Some of us are more optimistic than others about the future. We optimists recognize that it is still possible to escape from the traps that America’s Second Gilded Age has laid. During a gilded age, p ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-09
Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) are feeling the financial squeeze. Two-thirds of low-income countries are already in or at high risk of debt distress, Russia’s war in Ukraine is comp ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-08
Globalization brings the world together through the movement of people, things, ideas, money, and much else. But talk of globalization has become increasingly divisive, with competing assessments of t ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-06
As the 2024 US presidential primary campaign season begins, the most likely final contest is a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Judging by the electoral map in 2020, Biden would b ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
One might think that predicting the US Federal Reserve’s next policy moves would become easier now that it has already hiked interest rates ten consecutive times, for a total of five percentage points ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
“The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the early twentieth century. We seem to be living in a similar interregnum today, likewise marked b ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-02
Following the May G7 summit in Hiroshima, US President Joe Biden claimed that he expects a “thaw” in relations with China. Yet despite some recent official bilateral meetings – with US Secretary of th ...More
EJ Insight2023-06-01
A megadrought – the worst in 1,200 years – has been ravaging the American West for two decades, fueling wildfires and exacerbating the region’s chronic water shortages. As global temperatures continue ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-30
The tentative deal that was just struck to raise the United States’ debt ceiling won’t make the problem go away. Partisan standoffs over the federal debt limit have become a predictable feature of Ame ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-30
Everything changed in early 2020, when it became clear that COVID-19 was not going to be contained. Suddenly, life in the United States and many other countries came to a near standstill: schools and ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-29
Last November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, concluded on a historic high note, with the last-minute agreement to establish a “loss and damage” fund. The ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-29
When Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was found to be safe and effective in 1955, following a successful trial involving nearly two million American children, it marked a turning point in the fight against ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-25
It is too early to tell whether all the talk about reforming development finance at this year’s International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings will translate into meaningful policy action ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-23
During my lengthy career in finance, I picked up several market heuristics that have generally proven more useful than not. Every January, for example, I remember the “five-day rule,” which holds that ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-18
The debate about how to achieve climate goals – most notably, the transition to net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases – has fueled speculation that the world will deglobalize. Some argue that, since ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-17
In our collective imagination, the Himalayas – the roof of the world – are an archetype: glistening white, distant, even otherworldly. Climbing them is proof of humanity’s daring, courage, and drive – ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-16
Optimism can be difficult to muster at a time of heightened uncertainty and global turmoil. The 2022 ASDA’A BCW Arab Youth Survey, conducted only a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukr ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-15
The first rule of forecasting, the financial journalist Jane Bryant Quinn once observed, is this: give them a forecast or give them a date; just never give them both. So, here’s a not very bold foreca ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-15
The US Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates by 475 basis points over the course of 12 months, in a bid to curb inflation, was bound to be perilous. As should have been expected, it preci ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-12
Over the past three years, a series of overlapping crises has exposed the structural weaknesses in Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies. Coming on the back of rising labor costs and declining ...More
EJ Insight2023-05-11
