It’s time to buy Asian stocks. In fact, last Friday was the time to buy Asian stocks. Outside of Japan, a relief rally buoyed Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian equities, with the bellwether Hang Seng China Enterprises Index jumping 1.27%. The markets are right and the pundits are wrong. The comedy of errors that ensued on North Korea’s July 28 ICBM test is nearly over. American policy is firmly in the hands of military men – Generals Mattis, McMaster and...
In 2015, the last time Palestinians rioted over the Haram-al-Sharif – the Temple Mount to Christians and Jews – a handful of pious Jews had committed the offense of attempted prayer. This week’s protest over the presence of metal detectors takes the dispute to a new level of unreality. After Israeli-Arab gunmen killed two Israeli policemen with weapons hidden on the site, Israel installed metal detectors, a common sight at mosques in many Muslim countries. After Israel removed the...
The ceasefire in three Syrian provinces announced Friday after the Trump-Putin meeting in Hamburg is the first step in the right direction that the United States has taken in the Middle East in more than 20 years. The Syrian deal should be understood in the context of President Trump’s address in Warsaw the day before, a challenge to Russia to “join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.” Syria’s...
Just before midnight local time, Italy’s Channel 5 projected a 60% “No” vote in the country’s constitutional referendum, a crushing defeat for the Socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. The euro dropped by 1.5% on the news, but has recovered slightly; the yen gained initially, but has quickly fallen back to Friday levels and below. Asian stock benchmarks were lower in Monday morning trade, but there has been no catastrophic Italy reaction, indeed, no indication that index declines were Italy-related...
With Turkey's help, Russia is conducting direct negotiations with Syrian rebels, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The FT wrote that one opposition figure, when asked why he thought Russia would seek a deal with the rebels just as Assad appeared to be winning, said Moscow was "essentially saying: 'Screw you, Americans.'" Turkey in effect is saying the same thing to Washington. The London-based newspaper explains: Four opposition members from rebel-held northern Syria told the Financial Times that Turkey has been brokering...
The surge in industrial and raw materials stock prices and the collapse of bond markets since Donald Trump's election victory portend a very different kind of world economy. Rather than persisting in a world of quantitative easing, with extremely low interest rates and 1%-2% growth, the United States has the potential to get back onto a normal recovery track. How much can it grow? The US economy is 10% smaller than it would have been under a “normal” economic recovery...
A small dark cloud appeared over America's "sharing economy," one of the few bright spots in a general environment of entrepreneurial gloom. New businesses created more than 100% of all jobs created between 1992 and 2005, as I noted in an Oct. 23 essay ("Small-ball conservatism or national greatness"). Between 2008 and 2015, by my calculation, startups made zero net contribution to employment, a disturbing turnabout. American entrepreneurship isn't dead, to be sure, but it is running light on employment and...
By the usual gauges America’s Depression-era president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a failure. With few exceptions, nothing he did helped the crippled US economy very much. His policies lurched from one failed experiment to another: price controls, make-work employment, destruction of agricultural crops (to raise prices) in the midst of starvation. His modest increases in federal spending didn’t even compensate for the contraction of state and local spending. Yet Roosevelt won the presidency four times, uniquely in US history, and...
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the world should hope for the election of Donald Trump next Tuesday. American policy has become a fetid morass in which ideology and influence-peddling jointly serve to insulate its leaders from the real world. It is not simply that America's leaders are out of touch, but that they are in continuous touch with a fictitious construct of the world that excludes the possibility of policy course correction. America's policy elites are sleepwalkers, in the way that...
Today's US GDP report is dodgy in almost every respect. It's not surprising that bond yields fell on the news. The biggest disappointment relative to the consensus forecast was personal consumption, at 1.47%, the lowest vs. 2.6%. Even more disappointing is the composition of personal consumption. Services consumption contributed 1% of the overall 2.9% growth. Most of this was health care (hardly a contributor to long-term growth) and housing services (more rentals from homeowners who cannot afford to buy). Neither...
Small-ball conservatism dominates mainstream Republican thinking. It finds expression in the writing of Ramesh Pommeru, Ross Douthat, and Yuval Levin, whose “conservative governing vision” sees a kind of: ... American life in which government does not use society as an instrument to advance progressive aims but rather sustains and strengthens the space in which society can thrive and enables all Americans to take part in what happens in that space. "Such a government would no doubt be much smaller, more restrained,...
The most extreme misstatement of the Oct. 9 US presidential debate was Hillary Clinton's proposal for a no-fly zone in Syria. The Democratic candidate declared, "I, when I was secretary of state, advocated and I advocate today no-fly zones and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them." Neither Donald Trump nor the debate moderators mentioned...
Deutsche Bank's plunging share price raised fears of a new financial crisis on the order of 2008 in the United States or 2011 in Europe. Deutsche, Germany's largest lender, lost slightly over half its market value this year, and declined by 30% since Sept. 9. German media quoted unnamed Berlin officials warning that there would be no bailout for Deutsche Bank, and the stock price fell sharply this morning. That's the bad news, and very bad news indeed if...
The presidential election was over the moment the word "deplorable" made its run out of Hillary Clinton's unguarded mouth. As the whole world now knows, Clinton told a Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender fundraiser Sept. 10, "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up.” Hillary is road...
The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them. In his recent book Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton's Secretary of State...
The first step to finding a solution is to know that there's a problem. Donald Trump understands that the Washington foreign-policy establishment caused the whole Middle Eastern mess. I will review the problem and speculate about what a Trump administration might do about it. For the thousand years before 2007, when the Bush administration hand-picked Nouri al-Maliki to head Iraq's first Shia-dominated government, Sunni Muslims had ruled Iraq. Maliki was vetted both by the CIA and by the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. With...
Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. "We were sorry that...
The outcome of tonight's apparent coup attempt in Turkey remains unclear, but the motivation for regime change in Turkey has been building under the surface for years. Turkey faces a perfect storm of economic, political and foreign policy problems. First, Turkey's much-heralded economic growth spurt of the 2000's has come to a grinding stop. The Erdogan boom, which inspired predictions that Turkey might emerge as another China, resembled the Asian experience less than it did the Latin American credidt bubbles...
Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this. The terrorists, though,...
"We are not as divided as we seem, President Barack Obama told a Dallas memorial for five police officers killed by a black sniper enraged at the alleged mistreatment of African-Americans by white police. But a different Barack Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at a White House barbecue last July 4. Details of Lamar's performance are not available, but it is unlikely that he repeated this line (from a recent Saturday Night Live appearance): "I put a bullet in the back of the...
asia times EST 1995
