Economic recovery at the expense of your neighbors? The wave of competitive currency devaluation further intensified in the month of January while pessimism grew that the year 2013 would be remembered as the year of a global exchange rates war. In many countries, quantitative easing and the ensuing currency depreciations are touted as the final prescription to boost exports and re-energize sagging domestic economies. Forget about the detrimental fallout for other countries. A blame game has alre

PARK CITY, Utah ― The last documentary film that used dry charts and statistics to make an abstract argument about a global issue and nonetheless became a pop-culture hit was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the hit of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was a low-key affair called “Inequality for All,” in which Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration, explains how rising income inequality and the demise of the middle class is causing so many Americans to suffer.With P

Although people realize the necessity of parliamentary confirmations for cabinet nominees, they frown upon the process. The reason is obvious. Instead of examining a person’s abilities and qualifications, the hearing committee members tend to viciously bring forth all sorts of allegations and suspicions. During the process, they brutally expose all of the past mistakes and misdeeds of the nominee, thereby turning the supposedly solemn hearing into a scandal-rousing session. Everybody has a skele

WASHINGTON ― John Kerry’s first task as incoming secretary of state should be to develop a coherent policy for Syria, where U.S. sanctions are proving counterproductive, the fighting around Damascus is deadlocked, the economy is in ruins and the country is headed toward a sectarian breakup. This grim prognosis for Syria is based on the latest reports provided to the State Department by opposition forces working with the Free Syrian Army. The military situation in Damascus is described as a stale

NEW YORK ― In 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan came to office famously declaring that, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Thirty-two years and four presidents later, Barack Obama’s recent inaugural address, with its ringing endorsement of a larger role for government in addressing America’s ― and the world’s ― most urgent challenges, looks like it may bring down the curtain on that era.Reagan’s statement in 1981 was extraordinary. It signaled that Ameri

STANFORD ― A successful society needs effective, affordable government to perform its necessary functions well, and that includes sufficient revenue to fund those functions. But a government that grows too large, centralized, bureaucratic, and expensive substantially impairs the private economy by eroding individual initiative and responsibility; crowding out private investment, consumption, and charity; and damaging incentives with high tax rates. It also risks crowding out necessary government

WASHINGTON ― Chuck Hagel means it when he describes himself as an “Eisenhower Republican.” He kept a bust of President Dwight Eisenhower in his Senate office for a dozen years, and has a portrait of Ike on the wall of his current office at Georgetown University. But the most compelling evidence of Hagel’s fascination is that he purchased three-dozen copies of an Eisenhower biography and gave copies to President Obama, Vice President Biden and then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates, according to the bo

TEL AVIV ― Few foresaw the surprising setback suffered by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his Likud party, and the right in general in Israel’s recent general election. It is an outcome that will have important ramifications for Israel’s domestic politics and foreign policy alike, particularly its Middle Eastern diplomacy.Although the final vote tally awaits (soldiers’ votes have not yet been fully counted), the basic result is known. Given the current stalemate between the right and left, a

Once again during his presidential term, Lee Myung-bak has used the presidential pardon power, and once again during his presidential term the pardon power has been misused. Although the Blue House asserts such uses have been in strict accordance with law or in the pursuit of the national interest, the truth is that the use of this power to pardon family members, close confidants, or high-ranking chaebol members disregards both the spirit of the power and the original intent behind the power. Ev