The Economy: An Optimistic Thought Experiment

Over the past few years the economist in me has been profoundly pessimistic about the short and medium term economic destiny of the developed world, a view that is profoundly at odds with my fundamentally [...]

Is the Euro zone crisis by design?

A few months ago, I started writing an analysis of our global economic situation that I wanted to present in the form of an optimistic thought experiment. That article has become so long and complicated [...]

Must read article on America’s 21st century collapse!

I just came across this very well thought through article on everything that could go wrong for the US in the 21st century should we continue down the current path. It covers all aspects of [...]

The Ultimate Startup: Creating a New Country

My good friend Auren Hoffman posited that existing nation states would benefit from a little bit of creative destruction and competition to maximize the welfare of their “customers“: http://blog.summation.net/2010/06/the-ultimate-startup-creating-a-new-country.html. In light of the [...]

Just How Bad is Bad?

Great interview of Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer in Foreign Policy. Read it at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/05/just_how_bad_is_bad

Cameron Rules, Sarkozy Sucks!

Over the last two weeks I had the pleasure of attending the eG8 Summit in Paris at the invitation of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and being invited to tea with David Cameron, the Prime Minister [...]

Why India is behind China!

I recently wrote how the world is less globalized than we suspect it is and how we now spend $88 billion a year in visa processing fees. What is not included in this [...]

How to minimize human misery in recessions or the macroeconomic implications to hedonic adaptation

  As I was reading The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely’s sequel to the brilliant Predictably Irrational, I started wondering whether there were macro implications and applications for behavioral economics and [...]

Globalization is more fragile and less entrenched than you think!

I was shocked that the statistics I came across in a recent article in The Economist which presented Pankaj Ghemawat’s research on globalization. We seem to take it as a given that we live in [...]

Summit Series Speech: The Pessimistic Optimist

I posted a while back a written transcript of the speech. Stephen Meade recorded the speech and was nice enough to share it with me.