I was asked by The Economist magazine (they call it a newspaper but this is a small conceit for a publication I hugely admire) to contribute to their new Lean Back 2.0 Blog. My first piece can be found at The iPad and the future of paper. I encourage you to read the other interesting Read More

For the last several years I have been writing about the threats posed by the over-indebted West. These are not only threats to the economies of Europe and the US but also to the very political foundations of these states. While the United States has so far enjoyed a ‘bye" from the debt capital markets Read More

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 had almost zero intellectual content other than perhaps Read More

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 executive or judicial restraint often in the face of Read More

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 these pages. That country is France. What prompts me to write Read More

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 was the country of the future and Read More

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 and have-nots were not reconciled. What was exceptional was Read More

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 come up Read More

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 of the private equity industry I actually find Mitt’s business experience one of his more attractive Read More

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 down and that I have Read More

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 are usually fixed establishing a moral and legal Read More

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. So for example why do American Congressmen insist on playing an adult variant of Read More

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 other social media to combat violent street protests. Am I the only one who detects a Read More

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 occasional film. One of these films Read More

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 once loaded into databasQes or just freely available to search engines is Read More

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 between the role of social media Read More

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 and awards bestowed but everyone goes (i) to see and be Read More

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 30000 feet in a couple of minutes. Let me explain. On the back of what had already been a pretty intense travel start to the year (see Read More

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 of 1989 and took the opportunity to Read More

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 across the Arab world. Thus I should have been on notice that Read More

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 the snowy valley acts a large reverb box to bounce around amplify Read More

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 Book Pro for her last birthday. Ursula Read More

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 I’ve written about in other posts to this blog I include them in their entirety Read More

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 of national politics and sense of social angst. In short we are Read More

As of the precise moment that I write the total outstanding public debt of the United States stands at $13805199866881.18. At some $45000 per US citizen this is not a small IOU. If your family owed this much it might motivate you to trim expenses but not if you were the US Government. In fact Read More