Global purchasing power

2, 500 years of international currencies the future of the U.S. dollar as well as crypto and central bank digital currencies are revealed. Recently the US dollar has fallen more than 10 per cent against other major currencies since the beginning of 2025, and this especially has questioned the its future, that how long can it remain the world’s premier currency and should it fall what will replace it? Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction and fraying international alliances. In Money Beyond Borders, Barry Eichengreen, a leading authority on … Continue reading Global purchasing power

Changing  western-dominated international order

Former UK minister in the coalition government under David Cameron and chief economist at Shell, brings all his knowledge, common sense and experience in Eclipsing the West, defining political and economic issue of our era, relations between the west and the rising Asian countries like China and India. As the International order begins to crumble in the Western-dominated world we have known for the past three hundred years is coming to an end, as America withdraws from its role as enforcer of the international order, other countries are moving in to fill the void.  Accounting for more than a third … Continue reading Changing  western-dominated international order

Engineering towards mega projects

Chinese-Canadian, Technology analyst, Dan Wang, from Stanford University, has been living through China’s astonishing messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. Rapid changes also meant pain throughout the Chinese society, controlled by political repression ending in astonishing growth, a feature of China’s engineering mindset. In Breakneck, Wang, reveals a provocative new framework for understanding China – one that helps us see America more clearly. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything good and … Continue reading Engineering towards mega projects

Seven turbulent decades of Global finance

Professor of economist at Harvard and former chief economist at the IMF, Kenneth Rogoff explores the global rise of the U.S. dollar and reveals why the future stability is far from assured and argues that America’s currency might not have reached today’s lofty pinnacle without certain amount of good luck. The sharp sell-off of US Treasury bonds following Trump’s April 2 announcement of America’s highest tariff wall for a century confirmed Rogoff’s view that the recently prevailing belief that real interest rates will be “lower forever” is a dangerous myth. He sees America’s, and hence the dollar’s, “Achilles heel”, as … Continue reading Seven turbulent decades of Global finance

Arsenal of economic weapons: How the US weaponised Dollar

Chokepoints is one of the most pivotal geopolitical shifts of our time. As Russia, China and Iran have sought to upend the international order, America and its allies have mounted unprecedented economic retaliation. Now the global economy is a weapon of war. Globalisation was once hailed as the great leveller, bringing prosperity to all. Former top US State Department official and a scholar, at Columbia university, Edward Fishman, takes us into the back rooms of power around the world, meeting an eclectic group of innovator: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who have masterminded a fearsome new arsenal of economic … Continue reading Arsenal of economic weapons: How the US weaponised Dollar

Has Silicon Valley lost its way?

Palantir Technologies, a company that is intertwined with the national security state, Silicon Valley’s utopian tech thinking was always untethered from reality and it’s a good thing that it is now ending. Palantir’s co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska claims that in order for the West to retain its global edge – and preserve the freedoms we take for granted – the software industry must renew its commitment to addressing our urgent challenges, including the new arms race for artificial intelligence. Government, in turn, must embrace the most effective features of the engineering mindset that have … Continue reading Has Silicon Valley lost its way?

Have we lost ability to make things?

We live in a manufactured world, Unless you are floating naked through space, you are right  now in direct contact with multiple manufactured products. How ofoten we stop to think: where do the things we buy actually come from? American President, Donald Trump, promised in his recent inaugural address, America would soon become “a manufacturing nation once again”. His planned tariffs, will encourage some global companies to relocate factories back to the US.  Academic expert on innovation and technology at Cambridge University, Tim Minshall’s Your Life Is Manufactured is about perils of losing touch with the art of making things .  This … Continue reading Have we lost ability to make things?

Taiwan caught between Chinese power and vagaries of US politics

When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities. Kerry Brown on the small island caught between Chinese power and the vagaries of US politics, to find a solution to a problem, when they attempt it would most certainly lead to world war, the stalemate prevailed for the past 76 years. Taiwan is now a free, vibrant society, flourishing democracy and an economic success story, as one of … Continue reading Taiwan caught between Chinese power and vagaries of US politics

Global web of power

This is the untold story of the mysterious Chinese telecom company that shook the world from the coast of southern China, eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades  since its founding in 1987 in Shenzhen, shaping one of the world’s most powerful technological empires without anyone noticing. But December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the international spotlight. In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter  and former China correspondent Eva Dou, writes an authoritative and remarkable portrait of Huawei’s … Continue reading Global web of power

Chinese transformation

Want to know how an impoverished and terrorised China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s  and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. When Mao Zedong died in spring 1977, the new culture commissar busied himself publishing the fifth volume of the late Chairman’s selected writings. The paper that had been waiting in storage for this moment had gone mouldy, there was not enough electricity to run the printing presses, the typographers work at a snail’s pace, terrified that any misprints would result in death. The episode ois … Continue reading Chinese transformation