Tag Archives: World Affairs: Features

On October 5, after 10 years of negotiations, 12 Pacific Rim countries that account for a combined 40 percent of global GDP agreed to a sweeping trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The final text of the agreement isn’t public yet, but it appears that it would eliminate a large number of tariffs on goods and services, require state-owned enterprises to obey international trade laws, set stricter environmental and labor standards, and establish international tribunals to...

Globalization has been a fact of life for decades, but how long will it continue in its current form? A new report from the Credit Suisse Research Institute (CSRI) considers three potential futures for our increasingly interconnected world.   The most dramatic (and unlikely) outcome is an outright reversal of current trends, with globalization trumped by nationalism. It’s happened before. It wasn’t that long after the Industrial Revolution ushered in a long wave of globalization in...

It’s like trying to catch a falling barrel: Every time it seems as though crude oil prices might have touched bottom, the bottom moves a little lower. The latest low came on August 24, when the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) plummeted to $38.22, its lowest level since 2009. The price has since risen to around $46 per barrel, but a year ago it was more than twice that, at $93. Brent crude also fell to a six-year low of $42.69 per barrel in late August, and was still trading at $48 a...

Every now and then, the developed and emerging economies of the world find themselves in sync, growing or contracting together. This is not one of those times. In late 2015, a trend that started in 2014 accelerated, as the balance of global growth is tilting toward developed markets and away from emerging ones. Whereas Credit Suisse economists expect growth in developed economies to accelerate this year—up 1.9 percent versus 1.7 percent in 2014—they forecast slower growth in emerging ones, up...

In the aftermath of the housing collapse, U.S. consumers did something they hadn’t done in years: they drastically reduced their debt loads. After peaking in 2008 at just over $11.5 trillion, household debt (the sum of mortgages, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, and credit card debt) was whittled down to under $10 trillion by the second quarter of 2013. But that, apparently, is when the deleveraging stopped. Over the past two years, household debt has once again been on the rise. But...