MSI

A very strong 13% rebound of EU’s economic activity in the second quarter, after a 3% decline during the previous three quarters, is mainly the result of more relaxed sanitary limitations and a powerful support of an easy monetary policy. That surprisingly fast and vigorous response reflects a for...

“The West messed up East Asia …” To this day, many economists and people from the political elite in that region believe that’s what the West (read the U.S.) did during the Asian financial crisis in late 1990s, without providing any proof or reason for such a colossal mischief. Many years la...

“To be rich is glorious,” is a simple summary of dialectic materialism offered by China’s Paramount Leader Deng Xioping to a relentlessly prodding Mike Wallace during the CBS News “60 Minutes” interview in September 1986. Looking at his puzzled interviewer, Deng went on to amplify on his m...

The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) is misleading the public with statements that sharply accelerating price increases (aka price inflation) in the American economy are due to temporary and reversible external shocks. The subtext here is that this undeclared form of taxation is not caused by serious ...

Washington’s recent efforts to restore and invigorate close relations with Germany are an important part of a new architecture of Western world order. Accounting for one-fourth of the EU economy, and for nearly a third of the trans-Atlantic trade flows, Germany is an economic powerhouse that sets ...

Systemic financial market changes in Western economies during the 1980s were routinely called “Big-Bang reforms.” That long, and still unfolding, process started in London and continued, in a much more radical fashion, in Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, and many other European capitals to make possibl...

“(The German Chancellor Angela) Merkel will not be deciding who will live in Hungary” was a warning by the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Germany took that as a lèse-majesté of sorts at a time when Merkel was trying to rescue her disastrous open-door immigration policy in 2015 by dum...

Recent public statements of the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) that labor market indicators will play a prominent role in its future policy settings are nothing new. By its charter, the Fed is bound to aim at “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” Practical and doctrinal issues with this poli...

Fresh from a hollow U.S.-Russia summit in Geneva, and a failed attempt to round up European allies to confront Moscow and Beijing, the White House is reportedly planning to set up a U.S.-China summit on the margins of a G20 meeting in Italy next October. Washington’s obsession with summitry is a w...

America’s key European allies seem unwilling to join Washington’s call for democracies to confront Russia and China. Germany says it does not need a “reset” in its relations with Russia. And, reflecting the views of its powerful business community, Berlin is clearly signaling that it won’t...