On Global Markets

By many conventional measures, the economy of the United States has been outperforming that of Europe for well over a decade. A simple look at the IMF’s data on GDP growth shows that the US growth has outpaced that of the European Union (EU) in 11 of the last 16 years. Cumulatively, the US economy […] 

Draft legislation, currently before Congress, proposes to award people prepared to give up a kidney – for a stranger – a $50,000 tax credit. As one recent summary explains: About 10,000 people die each year in the United States because they did not receive a kidney transplant in time… The issue isn’t a shortage of […] 

Back in 1978, when British television only had three channels, the impact and audience of any individual TV show was much larger than today. One episode of Horizon, a high-profile BBC science show, was large enough that, almost fifty years later, it has its own Wikipedia page. The episode was on a then still new(ish) […] 

The European Union (EU) is currently conducting a review of its rules around mergers and acquisitions. As ever, this is the sort of thing which is closely watched by corporate law firms (and one cannot walk very far in central Brussels without coming across a legal office). Latham & Watkins, one such firm, has provided […] 

Prediction markets, exchanges where market participants can trade contracts based on unknown future events such as sports results or the outcomes of elections, are booming. One recent report looked at trading volumes over the past few years and came complete with a rather striking chart. (The final data point on this chart represents partially month […] 

Late last year, a leader in the Economist asked which industries and sectors China would dominate next? As the article explained: The country’s autonomous taxis, constructed for a third of the cost of Waymo’s in America, are racking up millions of kilometres of driving and are forging partnerships in Europe and the Middle East. In […] 

The polls carried out by the Clark Center’s various Expert Panels are always interesting, but they are rarely that surprising. Last week’s poll of the European Experts Panel was an exception. As Patrick Honohan of Trinity College Dublin put it, “I never thought it would come to this. But it has”. The panel was asked […] 

Nasdaq, the tech-firm-heavy New York Stock Exchange and index provider, is consulting on what, at first, appear to be some fairly technical tweaks to its rules on index composition and inclusion. Given the seemingly dry subject matter and the distraction of the events in the Middle East, this has not received a great deal of […] 

The war in the Gulf has, understandably, taken up most of the bandwidth of global investors and most of the front pages of the financial media over the past few weeks. Soaring energy prices, coupled with substantial falls in bond and equity markets, and a high degree of uncertainty all demand attention. But if that […] 

It is something of a historical irony that, 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, Oliver Cromwell – Lord Protector of England in the years of the interregnum after the civil war and the execution of Charles I – continues to have an influence on the economic policy set-up of the United States. In the […]