MSI

“We don’t do sanctions …” was a calm response, with a disarming smile, of an ASEAN (an association of ten Southeast Asian nations) official to western demands to punish and expel one of its member-countries allegedly violating a democratic code of statecraft. Americans and Europeans were als...

Ever since China’s paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping began his relentless drive for economic development in late 1970s, Beijing has been offering a de-risking masterclass on trade and incoming foreign direct investments. And the long march from sweatshops and smokestacks to productive agriculture, h...

The economy is currently held together by a roughly neutral monetary policy that ignores inflation and monetizes an irresponsibly loose fiscal policy. The markets and the mainstream media are supporting the idea that we shall somehow muddle through the next elections in early November. After that �...

Trade and investment flows between the U.S.-led West and the Global South – represented by the BRICS – are drying up in an increasingly direct, proxy and hybrid warfare. Ideological and political underpinnings to this epochal change of world economy stems from the U.S. assessment that its “rul...

Last Wednesday, Brazil’s G20 presidency opened up as a slugfest about global governance – a totally inappropriate agenda item for the world’s only economic forum. Predictably, a gathering of foreign ministers (sic) had nothing to say about the ailing developed economies and their systematic ma...

The world’s largest archipelago, consisting of 18 thousand islands and islets, is home to 278 millions of Indonesians and an economy that has grown at an average annual rate of 5% since the turn of the millennium. Over the same period, Japan’s economy lost its forward momentum under an increasin...

There was no economic growth in the European monetary union last year. And, on current evidence, the outlook is for a much worse downturn in the months ahead. The euro area’s monetary policy cannot help. The core inflation of nearly 4% and unit labor costs of 5.5% offer no room for increasing supp...

America’s current monetary management is a bright spot in global economic affairs. Struggling with a horrendous legacy of errors that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession, followed by a long period of subsequent extraordinary credit creation, the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) ...

Almost two-thirds of American foreign trade transactions in the first eleven months of this year took place with friends and treaty allies. Canada and Mexico account for about one-third of the U.S. foreign trade business, and there is every reason to expect that those two countries will remain Ameri...

Jobs and incomes are America’s principal election issues. This time will be no different, although wars in Europe and in the Middle East, the chaos of illegal immigration and drug smuggling along the border with Mexico will register with American voters. The real election mover, however, will rema...