MSI

After a 6% economic growth last year, this part of the developing world -- consisting of China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam -- remains the fastest growing segment of global economy. And that will also be the case this year. Despite an expected slowdown to a 5.5%...

Trade has been the foundation of a European peace project after Germany led Europe twice during the last century to largest losses of lives the humanity has ever known. A fledgling customs union of six nations, founded by the Treaty of Rome on March 25, 1957, followed a successful European Steel and...

An excessive and totally unnecessary U.S. interest rate cut last September has stored a problem of price instability for the next American government facing a runaway public debt, huge budget deficits and unprecedented challenges to world peace and security. The Fed’s procyclical move is a major p...

And when that moment comes, Washington and Beijing will not be reinventing the wheel of a peaceful and productive modus vivendi. The two countries’ presidents talked -- and apparently agreed – about all those key issues during their meeting in Bali, Indonesia, on November 14, 2022. The same bila...

A 25-basis points interest rate cut this week is in the bag. But, as always, financial markets’ greed is pushing for more, prodding the Fed to “go big” -- with another quarter point bonanza. Traders have already taken some key U.S. money market rates in that direction. Will the Fed cooperate? ...

Washington has blissfully ignored decades of systematic and excessive trade deficits on its merchandize trade with China. And during that time, Beijing has tirelessly lectured Washington to embrace the mantra of the “win-win cooperation” instead of a “zero sum game” of another era. Here are ...

During most of the last decade, there was a perfect correspondence between the annual averages in the growth of world economy (3.4%) and the global trade transactions (3.4%). Last year, that relationship broke down: the world economy grew 3.3% while the volume of world trade declined 3% to a total o...

That’s the reaction I got in late 1980s from one of my Wall Street contacts. Armed with a reasonably good knowledge of economics, money and banking theory and some common sense, I argued that the U.S. Federal Reserve System (the Fed) had no reason to cut interest rates to please Wall Street trader...

A badly mismanaged U.S. economy is now going through a cyclical adjustment marked by an extremely expansionary fiscal policy, price rigidities and trade flows in a world split along increasingly bellicose security fault lines. That is the general setting in which the policy making committee of the A...

None of the currently active war theaters is nearing a peaceful conclusion. Sadly, they are becoming intractably expanding bloodbaths or uncompromising fields of confrontation. It has been decades now that the Middle East war ceased to be synonymous with Arab-Israeli fighting. The Iran-Iraq war in t...