Despite some 750 military bases in about 80 countries the U.S. is often accused by its European allies, anxious about American protection, of being “inward-looking,” “isolationist” and downright “selfish.” When Donald Trump ran, and won, on a slogan “America First,” Germans fearfully proclaimed -- “we are on our own” -- but spent nothing on defense, […]

The best outcome of last week’s APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting in San Francisco is that it produced enough of a consensus to come up with a joint statement. Some member countries apparently wanted to stay away from geopolitics and keep the agenda tightly focused on trade and economic development. That’s a significant departure from […]

China’s long-delayed official announcement of a summit meeting on the sidelines of APEC proceedings in San Francisco November 11-17, 2023, speaks volumes about Beijing’s view of the bilateral relations between the world’s two largest economies. Apart from an obvious intention to make Washington appear as a supplicant, China’s official media thought there was nothing new […]

Getting kudos from Wall Street is a very rare feat. But that unrivaled trading place conceded last week that the Fed won the bet on U.S. economy. Traders drove the S&P 500 in a breathless climb that accounted for nearly half of the year-to-date gain on the iconic stock index. The rest of the world […]

Washington has been very successful in convincing China to participate in a flurry of high-level meetings and working group consultations while side-stepping fundamental disagreements on core red lines and world order issues. This weekend’s hottest media headlines are that American and Chinese top diplomats have agreed, “in principle,” about a summit meeting on the sidelines […]

Errors of monetary policy have established an inflation-recession reasoning about the growth patterns of American economy. The good part is that such reasoning explains the error and points the way to avoid it. The error stems from an old axiom of monetary theory positing that recessions and inflations are created by maintaining monetary restraint (stimulus) […]

Transition to a new world order was never going to be quick, smooth and easy. Acquired and long-held positions of power and privilege will not be given up without a long, costly and exhausting confrontation. American bankers see that much better than the Beltway’s political establishment. Despite toping Wall Street profit expectations and feasting on […]

Economic and financial relations are always a mirror image of social and political interactions between governments or trading blocs. That state of affairs may not obtain at any particular point in time, but it always, and everywhere, ends up in a perfect correspondence between economic and political interests. The period of 2017 to 2022 of […]

After more than a decade of excessively loose policies, the U.S. monetary authorities (the Fed) decided early last year to “normalize” credit conditions and restore price stability. During that period, the policy interest rate – formally known as the effective federal funds rate -- has been raised from 0% to 5.33% at the close of […]

Current estimates show that the limping American economy will still make a trillion-dollar contribution to world’s demand and output this year and next. North America (Canada and Mexico), European Union and China are the largest beneficiaries of the U.S. foreign trade. In the first seven months of this year, those economies accounted for 67% of […]

An instrument of power is bound to break down in a community of sovereign nations pursuing irreconcilably hostile geopolitical objectives. The just finished G-20 summit in India showed – once again -- that “strategic and systemic rivalry,” sweeping sanctions, hybrid and proxy wars are incompatible with multilateralism, respect for different socio-political systems, peaceful coexistence, and […]

In one of his expansive speeches, President Xi Jinping assured his audience that “China’s economy is an ocean …” I was often reminded of that moment while looking at vacuous claims that some cyclical or structural problems would sink the economy that is home to nearly one-fifth of humanity. China’s naysayers are impervious to the […]

The idea that the world connected through trade and technology is coming to an end is seriously at odds with evidence and common sense. That extravagant pessimism about the historical process of globalization is mainly a result of deepening security fault lines between the U.S.-led West and the developing world of Global South. A legitimate […]

Economic research and the collective financial market wisdom agree: An American business cycle downturn is inevitable over the next twelve months.             Financial markets’ proposition is based on the yield curve analysis. Wall Street rainmakers get huge (six figure) salaries for producing a line that plots the yields (i.e., interest rates) of bonds of […]

At some point, historians will write about the dismal failure of generations of world leaders to heal the festering wounds, and to effectively deal with the WWII legacy of a profoundly divided global community. After eight decades of muddling through the widening East-West divide, mismanaging the Bretton Woods system of world economy, and squandering the […]