Articles by Bloomberg
Bloomberg
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[Christopher Balding] China’s economy is too frail to force open
The US demands that China either open up to increased foreign competition or agree on hard targets for boosting imports that overlook the weakness of that nation’s economy. If President Donald Trump’s team doesn’t recognize this fragility and Beijing’s wariness, it overlooks a profound unspoken worry. Few are inclined to think of the Chinese economy as wobbly. According to official data, 2017 marked the first acceleration in real gross domestic product growth, to 6.9 percent, since 2010. Nominal
Viewpoints May 20, 2018
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[Leonid Bershidsky] How media paywalls work in authoritarian countries
There’s been a lot of talk recently about journalism and paywalls. Much of the general conversation has been focused on the economics of supporting quality reporting. I’d like to widen the frame on both counts -- by sharing my experience in Russia. There, the record is more complicated. In Russia, paywalls have been essential for maintaining journalistic integrity. At the same time, they have shown that charging for journalism can reduce its impact. In authoritarian countries, this can in turn l
Viewpoints May 17, 2018
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[Eli Lake] Trump’s leniency with China’s ZTE hurts his Iran strategy
When President Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last week, he emphasized a broader message to foes and friends about US credibility: “The United States no longer makes empty threats.” That was primarily directed at foreign banks and corporations that would now have to choose between the Iranian and American economy under renewed sanctions. But the president was also saying he will not be hemmed in by advisers, the Republican Party or Washington’s foreign pol
Viewpoints May 17, 2018
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[Eli Lake] Trump needs human rights deal with North Korea
Here’s something you may not know about North Korea’s dear leader, Kim Jong-un: He really cares about North Koreans. Yes, he presides over a Gulag state in which his people live in constant fear. Yes, he has recklessly built nuclear weapons despite severe international sanctions. And yes, he allegedly dispatched an agent to poison his half-brother in Malaysia with a nerve agent. But deep down, the dear leader really wants a modern, open economy. This is at least what President Donald Trump and h
Viewpoints May 16, 2018
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[Leonid Bershidsky] Why Germans are getting fed up with US
Germans have never liked US President Donald Trump, and the backlash against his actions is stronger than ever after he pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal last week. But there’s a growing gap between the German establishment and German voters: The former may be anti-Trump, but the latter are increasingly anti-American. German Chancellor Angel Merkel vented her frustration with Trump in a speech in the North Rhine-Westphalia city of Muenster on Friday, saying his Iran decision “undermines
Viewpoints May 16, 2018
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[Pankaj Mishra] It’s no wonder Iranians hate America
“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a senior British official was quoted as saying to Newsweek in 2002, witnessing the competitive bellicosity in the Bush administration’s run-up to the war in Iraq. US President Donald Trump asserted his claim to be a real man as he tore up the nuclear deal with Iran. But he has inadvertently accelerated rather than delayed an inevitable process: the emergence of Iran as a major geopolitical and scientific power in a world that is n
Viewpoints May 15, 2018
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[Shuli Ren] Kim could make North Korea Samsung’s new backyard
It wouldn’t be hard for North Korea to become the next Vietnam, if only Kim Jong-un loosened up a bit. North Korea today looks remarkably similar to the Southeast Asian nation in 1986, when its communist neighbor undertook “Doi Moi” reforms to tiptoe toward capitalism. North Korea may have a head start, because it’s richer and more industrialized. Vietnam is now a huge manufacturing hub, boasting an economy that’s six times larger than North Korea’s. Last year, it expanded 6.8 percent, the faste
Viewpoints May 15, 2018
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[Tim Culpan] Trump’s ZTE tweet points to Pyongyang, Singapore, Oslo
US President Donald Trump’s sudden concern over Chinese jobs may indicate a realization that neither a failed nor a nationalized Chinese telecoms equipment maker would be in America’s best interests. It may also indicate just how important his meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un really is. To recap: ZTE Corp. is a Chinese company that makes telecoms equipment and mobile phones. It previously broke a US embargo on Iran by using American chips in equipment it sold to the Midd
Viewpoints May 15, 2018
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[Andy Mukherjee] Malaysia-Singapore union flickers back to life
Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a canny politician, an extraordinary statesman and an astute analyst of geopolitics. At times it was hard to tell which hat he was wearing.That seems to have been the case when, speaking to the press in 1996, a little more than three decades after his city was ejected by Malaysia and forced to become a nation-state, Senior Minister Lee boldly speculated on the idea of a re-merger. Let politicians across the causeway that links the neighbors dro
Viewpoints May 14, 2018
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[Sam Tanenhaus] For liberals, the Watergate hangover has been excruciating
As Donald Trump’s legal challenges multiply, so do comparisons of him to Richard Nixon, the only president ever removed from office. We’re getting used to headlines like “How Trump’s scandals mimic Watergate,” “Trump is going full Nixon on Mueller” and “Who’s worse, Trump or Nixon?” Turn on MSNBC on a given night, and you’ll hear veterans of the Watergate scandal like John Dean and the prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks explaining the parallels -- the special prosecutor, the witnesses who may “flip,” th
Viewpoints May 14, 2018
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[Faye Flam] Inspiring terms are simple. ‘Climate change’ isn’t.
Last week I chatted with Columbia University paleontologist Dennis Kent about some new work he and his colleagues published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the surprisingly big influence of Venus and Jupiter on the climate of Earth. The gravitational tug of the second and fifth planets from the sun act to stretch Earth’s annual orbit like a rubber band, pulling it into a more oblong ellipse and then back to something very close to a perfect circle over a cycle of 405
Viewpoints May 14, 2018
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[Tyler Cowen] China proves Marx right
What would Karl Marx think of contemporary China? China certainly seems to think highly of Marx, holding celebratory events this month for the 200th anniversary of his birth. The government even sent a large statue as a gift to his hometown of Trier, Germany. China is proudly parading Marx and his thought as an alternative to Western liberalism. I think Marx, if he could be magically reincarnated, would love today’s China but not for the reasons Beijing might appreciate. He would see China as a
Viewpoints May 13, 2018
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[Therese Raphael] What does Brexit mean? UK still can’t decide
It’s been nearly two years since the UK voted to leave the European Union. But the intervening period has done nothing to resolve the question of what that should mean. Consider the latest Brexit-related fracas, which has seen members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet publicly squabbling about Britain’s future trade relationship with Europe. For many Brexit supporters, the debate has become a test of whether the UK is really leaving, or just pretending to. This isn’t a polite disagreement:
Viewpoints May 13, 2018
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[Daniel Moss] Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank shows US hasn’t learned
Is the US better off trying to shape the world as party to an imperfect international accord, or as an outsider insisting on better terms? One lesson from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 ought to be: Rejecting ideas from allies merely opens the door to alternatives over which the US will have zero control. This wisdom is newly relevant, not only because US President Donald Trump is chipping away at the Iran nuclear deal. Today the US frets about increasing Chinese influence in Asia and b
Viewpoints May 13, 2018
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North Korean state media assails Japan for emphasis on abductees
North Korea’s state news agency slammed Japan for insisting on the return of abductees as a condition of normalizing ties, accusing its neighbor of going “against the trend” toward the “building of a bright future” in the run-up to an unprecedented summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.“The reactionaries of Japan are hyping the ‘issue of abduction’ which had already been settled,” KCNA said in a commentary published Saturday. “This is just a mean and foolish behavior to stem t
North Korea May 13, 2018
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