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COMMENTARY

Mar 15, 2012

Brace for China's impending crash

By Gwynne Dyer

Building a skyscraper is the ultimate expression of economic confidence, and more than half of the 124 skyscrapers currently under construction in the world are being built in China. But confidence is often based on nothing more than faith, hope and cheap credit, and a frenzy of skyscraper-building is...

COMMENTARY

Mar 15, 2012

Ocean acidification: another problem with CO₂ emissions

By Michael Richardson

We tend to measure time by the span of a human life, making a century seem like an era and a millennium a mega-stretch of time. In this perspective, a million years is an eternity. So it can be revealing to consider our place in geologic history measured in hundreds of millions of years.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 15, 2012

Europe's trust deficit undermines crisis resolution

By Barry Eichengreen

There is no shortage of talk nowadays about Europe's deficits and the need to correct them. Critics point to governments' gaping budget deficits. They cite the southern European countries' chronic external deficits. They highlight the eurozone's institutional deficits — a single currency and a central...

COMMENTARY

Mar 14, 2012

Japan's cautionary tale for the U.S.

By Robert Samuelson

Since the financial crisis, a shadow has hovered over the U.S. economy: Japan. Could what happened there happen to us? The bursting of Japan's real estate and stock bubble in the early 1990s has had lasting consequences: a "lost decade" (actually, two) of meager growth and weak job markets. Though hardly...

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 14, 2012

World has a stake in Russia's youthful vanguard

By Condoleezza Rice

The election of the once and future president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, tempts one to despair that the brief and inspiring political awakening in Russia over the past year was for naught. He has gotten his way — replacing his protege Dmitry Medvedev and reclaiming the Kremlin to solidify...

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 14, 2012

A wakeup call Japan ignored

By Paul Blustein

At 2:46 p.m. Sunday, March 11, my family and I joined millions of Japanese standing silently at a Buddhist temple or a Shinto shrine. With heads bowed, we remembered the events of one year earlier, when our house swayed for nearly three minutes and the power died. In the Tohoku region, several hundred...

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 14, 2012

Renew commitment to building a new Japan

By Yoshihiko Noda

March 11 is etched in Japan's collective consciousness. Sunday, on the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, which triggered the starkest crisis our country has faced in a generation, we commemorated all of those who suffered. Our thoughts went out to all of the victims of the tragedy...

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 14, 2012

Sending the wrong message to North Korea

By Andrew Natsios

Another food crisis has spread across North Korea, caused by yet another poor harvest and Pyongyang's disastrous currency manipulation scheme, which wiped out the savings many people had used to feed themselves. We do not know how many people are dying, but it is not as bad as the famine of the 1990s,...

COMMENTARY

Mar 13, 2012

Greece could learn from Argentina's experience

By Cesar Chelala

To understand Greece's recent travails and how the country got there, it is useful to quote what Mikis Theodorakis, the famous Greek songwriter and composer, wrote about it recently on his homepage:

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 13, 2012

Public acceptance of high salaries for athletes contrasts with low regard for finance superstars

By Kenneth Rogoff

The biggest news around Cambridge in recent weeks has been Jeremy Lin, the Harvard economics graduate who has shocked the National Basketball Association by rising overnight from "nowhere" to become a genuine star, leading a losing New York Knicks team to an unlikely string of victories.

COMMENTARY

Mar 12, 2012

Fear and consequences of defense budget cuts

By Robert Samuelson

It turns out that "budget sequestration," portrayed as an evenhanded way to spur bipartisan negotiations over budget deficits, is actually a dagger aimed at defense spending. The president and other top administration officials have said the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration are "bad...

COMMENTARY

Mar 12, 2012

Foreign aid: sop to conscience and bad policy

By Ramesh Thakur

When India selected 126 French Rafale fighter aircraft (£13 billion) over the U.K.-manufactured Typhoon involving a consortium of European countries, some British politicians and commentators demanded that aid to "ungrateful" India, a fast-rising economic power, be stopped.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

A sinkhole in Yashio, which emerged in January, was triggered by a ruptured, aging sewer pipe. Authorities worry that similar sections of infrastructure across the country are also at risk of corrosion.

That sinking feeling: Japan’s aging sewers are an infrastructure time bomb

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

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