In his first few weeks in office, President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confirmed his intention to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. The consensus is that it won’t be long before he turns his focus to China, which he calls a currency manipulator. China can weather such criticism, for ...
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A climate change economist sounds the alarm
Some people who study climate change believe that addressing it later — when economic growth has made humanity wealthier — would be better than taking drastic measures immediately. Now, though, one of this group’s most influential members appears to have changed his mind. In the early 1990s, Yale’s William Nordhaus was among the first to examine the economics of ...
Read More »Smartphones have an unexpected new rival
Last week, an Indian government official announced that iPhones will start rolling off an assembly line in Bangalore by the end of April, targeted at local customers. It’s a big moment for Apple Inc., which is counting on India’s emerging middle class to make up for slowing sales in other markets. But don’t bet on the iPhone conquering India, ...
Read More »How pharma can get Trump off its back
Drug pricing is a conundrum for the country, and apparently for Donald Trump too. Last week, some pharma CEOs came out of a meeting with the new president believing he’d dropped his previously stated support for direct Medicare negotiation of drug prices. But at a press conference on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had not, in fact, ...
Read More »The North Korean red line
The Cold War was waged and won in many places, including this beach city, home to the RAND Corp. Created in 1948 to think about research and development as it effects military planning and procurement, RAND pioneered strategic thinking about nuclear weapons in the context of the US-Soviet competition. Seven decades later it is thinking about the nuclear threat from ...
Read More »India’s RBI has to choose its spice
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is forcing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to make a choice. The central bank will have to decide whether to let the masala bond market die slowly or gain new life in a different form than was envisaged when it allowed Indian companies to raise debt in rupees overseas. ReNew Power Ventures Private Ltd, ...
Read More »One way for Trump to help small business
At a meeting with small-business leaders this week, President Donald Trump pledged to do “a big number†on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which he blamed for cutting off the bank lending needed for growth. “It’s almost impossible now to start a small business and it’s virtually impossible to expand your existing business,†he said. Trump is wrong about small-business ...
Read More »Assad must face justice for war crimes
Amnesty International released horrifying details of mass hangings, exterminations, abuse and torture taking place in Syrian human ‘slaughterhouse’. Assad regime has killed more than13,000 people since the start of the 2011 uprising in mass hangings at Saydnaya Prison, north of Damascus. According to Amnesty report, 20-50 people were hanged each week at the prison. The killings were authorized by ...
Read More »Donald Trump is the singularity!
There’s been some controversy over when Donald Trump decided to run for president. Some say it was at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when he was roasted by both Seth Meyers and President Obama. I think it happened much earlier: August 29th, 1997, the date that Skynet became self-aware. Skynet is the artificial intelligence in the 1984 ...
Read More »Uber’s big fat Indian wedding service shows commitment
After its defeat in China, Uber Technologies Inc. can’t afford to lose a second billion-people-plus market to a local incumbent. So the ride-hailing company has introduced a service in India to suit tastes there. Letting customers book the same cab for as long as 12 hours — instead of finding a new one for every journey — doesn’t have ...
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