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Emerging markets can be a lot like teenagers: prone to accidents. They fall, get pushed by others, take reckless risks, and experience mood swings that make them hard to read and unpredictable. This doesn’t mean that mature nations always behave maturely—they too have accidents that, while less frequent, are deeply damaging to them and everyone else. The world is still suffering the consequences of the irresponsible behavior by banks, governments, and consumers in developed countries that triggered the great recession beginning in 2008. But while most advanced economies are now either recovering or no longer in recession, emerging markets are in turmoil. The value of their currencies is plummeting, inflation is up, economic growth is slowing down, and fiscal and trade deficits are soaring. Investors are taking their money and running.
It was easy to miss the miracle that occurred in New York in the fall of 2000. The miracle was one of the reasons why, over the ensuing decade, humanity experienced the fastest decline in poverty in history.
Silvio Berlusconi is out and Angela Merkel was reelected. Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez passed away. Fidel Castro didn’t. People took to the streets in Kiev and Bangkok, Cairo and Khartoum. The president of Syria ignored Barack Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, while Iran was willing to engage in negotiations with the United States for the first time in 34 years. China elected a new leader and jailed another. North Korea’s tyrant-in-training executed his uncle.
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, has more cabinet members with Ph.D. degrees from U.S. universities than Barack Obama does. In fact, Iran has more holders of American Ph.D.s in its presidential cabinet than France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, or Spain—combined.
The collective mood of a nation mired in a prolonged economic recession shows many of the symptoms of clinical depression: despair, fatalism, an inability to make decisions, lack of motivation, and irritability. This is one of the impressions I got from a recent trip to Spain and Italy, two nations I know well and visit often. While both countries have recently made small strides on the path to recovery, I nevertheless came away with the strong sense that their economies are in recession and their societies are in depression. In the course of my travels, I also felt more than ever before that Europeans have fallen out of love with Europe—or, more precisely, with the idea of building a Europe-wide union.
As you shop for Thanksgiving dinner this year, you may long for the good old days when food was cheaper. This isn’t just your nostalgia speaking. Over the past decade, food prices have increased at a very fast clip. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the global food price index has increased by 125 percent since 2000. To understand why, consider the seemingly intractable prices of global commodities markets—your standard agricultural goods like coffee, sugar, and wheat, or resources like crude oil and coal that are used to produce or transport those goods. Not only do these complex commodities markets determine the cost of what we eat, but their high prices can fuel the kind of social unrest that in some countries has toppled governments.
Let’s pretend you are the head of a government—a president, a prime minister, a chancellor. The director of your intelligence agency is seeking authorization on some potentially problematic operations. Here are two scenarios (as far as I know, they’re just the fictitious musings of one journalist, and have never actually happened). You be the decider.
Recently Angela Merkel has found herself in two complex situations. The first, as we all know, has stirred a bitter global debate about American spying. The second, though largely ignored, deserves at least as much attention because it may have even larger implications for international security. It’s about a prank using a drone.
Today, polarized electorates are the norm, and their votes offer no clear mandate to any party or candidate. That political conflict can result in full out governmental paralysis comes as no surprise… in Italy. Less so in the United States. But it does happen here too; and it is safe to assume that America's most recent "governance accident" won't be the last.
Some problems travel well. Sometimes too well. Financial crashes have taught us that in some cases what starts as a very local economic problem quickly escalates and becomes a global crisis. Think Greece—or more recently Cyprus. And we know that terrorism also has a way of going global in unpredictable and dangerous ways.
It’s that time of year again. Northern birds flock south for the winter, and the world’s bankers assemble in Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. Finance secretaries and central bank governors from countless nations descend upon Washington to mingle with their colleagues, leaders of the World Bank, the IMF and the titans of global finance.