NEW YORK – As Swedish prosecutors’ sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange play out in the international media, one c…

LONDON – Last week, the former dictator General Jorge Videla was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in Argentina’s “dirt…

BEIJING – Measured by the percentage of people living in its cities, China’s urbanization rate currently stands at about 48%, according to o…

BERKELEY – The central insight of macroeconomics is a fact that was known to John Stuart Mill in the first third of the nineteenth century: …

CAMBRIDGE –The tax package agreed to by President Barack Obama and his Republican opponents in the United States Congress represents the rig…

NEW YORK – I just returned from India, where I was lecturing to the Indian Parliament in the same hall where US President Barack Obama had r…

BERLIN – Two years have passed since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Much to his credit – and in contrast to his im…

MOSCOW – When Russian President Dmitri Medvedev delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly I was struck by the fact that his speec…

NEW YORK – America is on a collision course with itself. This month’s deal between President Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress to…

PHILADELPHIA – Polio broke out in Central Asia this year, with 560 cases reported in Tajikistan. Cases have also been diagnosed in Russia an…

LONDON – It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the es…

CHICAGO – It is universally recognized that a key factor underlying the 2007-2008 financial crisis was the diffusion of collateralized debt …

BRUSSELS – If French President Nicolas Sarkozy had written the prologue to his presidency of the G-20, which has just commenced, he could no…

PARIS – Could the world be on the verge of a new period of re-ordering itself, similar to the one experienced nearly 20 years ago?In the 199…

MUNICH – By 2010, Europe was to be “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world.” This was the official proclamati…

NEW YORK – The visit on January 19 of China’s president, Hu Jintao, is coming at a time when economic conflict between the United States and…

LONDON – Last month, while in New York City, I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. To acc…

PARIS – Oscar Wilde said that experience is the name we give to our mistakes. Last year, we tried to analyze the errors that led the world i…

NEW YORK – The architects of the euro knew that it was incomplete when they designed it. The euro had a common central bank but no common tr…

NEW YORK – Whenever I hear people on America’s Republican right call themselves “conservative,” I experience the mental equivalent of a slig…

LONDON – Relationships between London banks and their regulators are not especially warm just now. The latest bonus rules issued by the Comm…

MEXICO CITY – Everyone these days, it seems, has their own favorite American diplomatic cable – or will soon – given that the 250,000 docume…

LONDON – For years, it was assumed, certainly in the West, that, as society developed, religion would wither away. But it hasn’t, and, at th…

LONDON – In 2008, at a time of financial peril, the world united to restructure the global banking system. In 2009, as trade collapsed and u…

SANTIAGO – Chile celebrated 200 years of independence in 2010. Only 20 of the 198 countries on Earth have reached that age. Therefore, it ha…