Comment & Opinion - Columnists Archives

17 May 2011
The IMF is one of the most misunderstood (and poorly explained, to spread the blame a bit) institutions in finance. This week, while I was in New York, it was thrust into the…
10 May 2011
Rarely were the price increases so enormous, rarely was the helplessness of the industrialized countries so great as in the rare earths sector. While precious metals like silver…
12 April 2011
Following the earthquake and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, a state of shock, intuitive defensiveness and frantic political activity of those in charge of utility companies as…
31 March 2011
Black with gold lettering. It feels heftier than most passports, maybe due to the thicker paper used on the visa pages. Before it is born, it is simply black vinyl and a dozen…
24 March 2011
How much does popular music influence society? How does it shape society’s image of itself? How does it change a society’s image of other societies? It’s been…
19 March 2011
The Libyan problem isn’t a problem to be solved by policymakers. It’s a problem to be solved by financiers. Bankers stand a far better chance of helping the Libyan…
16 March 2011
Whether I’m travelling in a developed or developing country, one of the common features of news reports is the presence of ratios, often termed the “something…
16 March 2011
As a third-generation graduate of the University of Chicago, nuclear power has a special place in my thinking about policy. The University of Chicago Maroons (the university…
14 March 2011
On the face of it, they are similar. New Orleans, USA had been under threat of serious hurricanes for over a century. The fault lines running along the Japanese coast were…
11 March 2011
In January, I again watched the Paris-Dakar Rally (this being the 32nd running of the event, on a route that passed through neither Paris nor Dakar), one of the top events…