World confronts a choice between chaos and order

It seems only yesterday that scarcity was the story. Energy and commodity prices were heading into the stratosphere. The oil was running out, food shortages loomed, Russia was resurgent and China was marching into Africa amid a scramble for dwindling resources. Now? Prices everywhere are falling as recession bites. Investment banks have disappeared; and the global credit system is…     Readmore

Global Governace for a Global Age: The Role of Leaders in Breaking Global Deadlocks

The financial crisis has highlighted gaps in global governance of international finance and capital. The world is interdependent in financial markets, trade, infectious diseases, climate change, terrorism, product safety, food supply and water tables. Our collective capacity to manage interdependence through coordinated policy responses is inadequate. There is a gap between the distribution of authority and of power, between…     Readmore

Searching for a global New Deal

Markets need not just an invisible hand but also a visible heart. The state of the world’s financial markets demonstrates that turbo capitalism really does make global crises more likely. Millions of people face the prospect of falling back into the poverty they have only recently escaped.     Readmore

Towards the G20 Summit: From Financial Crisis to International Regulatory Reform

Amid pressures from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, US President George W. Bush has called the leaders of the countries comprising the “Group of 20” to Washington on November 15, 2008, to discuss the current global financial crisis. The gravity of the financial crisis has encouraged some policy makers and commentators to describe the…     Readmore

Reading the graph: financial data & geopolitics

We took the 10-year total return performance of the S&P 500 back to 1900 (non-inflation adjusted) and charted the results below. When the line is highlighted in red, 10-year returns were lower than they are now.  As shown, periods where returns were lower occurred in 1914, 1921, 1932, 1938, 1974 and 1977. We also highlight…     Readmore

Long-term historical performances are no more familiar: the lost decade

If you were fortunate enough to buy the S&P 500 at the very bottom in October 2002, your investment would be up 68%. Unfortunately but most likely, 99% of investors didn't buy at the bottom. Instead, investors probably worked their way into long positions in 2003 and 2004 once the market proved it could sustain a clear up trend.…     Readmore

Millennium starts with negative returns and two major crashes

Since the blast of the "Internet bubble" in March 2000 (by September 10, 2001, the Nasdaq had declined roughly 34% for the year, while the S&P index had sunk 18%) a series of ‘Parmalat-style' and ‘Enron-style' defaults in diverse economic sectors have occurred in the US and the EU alike. Profits at U.S. banks declined…     Readmore

G20 summit: geopolitics challenges more than financial regulatory reforms

For the last few years the global economy has been running on two engines, the U.S. on the consumption side and China on the production side, both lifting the entire global economy. The U.S. has been the consumer of first and last resort spending more than its income and running large current account deficits while…     Readmore

2008: financial or breakdown crisis? Strategic Outlook

The correlation between economic and financial data with geopolitics endeavours suggests that no long-term economic and financial solution can be implemented without first re-defining a sustainable geopolitical environment. Today time is not ripe to change the 1944-45 balance of world powers. Sooner rather than later it will be possible to tackle this critical issue and to found a more…     Readmore

2008: financial or breakdown crisis? New world geopolitics under way

The 2008 crisis hits two targets: The monetary system, particularly the floating exchange rate mechanism; The financial market, particularly the creative valuation methods.

On the side of the international monetary system, the 2008 financial crisis hides intense geopolitics manoeuvres that are intended to create the conditions for a new world order to emerge.…     Readmore

Multilateralism for an Age of Scarcity

Building international capacity for energy, food and climate security

Resource scarcity issues – above all climate change and soaring prices for energy and food – are uniquely integrated. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the multilateral institutions and processes charged with managing them. This paper sets out a route map towards the more…     Readmore

Towards a theory of influence for twenty-first-century foreign policy: public diplomacy

Global issues are diffuse and rest on the decisions and behaviour of millions, if not billions, of people. Governments must respond by changing the way they practise diplomacy, offer development assistance and deploy force. This means making the new public diplomacy a core foreign policy tool.     Readmore