The spectacle of the US Congress grilling TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on March 23 could one day be remembered as a turning point in the history of globalization. Over five hours of aggressive questioning, ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-03
Late last year, Morris Chang, the legendary founder of Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading semiconductor producer, proclaimed that “globalization is almost dead.” In a world where supply chains have be ...More
EJ Insight2023-04-03
The sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10 was met by an equally swift response from US regulators, who announced plans to make whole all depositors, including the uninsured. But the SVB f ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-31
An easy way to start a long, heated debate is to mention global population. Thomas Malthus famously ignited furious arguments in the nineteenth century when he warned that, absent fertility-control po ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-31
The shotgun wedding of UBS and Credit Suisse was hastily arranged in the spirit of ensuring our collective safety. As Swiss National Bank Chair Thomas Jordan noted, Credit Suisse’s size and global net ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-29
When Edmundo, a waste picker in Peru, caught COVID-19, he had to take out a bank loan to pay for his visit to the clinic. Many of his colleagues also fell ill and subsequently went into debt, desperat ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-24
Together with air, water is arguably the planet’s most important natural resource. Functioning water systems are one of the technological pillars of civilization, which often makes a water crisis a ma ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-24
The world is becoming accustomed to the drip-drip of catastrophic headlines following each new climate-driven disaster. Increasingly frequent and severe heatwaves are causing wildfires in California a ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-23
The world is in the midst of a global permacrisis. As interrelated shocks – the war in Ukraine, the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the escalating US-China rivalry, climate change, and a looming fin ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-22
Fifty years ago this month, in March 1973, the Bretton Woods arrangement of fixed exchange rates was abandoned, and the world’s major currencies – including the US dollar, pound, yen, and Deutsche Mar ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-21
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in northern California and Signature Bank in New York are the largest bank busts since 2008. Regional and mid-sized bank stocks have tanked, and depositors and busi ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-17
Disruption is coming to the agriculture sector. Around the world, livestock farmers are leaving the land, policymakers are targeting the harmful environmental and social effects of industrial meat pro ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-16
The run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – on which nearly half of all venture-backed tech start-ups in the United States depend – is in part a rerun of a familiar story, but it’s more than that. Once aga ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-15
When the United States and its G7 partners imposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank and barred Western financial institutions from doing business with Russian counterparties, commentators warned of ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-14
As a maturing, cost-effective technology, electric vehicles (EVs) are a key part of the solution to planet-heating emissions. When paired with clean electricity, they offer a route to climate-neutral ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-13
We are at the halfway point for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (from 2015 to 2030), but we are not halfway to achieving them. In fact, in many critical areas – from poverty to food sec ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-13
In January, I expressed optimism that a recession across the Western world (and beyond) was becoming less likely, and high-frequency indicators since then have indeed supported a benign outlook. This ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-10
Recent months may well be remembered as the moment when predictive artificial intelligence went mainstream. While prediction algorithms have been in use for decades, the release of applications such a ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-09
In my view, the most profound and insightful work of political economy written in the 2010s was neither a journal article nor a monograph nor a book in the traditional sense. Rather, it was an online ...More
EJ Insight2023-03-09
