Deciding where to observe campaigning in battleground states isn’t easy these days. At the end of September, Pennsylvania seemed to be swinging, as did Ohio and Colorado. Florida wasn’t. Now Florida is a toss up and all others mentioned seem to be leaning towards Obama or even solidly behind him. So following the polls I [...]

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When the subprime crisis started to turn into a full-blown financial crisis for the United States, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbräck claimed that the crisis was principally a U.S. problem and that Germany’s banking system was robust enough to cope with potential losses. Unfortunately, Mr. Steinbräck was wrong and the financial crisis shortly after swept [...]

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I watched last week’s final presidential debate with GMF colleagues in town from Germany, Romania, and Serbia, which was fun and fascinating.   Without attributing anything to them, they seemed to me to respond most to Obama’s demeanor:   he appeared calm at a time when we’re using the word”crisis” attached to finances, Russia, Afghanistan, [...]

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President Eisenhower is reported to have said that one way to solve problems is to expand them. This is an insight worth recalling as the United States and Europe try to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Europeans and Americans share vital interests in the Middle East and have pursued numerous initiatives to address [...]

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Commentators have been jumping over each other to spell out the likely implications of the geopolitical power shift brought about by the global financial crisis. And there’s one big winner. In a recent paper, Brad Setser compares today’s United States and China to Great Britain and the United States circa the Suez crisis. The moral: [...]

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Francois Lafond, GMF’s Paris office director, was recently on Euronews to discuss the upcoming U.S. elections. The video is embedded below. Euronews video

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History tells us that multilateral trade rounds never die, and Doha is no exception. If the negotiations cannot be concluded this year, they will enter a period of hibernation, and things will pick up again when conditions are ripe to engage in a meaningful negotiation (probably during the second half of 2009 at the earliest). [...]

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