CAMBRIDGE, England (Project Syndicate) —A new show currently airing gives fresh meaning to the term reality TV. Call it “American Democracy: Clear and Present Danger.” It should be required viewing. Almost 18 months after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming the US Capitol, a House of Representatives select committee is publicizing the findings of its detailed…
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a host of major US corporations described their efforts to exit the country. With the war about to enter its sixth month, the Moral Rating Agency has released new data surveying 114 of the largest companies in the world involved with Russia at the time of its…
In January 2021, an unclassified memo revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a military-intelligence unit of the US government, buys huge amounts of commercially available smartphone data and uses it to spy on Americans and track their movement history. By using publicly disclosed data, the DIA – and other agencies – can circumvent laws…
President Joe Biden’s recent statement that the United States would intervene militarily if China tried to take Taiwan by force was hardly a gaffe. The US policy of strategic ambiguity has outlived its usefulness. Since President Richard Nixon went to China and put the two nations on the path to normalized diplomatic and trade relations,…
Read More “Opinion: Defending Taiwan starts with standing up to Putin” »
Emotionally, the slog of the second year of COVID-19 proved as distressing as the shock of the first. As 2021 served up a steady diet of uncertainty, including from the pandemic, the world became a slightly sadder, more worried and more stressed-out place than it was the year before. That pushed the annual Gallup’s Negative…
Read More “The world was unhappier and more stressed than ever — then war, inflation hit” »
Sesame Solar CEO Lauren Flanagan was a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pioneer who worked with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs during his NeXT days. And she’s been in a leadership role at the women-focused startup accelerator Springboard Enterprises. Technology shapes Flanagan’s career. But it was watching the harrowing conditions at darkened hospitals, nursing homes and grocery stores in…
Read More “These mobile solar and green hydrogen ‘nanogrids’ come together like Legos” »
NEW YORK (Project Syndicate) – The United States appears to have entered a new cold war with both China and Russia. And US leaders’ portrayal of the confrontation as one between democracy and authoritarianism fails the smell test, especially at a time when the same leaders are actively courting a systematic human-rights abuser like Saudi…
Read More “Opinion: How an arrogant and pathological America could lose the new cold war” »
I’ve been doing this — writing about the stock market and investments — for a quarter of a century. It’s been a heck of a turbulent ride, including Russian defaults, emerging market crises, dot-com disasters, terrorist atrocities, global financial meltdowns, a US housing collapse that rivaled the Great Depression, inflation panics, deflation panics, energy crises,…
CAMBRIDGE, England (Project Syndicate) – Starting in the 1980s, transnational production enabled the expansion of global trade and low prices for goods, contributing significantly to economic growth. But the shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war have shown firms that the efficiency gains implied by the global division of labor — and…
Driving my daughter to her first day of summer camp today, I sat at a red light with the radio talking about today’s Congressional hearings into the attack on our Capitol. It was an insurrection, a coup, an attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated counting of electoral votes after a free and fair election. News…
