About: robert

  Nearly six years after the outbreak of the worst financial crisis in history, prospects for a full economic recovery remain elusive. Unemployment remains at very high levels, and standards of living for many people in developed countries are likely to fall over the first two decades of this century. Meanwhile, emerging markets remain vulnerable…
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This is a technical appendix to the G20 Communique announced in a separate press notice Rationale: A global currency standard will give the peoples of the world a common measure of value, linking past, present and future, and connecting peoples across space as well as time. The old complicated network of dozens of currencies is…
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Yesterday I kicked off a round-table discussion organised by the CSFI of Benn Steil’s new book which carries this title. This is what I said. Benn Steil starts this stimulating book by poking fun at those politicians and others who have, in recent years, called for “a new Bretton Woods”. They have all been disillusioned….
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The death of Margaret Thatcher reminds us all of the power of ideas, when allied to guts and leadership, to change the world. She identified one area of national life after another where restrictions and old ways of doing things were holding back innovation and the spirit of enterprise that lay dormant in the British…
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Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Graeber is fascinated by the past. Indeed, Graeber might have started his book (“Debt: the first 5,000 years”) with an echo of the famous opening of The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”. But perhaps he thought that would be presumptuous.   Graeber starts off…
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