Debate on the Fed
Sixty percent of stock gains since the 2008 panic have occurred on days when the Fed makes policy decisions.
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The Wall Street Journal – The Dollar—and the Fed—Still Rule
Americans may think the U.S. is in hock to China, but Beijing’s economic fate lies in Washington’s hands.
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The Guardian – Globalisation as we know it is over – and Brexit is the biggest sign yet
“In the shock after the Brexit referendum vote the risk of contagion was raised. Analysts asked which EU country might leave next and whether this unravelling could shatter the postwar European order.”
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The Financial Times – Putin is the Model of Economic Sobriety
“President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive foreign policy has sparked a global backlash. Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine led to international sanctions, its internet hackers stand accused of interfering in elections in the US, and its state doping program has gotten many Russian athletes banned from the Rio Olympics. At home, however, Mr. Putin has been playing a surprisingly quiet and effective game of defense on the economic front.”
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The Wall Street Journal – Beware the Economic Allure of the Strongman
China’s example has led some to believe that authoritarians are better for growth. The evidence favors democracies.
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Time Magazine – The Anti-Incumbency Wave Is Changing the Politics of Latin America
“In April last year I caught up with Chile’s richest man, Sebastian Piñera , in the surprisingly modest Santiago office to which he returned after leaving the presidential mansion. A billionaire who made his money in the credit card business, Piñera served as president from 2010 to 2014, and he reflected on the defeat of his party after he stepped down, limited by law to one term. His center-right government had presided over an economic boom, with growth averaging 6 percent, yet his party was driven from power amid street protests against rising inequality. ”
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The New York Times – How China Fell Off the Miracle Path
“For years now, Donald J. Trump has been sounding the alarm on China, calling it an economic bully that has been “eating our lunch.” The crux of Trump’s attack is that Beijing manipulates its currency to keep it cheap and give Chinese exports an unfair advantage. But that narrative is so last decade. China is now a threat to the United States not because it is strong but because it is fragile.”
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The Wall Street Journal – Impeachment Won’t Save Brazil
“Brazilian investors and citizens alike are happily anticipating the arrival of “anybody but Dilma.” Since late January, despite the country’s crushing recession, Brazilian stocks are up more than 50% in dollar terms, inspired by the campaign to topple President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached on Sunday by the lower house of Brazil’s Congress for allegedly violating financial responsibility laws.”
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Previous Articles
US:
• TIME Magazine (January 20, 2014)
• The New York Times (April 25, 2012)
• The Washington Post (June 24, 2012)
• TIME Magazine (May 14, 2012)
• TIME Magazine (April 23, 2012)
• Foreign Affairs (January/February 2014)
• Foreign Affairs (September/October 2013)
• Foreign Affairs (November/December, 2012)
• The Wall Street Journal (January 21, 2014)
• The Wall Street Journal (October 30, 2013)
•The Wall Street Journal (June 26, 2013)
• The Wall Street Journal (February 28, 2013)
• Bloomberg (July 28, 2013)
• Bloomberg View (May 6, 2013)
• The Atlantic (August 3, 2012)
• The Atlantic (April 16, 2012)
• CNBC.com (January 28, 2013)
• CNBC.com (June 5, 2012)
• The Huffington Post (July 10, 2012)
• The Globalist (August 11, 2012)
INDIA:
• The Times of India (January 29, 2014)
• The Times of India (December 10, 2013)
• The Times of India (August 28, 2013)
• The Times of India (August 25, 2013)
• The Times of India (May 7, 2013)
• The Times of India (April 1, 2013)
• The Times of India (November 12, 2012)
• The Times of India (April 15, 2011)
• The Economic Times (January 29, 2014)
• Outlook Magazine (May 7, 2012) – Cover | Excerpt
• The Mint, India (June 15, 2012)
• The Economic Times (October 8, 2012)
• The Economic Times (May 14, 2012)
UK:
• The Financial Times (January 27, 2014)
• The Financial Times (December 8, 2013)
•The Financial Times (August 25, 2013)
• The Financial Times (July 1, 2013)
• The Financial Times (May 20, 2013)
• The Financial Times (March 27, 2013)
• The Financial Times (December 18, 2012)
• The Financial Times (June 24, 2012)
• The Financial Times (May 6, 2012)
• The Financial Times (September 19, 2012)
INTERNATIONAL:
• Business Day, South Africa (June 12, 2012)
• Daily Financial Times, Sri Lanka (May 10, 2012)