On Global Markets

The Fed has a new chair and, it would seem, one with a very different approach to his predecessors. While much of the attention has, understandably, been focused on the traditional question of how hawkish or dovish Kevin Warsh will be on rates, there are deeper issues at play. In (at least) a couple of […] 

To mark the tenth anniversary of the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union, the Clark Center’s US and European Economic Experts Panels recently looked – once again – at the vexed issue of Brexit. Brexit is one of those issues which has the potential, at least in the UK, to provoke a fierce […] 

Earlier this month, the European Union unveiled its rather unimaginatively named European Technological Sovereignty Package. One imagines that had this been a proposal emanating from the US Congress, it would have had a punchier and more bombastic name; the Safeguarding America Act or some such. Name aside, though, the package was certainly ambitious. As European […] 

Towards the end of last month, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy memo which, in their words, ‘reiterated’ ‘ long-standing immigration law and immigration court decisions’ about the application process for a Green Card. As the USCIS spokesperson explained at the time: We’re returning to the original intent of the law to […] 

Over the last couple of weeks, your columnist’s inbox has been filling up each morning with emails about the imminent listing of SpaceX. About two-thirds of those emails have been newsletters from various financial media outlets – Bloomberg, the FT, the WSJ, etc – worrying about changes to the listing and index inclusion rules and […] 

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 […]