Opinion

  Japan’s plan to tame bullish Yen to sensitise its exports has drawn criticism from G7 ministers’ meeting, which brought together finance ministers and central bank governors from Britain, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and the US, plus leaders from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and European Union. Tokyo’s repeated threats to intervene in forex markets to reverse a …

Sara Hsu SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS China’s peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector has witnessed expansion in recent years, despite periodic clampdowns on excessive risk. This has led to on-again, off-again surges in activity in this shadow banking sector. In some cases, criminal activity has highlighted the perils of borrowing or lending through this industry, but the loan availability for borrowers and …

Vu Minh Khanh was in Washington last week to address a congressional hearing. As the wife of the respected Vietnamese human rights lawyer Nguyen Van Dai, she vividly recalled her husband’s ordeal. He has been missing ever since he was arrested last December. She knows he is in police custody but is unaware of his whereabouts and fears for his …

  The U.S.-Japan and U.S.-ROK alliances have survived the Cold War, drastic regime change, and global economic turmoil, but can they withstand a full-on assault by U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump? Trump’s fiery, and even racist, rhetoric has U.S. allies worried about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy and presence in East Asia. When examining alliances, scholars and alliance …

  Google’s annual developers’ conference, known as the I/O, has now become what Apple’s events have ceased to be: A window into the near future of consumer tech. This year’s event revealed two important bets Google is making for the post-smartphone era. The short version of Google’s (for the sake of convenience I will keep calling it that rather than …

Brazil can’t seem to catch a break. It’s suffering the worst economic slump in decades; its president may be thrown out of office; it’s contending with the zika virus. Now, to add to these indignities, come the huge subsidies to pay for this summer’s Olympics. The costs exceed $10 billion, with only a fraction to be covered by revenues from …

  Taiwan is between a rock and a hard place. It needs China for economic reasons, but continues to be apprehensive about Beijing’s “assertive policy”. The future path of Taiwan’s independence-leaning president-elect Tsai Ing-wen is fraught with economic challenges as the island’s economy has been contracting year-on-year for three straight quarters. Beijing’s fears that Tsai may not sustain the ‘one …

  Narayana Kocherlakota The U.S. government seems concerned about what will happen if other big nations push down the value of their currencies against the dollar. Actually, it could be good for the global economy. Ahead of this week’s meeting of finance ministers from the Group of Seven developed nations, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has warned that the U.S.’s counterparts …

On Monday, China heavily criticized the European Parliament for a resolution passed last week that squarely took aim at Beijing’s bid for market economy status at the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the non-binding resolution last Thursday, EU legislators declared that China still fails to meet the criteria for a market economy as defined by EU law and that there …

  Taiwan will inaugurate a new president this week who China hates but America should love. On Friday, Taiwan’s newly elected president, Tsai Ing-wen, will come into office amidst a storm of controversy and scandal. She will then begin a long hard slog through a cross-Strait political minefield, alienated from the world and increasingly unpopular at home. That is, if …