MSI

Relations with the U.S. being stuck in a fiercely competitive mode, Beijing has been actively working to strengthen trade ties with ASEAN and the European Union. Those are China’s two largest trade partners. They accounted for 29% of Beijing’s total foreign trade during the first 11 months of th...

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...

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 econ...

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 Washingto...

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 wor...

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...

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 inflati...

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 ...

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 politica...

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 ra...