CANBERRA – Japan is again alienating its neighbors and driving its friends to despair over the issue of accepting responsibility for its war…

BERKELEY – The United States continues to recover from its deepest economic slump since the Great Depression, but the pace of recovery remai…

SOFIA – One of the most troubling outcomes of the ongoing financial crisis has been a collapse of trust in democratic institutions and polit…

SEOUL – Whether East Asia’s politicians and pundits like it or not, the region’s current international relations are more akin to nineteenth…

NEW HAVEN – Once again, China has defied the naysayers. Economic growth picked up in the final quarter of 2012 to 7.9% – half a percentage p…

LONDON – Europe’s great success in 2012 was to avoid becoming another of history’s failed monetary unions. European Central Bank President M…

PRINCETON – As US President Barack Obama begins his second term, he will have to devote much of his attention to figuring out how to get Ame…

TOKYO – F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Hillary Clinton’s stunning (and, I trust, unfin…

CHICAGO – Hardly a day goes by without a settlement between a bank and a US government agency or regulator. The latest one is between Bank o…

TEL AVIV – Forty-five years into Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and four years after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’…

ROME – Sometimes something happens that can have a fundamental impact on mankind, but passes largely unnoticed at the time. Such an event oc…

STANFORD – A successful society needs effective, affordable government to perform its necessary functions well, and that includes sufficient…

MONROVIA, LIBERIA – This week, the 27 members of the High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda gather in Monro…

WASHINGTON, DC – Recently, a group of officials gathered to plot a new trade strategy. It was a typical trade-policy discussion: the partici…

EXETER – Commenting on the recent Algerian hostage crisis on an international news channel, one terrorism “expert” made a remarkable claim: …

PRINCETON – Albert Hirschman, who died at the end of last year, was a great economist with a gift for producing striking insights by focusin…

WASHINGTON, DC – Germany’s gold is on the move. For the first time since official gold transactions became more transparent, the Bundesbank …

TEL AVIV – Few foresaw the surprising setback suffered by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his Likud party, and the right in general in Is…

ADDIS ABABA – What does the future hold for the global economy? Will living standards rise worldwide, as today’s poor countries leapfrog tec…

BERLIN – I recently attended the JP Morgan health-care conference, the Davos of the medical world. And, like the World Economic Forum’s annu…

PALO ALTO – Since World War II’s end, the US dollar has been used to invoice most global trade, serving as the intermediary currency for cle…

BERLIN – When placed under too much strain, chains tend to break at the weakest link. Figuratively speaking, the same applies to the Europea…

LONDON – Unlike some in Britain’s Conservative Party, Prime Minister David Cameron has not previously given the impression of being obsessed…

NEWPORT BEACH – Not many countries nowadays seek a strong exchange rate; a few, including systemically important ones, are already actively …

DAVOS – In today’s world, identifying and managing hotspots is not simply a matter of pulling out a map, spotting the wildfires, and empower…