Reflectii

All Economics Is Local

For most of the last 40 years, U.S. policymakers acted as if the world were flat. Steeped in the dominant strain of neoliberal economic thinking, they assumed that capital, goods, and people would go wherever they would be the most productive for everyone. If companies created jobs overseas, where it was cheapest to do so, domestic employment losses would be outweighed by consumer benefits. And if governments lowered trade barriers and deregulated capital markets, money would flow where it was needed most. Policymakers didn’t have to take geography into account, since the invisible hand was at work everywhere. Place, in other words, didn’t matter.

A multifaceted response from Europe has so far prevented its energy woes from creating widespread social and economic destabilization. But with winter approaching, the crisis is far from over and risks are getting worse.

While European energy prices have eased slightly in recent months, stress continues to build across a continent that has long been dependent on access to cheap Russian energy.

Within days of each other, revealing portraits of the United States and China have been unveiled. In Washington, the Biden administration released its national security strategy. It says much about American psychology at a critical juncture. And Beijing witnessed the opening of the 20th Party Congress on 16 October that will see Xi Jinping confirmed as president for a record third term.

While whispers of the current emerging market debt crisis, the result of the rapidly strengthening dollar, could be heard throughout the summer, virtually no one predicted the blow the dollar’s rise would deal to some other developed economies. But with the dollar reaching levels not seen in a generation, a battering is precisely what several are being unexpectedly dealt.

Six men accused of helping a gunman who carried out Austria’s first deadly jihadist attack go on trial in a Vienna court on Tuesday.

On November 2, 2020, convicted Islamic State sympathiser Kujtim Fejzulai went on a shooting rampage in downtown Vienna, killing four and wounding 23 others before police shot him dead.

An energy policy that bans investment in some technologies based on ideological views and ignores security of supply is doomed to a strepitous failure.

The energy crisis in the European Union was not created by market failures or lack of alternatives. It was created by political nudging and imposition.

Americans may not even know that China has struck the first blow until months after it has occurred… Americans think China’s war planners think like America’s war planners. Unfortunately, the Chinese ones do not. First strikes, despite what former intelligence officials believe, do not have to look like the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Over the weekend, in a 55-second YouTube video with dramatic music, the world got a glimpse at a new killing machine that’s more fuel-efficient, quieter and sleek.

General Dynamics, the defense contracting juggernaut, showed off a prototype of its next-generation military tank, the AbramsX. It’s the biggest upgrade of America’s military tank technology since early in the Cold War, former military officials said, which presents both critical design advances and worries about unnecessary military spending.