PRINCETON – Since the 2008 financial crisis, most industrial economies have avoided anything like the collapse that occurred during the Grea…

PRINCETON – Margaret Thatcher was much more respected outside Britain than she was in her own country. In the United States, but also in Cen…

PRINCETON – Europe can choose its own musical accompaniment to its latest crisis. In Berlin, 50 Cent’s “All Things Fall Apart” has just had …

PRINCETON – What is the point of Europe? The threat of an explosive disintegration of the eurozone – and with it of the European Union – is …

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

PRINCETON – In constructing Europe’s monetary union, political leaders did not think through all of the implications, which led to major des…

PRINCETON – Any economic slowdown increases debt burdens, whether for households or for states. Today, both are looking for ways to reduce t…

FRANKFURT – Europe’s politicians nowadays are desperately looking for someone to blame for the euro crisis. Germany blames France, and vice …

PRINCETON – James Carville, Bill Clinton’s chief campaign strategist in 1992, famously expressed a bit of established insider wisdom about w…

PRINCETON – For the last century, economic-policy debate has been locked in orbit around the respective roles and virtues of the state and t…

MUNICH – To understand the euro crisis, you obviously need to know about economics. But you also need to know about the deep cultural orient…

FLORENCE – Summer is a time for beaches and relaxation – and, historically, for all sorts of destructive crises. Time and again, it has prov…

PRINCETON – Europe’s crisis is now poised at the moment that divides recovery and renewal from decline and death. Whereas a few weeks ago, c…

PRINCETON – As European leaders struggle after another failed summit, they should think hard about what their continent – and the world – mi…

PRINCETON – Over the past two years, financial markets have turned the spotlight on a succession of countries – Greece, Ireland, Portugal, S…

LONDON – The European Monetary Union, as many of its critics maintain, looks a lot like the pre-1913 gold standard, which imposed fixed exch…

PRINCETON – Europe’s debt crisis has piqued Europeans’ interest in American precedents for federal finance. For many, Alexander Hamilton has…

BERLIN – Germany’s position in Europe looks increasingly peculiar and vulnerable. In the chaos of German unification in 1990, when Germany’s…

PRINCETON – The protracted financial and economic crisis discredited first the American model of capitalism, and then the European version. …

LONDON – At the just-concluded European Union summit, British Prime Minister David Cameron vented decades of accumulated resentment stemming…

PRINCETON – The purpose of creating a common currency has been largely and surprisingly forgotten in crisis-torn Europe. Instead, there seem…

PRINCETON – The alternatives for Europe’s currency, the euro, seem increasingly limited to a desperate muddling through or a chaotic collaps…

PRINCETON – Today, the world is threatened with a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown – but on an even more cataclysmic scale. This time, …

FLORENCE – For months, an increasingly frenetic, even apocalyptic, debate about the fate of the euro has been the major driver of global ins…

MUNICH – Big economic crises often cause iconic companies to falter. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a model of the modern global enterpris…