Articles

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has an intriguing blog post asking a deceptively simple question: You are an investor with $10 million planning to cash out in 20 years. A genie appears and offers to send you the price of one but only one asset 20 years from now to inform your investment decisions (a stock, currency pair, commodity, ...

When central banks start exploring strange new worlds, the results aren’t always ideal. Quantitative easing wasn’t just a change in monetary policy, but a whole new kind of monetary policy — a journey into the unknown. It isn’t over yet, but there’s already a debate about drawbacks and unintended consequences. With that question far from resolved, another adventure in super-loose ...

India’s premier security think tank, the Institute for Strategic and Defence Analysis (IDSA), just held its first major international conference on cyber security. Its focus on Asian and international perspectives has delivered distinctly Un-American perspectives on security in cyber space. The three-day meeting coincided with the release by President Obama on February 9 of a bold new initiative, the Cyber ...

Dwindling growth indicators for China have been reported extensively in the media in recent months, so much so that little space has been devoted to coverage of growth areas. It turns out that, even as railway transportation of so-called “black goods,” or steel and coal, has fallen, transport of “white goods” for household consumption is up. Indeed, consumption is on ...

You cannot understand the vulnerable state of the US and global economies — and nervous stock markets — without coming to grips with the crash of “emerging-market” countries. Led by China, these are middle-income countries that, along with the poorest countries, account for 85 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of the global economy, according to Christine Lagarde, ...

Uzbekistan tightly controls its currency, in the past year allowing it to depreciate very gradually. Officially, the Uzbek som has avoided the rapid and massive depreciation experienced by the Kazakh tenge, for example. But, unofficially, as Olim Abdullayev wrote for bne Intellinews this week, it’s a whole different story. On the Uzbek black market the som sits at 6,200 sum ...

Ever since the Eurasian recession began in earnest — or, predating that, when it was clear that Russia’s economic engine would stall under Vladimir Putin’s third term — there has nonetheless been a source of hope for Central Asia’s economies: China. On the backs of China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) platform, Beijing has stepped in to provide Central Asian ...

Is Bernie Sanders a closet foreign policy “realist”? Reading his few pronouncements on foreign policy, you sense that he embraces the realists’ deep skepticism about American military intervention. But he has said so little about foreign policy that it’s hard to be sure. Foreign policy is the hole in Sanders’ political donut. We know what he doesn’t like — the ...

It is potentially an unusual business transaction. While the prospect of a Vietnamese company taking over a Russian group in of itself is unusual, the buyout of a strategic stake in a major fish distributor is also a reflection of changing attitudes to the management of the Mekong River. Food security is the priority issue dominating the political agenda surrounding ...

The Trans-Caspian transport route is many things to the many states involved. Transporting goods from Europe to China and back–at the moment crossing through Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (as well as both the Black and Caspian Seas)–is an alternative to the Russian route. The clearest rationale behind the recent focus on the route is political, but that’s not the ...