Section: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (USA)
Putin’s best EU friends
Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is trying to have it both ways.Just days after attending the G7 summit, which highlighted the possibility of stepping up sanctions against Russia should it not meet the commitments it made in the Minsk agreements, Renzi hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Milan, where he spoke of the “traditional...
Why would the president threaten to veto much-needed additional defense funds?
A showdown is looming in Washington over the National Defense Authorization bill and the Appropriations bill for the Department of Defense. At stake is whether the Congress is able to make any progress this year on repairing the damage which defense cuts have done to the armed forces and the nation’s security.The Budget Control Act of 2011,...
Playing with fire
When UK Prime Minister David Cameron set out on his tour of the Continent late last month, the European leaders who received him likely knew what he was going to tell them: that the clock was ticking on Britain’s EU membership, and that the choice the British people will make a couple of years from now depends on them. Indeed UK Foreign...
NATO public opinion invites expanded Russian aggression
A just-released Pew Research survey of eight major NATO members does not bode well for peace in Europe, as almost half of each country’s population would not support the use military force to defend an ally if it became engaged in serious military conflict with Russia.While barely over half of those polled in the United States (56%) and...
Democrats and Europeans forget what NATO means
If the findings of a new Pew poll are to be taken seriously, one ought to think twice about buying that second vacation home in one of the Baltic states or the Polish countryside. According to Pew, although the public in eight sampled NATO nations largely blame Russia, Putin, and the Ukrainian separatists for the security crisis in Eastern...
Putting the ridiculously large $18 trillion US economy into perspective by comparing state GDPs to entire countries
Following the BEA release today of US state Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data for 2014, I was able to update the map above, which appeared on CD a year ago using 2013 data.The map above was created by matching economic output in US states in 2014 to foreign countries with comparable nominal GDPs, using BEA data for GDP by US state and GDP by...
Could Slovakia provide an unlikely roadmap to avoiding a Greek tragedy?
It may sound harsh – but Greeks have to stop seeing themselves as victims of a diktat imposed on them by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.True, Greece’s international partners need to bear their share of responsibility for the economic catastrophe that has been unfolding in the country. However, it is not its creditors...
Greece and Rick’s Sovereign Debt Café
“Greece to withhold E300 million loan repayment” (Financial Times lead headline today). I am shocked, shocked to find that default is going on in Rick’s Sovereign Debt Café!A week ago, the FT helpfully provided an instructive table of the huge losses, or “haircuts,” taken by the credulous bondholders in a dozen sovereign debt defaults...
Time for real IMF reform
Editor’s note: The following article appears in a June 2, 2015 briefing from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. Over the past five years, the US Congress has been repeatedly browbeaten by the Obama administration as well as by a chorus of international leaders for its opposition to IMF reform proposals agreed by the G20...
China is gambling Obama doesn’t have will to respond to its massive land grab
You may not have noticed, as ISIS expands its reach across Iraq and Russia fuels conflict in Ukraine, but the odds of an armed confrontation between the United States and China just dramatically increased. Modal TriggerAfter years of ignoring China’s growing assertiveness in Asia, the Obama administration has been taken unaware by a major...
