While I was growing up in New York I watched a lot of television despite the admonitions of my school teachers . My two favorite programs were Star Trek (the original series) -- yes, I'm that old, and Hogan's Heroes. The latter show was very funny but...

What if every wrong does not have a remedy; every pain, a pill; every injury, a cause of action? What if, in each case, the cure were worse than the illness? This is a tough choice for government and for the governed. It requires great legislative,...

I have written frequently in this blog about many countries I admire, most recently Brazil. However, there is only one country to which I am very attached and in which I have lived, worked and owned property, but which has not featured prominently in...

As the faithful readers of this blog can attest I have been an ardent fan of Brazil and Brazilians before it was obvious that the country had "emerged." As I wrote in April 2007 in Is it Brazil's Time?, the running joke about Brazil had been that Brazil...

I have been making the trip to the not so quaint town of Davos, Switzerland for over 10 years to attend the annual World Economic Forum, and 2012 was no exception. Once again, Mid-East peace was not achieved; global warming was not halted and the haves...

This post has been a long time in the making, and for good reason. Don't get me wrong; it did not take long to write as I believe firmly in these ideas and the words came easily, but it took me a long time to overcome the many good reasons I have always...

I find it amusing that the increasingly desperate Romney-chasers among the remaining US Republican presidential candidates are working overtime to attack the front-runner for his leadership of Bain Capital in the 1980s and 1990s. While not a blind supporter...

I write at the end of a wonderful two week holiday with the family. I would be interested to hear from the readers of this blog as to whether any of you have ever had the following thought. When a long vacation begins I often feel like time has slowed...

Debt and equity are common terms from the financial world, but I argue below we should begin thinking of our politics in this way as well. Debt is commonly defined as an obligation (usually to repay money) owed by one party to another. As such its terms...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the following issue: Why does it seem so difficult to turn sound economic policy into political action (i.e., results) in the United States and other established democracies? There are many versions of this complaint....

Over the summer two seemingly unrelated developments caught my eye. First, a collection of Continental European officials urged their governments to ban the short selling of securities. Second, a member of Parliament called for the ban of Twitter and...

Apologies for not having posted in a while -- it's been a busy summer. I did manage to spend time with the family, play some decent tennis, read a couple of good books (Feast of the Goat by Vargas Llosa and Cutting for Stone by Verghese) and watch the...

As regular readers of this blog are only too well aware, I am a passionate promoter of technology and internet-based businesses.  However, there is at least one dimension in which the elephantine memory of the internet can be a nuisance -- incorrect information,...

I gave a talk at a lunch last week in London at which I was asked to speak about "Social Media and Revolution." While this is a very worthy and interesting topic to me, I chose to broaden (but I hope not trivialize) the topic by making a connection...

I made the annual Amtrak trek to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner – an intimate affair in which the President and the First Lady, along with thousands of other guests fête the journalists who cover the White House. There are some worthy scholarships...

I was reminded recently that I travel a bit excessively for a non-pilot when my chosen home remedy for a blocked ear and sinus infection was to plunge 30,000 feet in a couple of minutes. Let me explain. On the back of what had already been...

I am en route home from what was always going to be a long trip (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, France, UK), made longer by an unscheduled visit to ravaged Japan. Japan has long been a very special place for me. Maarit and I lived in Tokyo during much...

I participated in a fireside chat last week at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit in which I was interviewed by the talented Lebanese journalist, Raghida Dergham. Raghida writes a well-read weekly column in Al Hayat and is a close follower of political developments...

For me two major themes ran through the recent World Economic Forum — unequal economic recovery and the advent of social media.  While neither item is novel, that misses the essential Davos point. Themes at the WEF are seldom new or innovative; rather...

Devoted readers of this blog will recall that I sometimes credit my 89 year-old mother with teaching me (by negative example) the need to stay current with technology. So I only have myself to blame for deciding it was a good idea to buy her a new Mac...

I gave the following remarks this morning in London to a meeting of British American Business, an organization dedicated to supporting business and fostering cooperation between the US and the UK.  As my remarks picked up some of the themes...

In my last piece I argued that the burgeoning national debt threatened the supremacy of the United States (see, Reducing the National Debt Before it Reduces the Nation). Here I explore how an economy hanging in the balance explains much of the polarization...

As of the precise moment that I write, the total outstanding public debt of the United States stands at $13,805,199,866,881.18. At some $45,000 per US citizen this is not a small IOU. If your family owed this much it might motivate you to trim expenses,...

I was chatting recently with a private equity investor who invests frequently and successfully in US media companies (a relatively difficult thing to do simultaneously), when he mentioned how the Thomson Reuters electronic signs, among others in Times...

The quadrennial World Cup was played this year, so perhaps I could be excused for thinking it would not be an auspicious time for  Argentine -- Brazilian relations.  However, my experience this week in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo belies that assumption....