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BOSTON—It is not easy to be optimistic about climate change nowadays. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s administration has eliminated incentives for clean-energy investment, slashed funding for numerous private-sector projects, and rescinded long-standing rules limiting greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions from vehicles and power plants.
CAMBRIDGE (USA) – Is China experiencing a boom or stagnation? On the one hand, the country’s export sectors – including the production of electric vehicles, solar panels and virtually the entire range of industrial goods – are the envy of the world, whilst its technology sector and developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are second only to America, with Europe lagging far behind. On the other hand, as I have written many times before, China has been experiencing a full-blown property market crisis – similar to that in Japan – for the sixth year running. Can China be experiencing both a boom and stagnation at the same time?
PARIS—Given current AI capabilities, does it matter who conducts scientific research? The intuitive response is that a fact is a fact, regardless of who finds it.
NEW YORK—It is telling that Anthropic chose to call its most powerful AI model “Mythos.” In ancient Greek, the word denotes an original reality that we can imitate or embody through the stories we tell ourselves and one another. Pliny the Elder tells us that the fifth-century Greek painter Zeuxis rendered grapes so realistically as to fool even the birds.
BUENOS AIRES—Nearly three years after Javier Milei became Argentina’s president, the chainsaw-wielding free-marketeer has established himself as the darling of the far right.
PARIS—After weeks of mounting tension on the streets of Paris, my wife and I decided to take our six-year-old daughter and leave town during Saturday’s protests. When the main demonstration assembled at 2 p.m. at the Place de la République, we were hiking in the forests southeast of Paris near Fontainebleau, once an autumnal retreat and hunting ground for French kings.
In Hungary’s general election in April, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing populist government was toppled not by some leftist opposition, but rather by a center-right party committed to fighting corruption and restoring democracy. As Israel heads to the polls on October 27, a similar shift is by far the best outcome one can reasonably hope for, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government replaced by a decent, law-abiding administration. A radically new foreign policy will remain out of reach.
PARIS—Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN) party in France, has unveiled an economic programme centred on rapid budgetary consolidation. This is usually referred to as a policy of strict budgetary austerity. In doing so, she is making a sharp break with her own party’s past, aligning herself with the traditional line of the European right.
MILAN — The world’s three largest economies, comparable in scale to continents, are moving in different directions. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, although the balance of power appears to be tilting more favourably towards the US and China than towards Europe.
NEW YORK — There are many reasons why, two years ago, the then US Vice-President and Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Her election campaign got off to a late start. She inherited a huge amount of anger directed at US President Joe Biden. And Trump is a talented demagogue who knows how to exploit the rage and hostility fuelled by fear.
In his historic speech in Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney urged middle powers to confront an increasingly harsh geopolitical reality by joining forces to forge a “third path” between kowtowing to great-power pressure and going it alone.
In 2010, a Greek sovereign-debt crisis roiled world financial markets. Now, France threatens to do the same, but on a larger scale. Not only is its public debt-to-GDP ratio edging up toward that of Greece on the eve of its crisis, but the French political system seems unwilling or unable to address the country’s gaping fiscal deficit.
CAMBRIDGE—The US budget situation is increasingly reminiscent of a train hurtling along a winding mountain track. No one wants to slow down, for fear of falling behind schedule and losing their jobs. But even if the train does not plunge into the abyss, it is worth asking: why keep driving it at full speed? Despite robust economic growth, the federal budget deficit has reached almost 6 per cent of GDP. However, slowing the train down is clearly not part of President Donald Trump’s plans.
On September 6, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, falling just short of an absolute majority. For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic, an openly ethnonationalist (indeed, racist) party, campaigning on a political platform that is ideologically adjacent to National Socialism, is close to gaining government power.
The world must now face up to the fact that the increase in average global temperatures will surpass 1.5° Celsius, the more ambitious of the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s targets. That means devising a plan for managing the consequences—by increasing our focus on adaptation, loss and damage, and geoengineering—while redoubling our efforts to cut greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions.
Germany’s far right has won again, capturing the largest share of the vote in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, as it did in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month.
When the European Union determines which assets are strategic, it tends to focus on those where a rival already dominates production (or could one day). That is why we hear so much about semiconductors, batteries, rare earths, and hydrogen. But we almost never hear about an EU asset that cannot be replicated elsewhere: Europe’s soil.
NEW YORK—The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is conducting a ‘Review of Programme Design and Conditions’ (ROC). This is the first major assessment of the Fund’s programmes since 2019, that is, from before the Covid-19 pandemic.
As President Donald Trump plunges the United States into another reckless trade war—this time with neighboring Canada, one of its largest trading partners, and a NATO ally—the irony is hard to miss. Despite being the main architect and beneficiary of the multilateral trading system since 1945, the US under Trump has recast itself—at least rhetorically—as the victim of an allegedly unfair economic order.
US President Donald Trump has once again published a map on which the American flag covers not only the United States but also many other countries, including Canada, Cuba, Greenland and Mexico.
