This is a guest post by Rawi Abdelal, Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, as part of the Duck of Minerva’s Symposium on Structural Power and the Study of Business. This post draws on ideas developed at greater length in...
[UPDATE: This provides more detail and context than I do. Read it instead of, or at least in addition to, my post.] Thomas Piketty has decided that because Germany was the beneficiary of debt relief...
I would like to cut through a lot of the rhetoric and discuss where we are with the Greece crisis and where we are likely to be quite soon. I will conclude with some thoughts as to why this has been...
The intuition behind the maxim divide et impera is clear. Â If they're busy fighting each other, they not fighting you. Â And that's obviously in your interest (assuming, that is, you are some sort of...
This issue of International Studies Quarterly contains an interesting article about the effect of donors on both the agenda and strategies of human rights NGOs. Here's the abstract:"Focusing on the flow of funding to human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we begin in this article to broach one of the least studied issues pertaining to transnational regimes—namely, their material underpinnings. Through an analysis of the patterns of donor funding to human rights NGOs, we underscore the triangulation between states, donors, and rights NGOs, whereby states have an impact on donor...
One of my favorite Cleveland sports columnists often does a column of brief observations and insights after a game or big event. I don't scribble, and I lack a notebook, but watching the AIG bailout has me thinking about a few things:Wow, that's a lot of money. To put this in perspective, recall the 2004 Presidential Election, when Kerry was rolled for being for the $87 billion before he was against it. That was a yearly supplemental appropriation to fund the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paulson spent about the same to bail out AIG in one day.This may have avoided an imminent financial...
If you're on the internets right now, you know that the US government has just effectively nationalized AIG. It seems that the risk of a total meltdown of the global economy outweighed concerns about moral hazard.Correspondents say AIG's demise would have a far greater impact on the world's financial markets than Lehman's.Many banks and investment funds in the US and around the world would lose their insurance cover at a time when defaults on payments are likely to rise.Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, met senior...
After the start of the Great Depression, the US government adopted a number of regulations, institutions, and safety-net policies designed to prevent a recurrence of an event that nearly destroyed capitalism and liberal democracy. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of those regulations, institutions, and safety-net policies were eliminated or curtailed. Some call this the triumph of capitalism and freedom over excessive government regulations, others call it "the great risk shift."Now, I'm not saying any of this is directly responsible for the fact that our financial system is teetering on the...