PROVIDENCE – While the conventional wisdom is that the next financial crash will come from the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble, climate finance may pose a more serious risk. Mounting evidence suggests that green lending is displaying all the pathologies associated with financial manias. In the last few years, and especially after the ...

NEW DELHI – In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, China could have become the development bank, central bank, and medical supplier to the world. By choosing unprovoked aggression over enlightened generosity, President Xi Jinping's regime has squandered that historic opportunity and possibly also revealed its true character. Until recently, ...

CAMBRIDGE – Sri Lanka has long been prone to macroeconomic instability as a result of its deep social and political divisions. If the country's newly elected president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, pursues policies that perpetuate these divisions, macroeconomic stability will remain elusive. As Sri Lanka makes another crucial political transition, it ...

CAMBRIDGE – Traditionally, a strong rising power has challenged a weakening incumbent, making the outcome preordained. But the outcome of the current struggle between China and the United States is far from inevitable, because the powers of both the aspirant and the incumbent are eroding – albeit in different ways. Almost a decade ago, China ...

CAMBRIDGE – Although most of the intellectual consensus behind neoliberalism has collapsed, the idea that emerging markets should throw their borders open to foreign financial flows is still taken for granted in policymaking circles. Until that changes, the developing world will suffer from unnecessary volatility, periodic crises, and ...

CAMBRIDGE – For years, China has defied the widely held view that political openness is necessary for long-term economic development. But recent macroeconomic developments now suggest that the country's exceptionalism is nearing its expiry date, with potentially devastating effects for the global economy. In September 2018, we argued that ...

In a recent exchange between former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on the plausibility of secular stagnation, one point of agreement was the need for a global perspective. But from that perspective, the hypothesis of secular stagnation in the period leading up to the 2008 global ...

The world is still struggling to digest Alan Greenspan’s mixed legacy as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006. So it is too soon to assess whether his departing successor, Ben Bernanke, is headed for history’s chopping block or its pedestal. But the crucial international role that Bernanke and the Fed played during his ...