When Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve announced last month that it was initiating another round of $600 billion in “quantitative easing,” the reaction was swift and negative. The supposed profligacy of the Fed was yet another arrow in the Tea Party quiver and was used to support the contention that government spending is out of control.
Read moreCancun and Climate: Government Won’t Act, But Business Will
Over the next two weeks, Cancun will be in the spotlight for something other than spring break madness. As host of the annual climate summit that once saw such promise in Kyoto in 1997, Cancun in 2010 is framed by the spectacular failure of last year’s Copenhagen talks and by the stark realization that nearly 200 nations simply cannot agree on anything of consequence.
Read moreThe G-20: This Time, It’s Different
Last week’s G-20 economic summit in South Korea was widely depicted as a failure for the Obama administration and a rebuff for the United States. In many respects, it was. Obama remarked that if the U.S. hadn’t tried to set the agenda, it would have had an easier time. “Part of the reason that sometimes it seems that the United States is attracting some dissent is because we’re initiating ideas,” he said. “We’re putting them forward. The easiest thing for us to do would be to take a passive role and let things just drift which wouldn’t cause any conflict.”
Read moreObama's Misfire at the G-20 Summit in Seoul
With the leaders of the world gathering for two days of economic points and counterpoints under the aegis of the G-20, Seoul has become the scene of a showdown between a testy set of European and Asian powers and a rather flummoxed and flat-footed America represented by President Obama in all his post-Nov. 2 glory and malaise.
Read moreSustainable Excellence: The Must-Read Book
Fast Company Review of Sustainable Excellence
Read moreSustainable Excellence
Today's business landscape is changing in fundamental ways: Natural resources are growing ever more scarce and expensive. Technology and changing consumer expectations are making transparency a fact of life. The rise of emerging economies creates vast market opportunities for companies--and better living standards for hundreds of millions. In Sustainable Excellence, Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell tell the stories of the companies who are transforming themselves by responding to these paradigm shifts and in the process shaping the future.
Read moreSustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World
The economy continues to limp along, and from the debate in this U.S. election season, it seems as though the path to restoring economic vitality is terra incognita. Over the past generation, economic advances have been jump started by fundamental changes: first, globalization, and then the rise of the internet economy.
Read moreCSR Video Updates: Interview with Zachary Karabell
Zachary Karabell: discusses about river twice research.
Read moreThe China Blame Game
So bipartisanship isn’t dead. By a vote of 348-79, Democrats and Republicans alike put aside their acrimonious differences and agreed, at least for a moment, to stop blaming each other for the sad state of American economic life. Instead, they agreed to blame China.
Read moreBook Review: "A World Without Islam"
One of the sadder consequences of the near decade of war and violence that has followed the attacks of 9/11 is that so many people are convinced that we are in a clash of civilizations divided along religious fault lines. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe and the continued attraction of radical antinomian Islam in parts of the Muslim world attest to this situation.
Read moreBehind the Mosque Controversy, a Rich History of Both Coexistence and Conflict
Over the past two months, the planned construction of a Muslim cultural center in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site has become the fulcrum of an acrimonious debate about religion, freedom of expression, and the place of Islam in the United States. You would have had to be living off-the-grid somewhere not to have noticed the hundreds of opinion pieces, thousands of blogs, and considerable airtime on television and radio. As characterized by Newt Gingrich, the planned center is no less than the latest chapter in a war of civilizations: "America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization."
Read moreBook review: 'Fubarnomics' by Robert E. Wright
We live in an era of economic anxiety. There have been other such eras, but this one seems particularly acute. Though the actual fortunes of Americans differ widely, there is a shared sense of something not right. That sentiment acts as a negative glue, binding Americans in a collective malaise.
Read moreZachary Karabell in conversation with James Flanigan
SUPERFUSION: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It. This Drucker Business Forum was held on October 29, 2009 at the Los Angeles Public Library, featuring Zachary Karabell in conversation with James Flanigan discussing the US and Chinese economies.
Read moreBlouin Creative Leadership Summit 2009: Global Commodity Crunch
Panelists including, John Authers, Zachary Karabell, Badr Jafar, Josh Margolis, and Henk-Jan Brinkman were invited to discuss the challenges facing commodity markets, commodity prices and distribution.
Read moreThe Myth of the Stock-Economy Connection
Last week, I wrote a column in Time about the unfortunate tendency of investors, pundits, economists et al to view stock markets as barometers for the economy and economic data as indicators of the markets. This tendency is pronounced in the media in general and the financial media above all, which looks daily for a story about why markets move up or down.
Read moreHow Bad Is It? Greece, Panic and the Crisis of Confidence
The Greek debt crisis finally spilled over in full force to U.S. markets, aided and abetted by extreme statements emanating from such esteemed and prominent voices as Muhammed El-Erian of the large bond investor Pimco, who warned that Greece could be just the beginning of sovereign debt catastrophes. In the space of minutes, the major U.S. indices plunged more than 10%, fueled by the same programmatic electronic trades that were part of the battering in late 2008 into 2009. And then in the space of 15 minutes, they recovered, without — it’s fair to say — much human decision-making during that interval (and if an individual even tried trading during those 30 minutes, they would have found it difficult or impossible, as web sites such as schwab.com were completely overwhelmed with traffic).
Read moreDebt: The Third Rail of Journalism
Last week, I published an essay in Time magazine about debt, arguing that our current preoccupation with the federal deficit and with debt in general is a dangerous distraction from the real issue (namely, our inability to invest and spend wisely to create the economy of the future). The problem isn’t debt per se - after all, the U.S. government took on much more debt during and after World War II, and few would argue that was bad policy or led to disaster. The problem is that we aren’t spending our debt productively; instead, we’re frittering it away on consumption, tax rebates, military budgets to pay for Cold War-era weapons systems, pork projects, or other forms of spending that will not yield returns in the future.
Read moreThe World's Dollar Drug
For all the talk about the problems of Greece and their implications for the euro zone, there is another currency that presents equally profound problems: the U.S. dollar. The dollar is, as everyone knows, the world's reserve currency, and it widely seen as a boon and an anchor for the emerging global economic system. It is also the only thing standing between the United States and its own moment of reckoning, and that is not a good thing.
Read moreDow 11000 Is Only the Beginning
So we're almost there. The Dow is flirting with 11000 for the first time since October 2008—after falling to a low of 6500 in March last year. Now seems an appropriate time to ask whether the dramatic recovery of stocks is sustainable and to speculate about what comes next.
Read moreHas China's Business Climate Cooled To U.S. Firms?
Google recently anounced it is moving part of its operations to Hong Kong; and harsh corruption sentences have been handed down to China-based executives of the British-Australian firm Rio Tinto. Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion tells Renee Montagne that the recent events don't mean the business environment is souring for foreign firms in China.
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