By Paolo von Schirach February 22, 2012 WASHINGTON – Whatever happens with the Republican nomination process, the winner is unlikely to truly inspire America. For different reasons, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are all very weak candidates. (I shall not even try to assess Ron Paul, who lives all by himself in a [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 18, 2012 WASHINGTON – A recent WSJ op-ed piece, Europe’s Supply-Side Revolution, by Donald L. Luskin and Lorcan Roche Kelly of Trend Macrolytics, (February 17, 2012), makes predictions about the future of Europe so bright and so positive that they frankly border on absurdity. As the writers put it, following Germany’s example, [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 15, 2012 WASHINGTON – The President of Greece, Karolos Papoulias, made headlines by criticizing the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, because he has said unkind things about Greece being a bottomless pit, or something to that effect. So, the old patriotic President got irritated and reacted against the arrogance of [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 14, 2012 WASHINGTON – General Electric is hosting a major event in Washington, DC, titled American Competitiveness: What Works. Given GE’s convening power, lots of interesting people from industry, government, the media and think tanks are attending and speaking. And mostly the panelists and speakers talk about the right things. [...]
By Paolo von Schirach Related story: http://schirachreport.com/index.php/2011/12/17/the-wukan-village-defiant-and-prolonged-protest-goes-on-chinese-authorities-unwilling-to-use-force-a-sign-of-change/ February 3, 2012 WASHINGTON – Is the small village of Wukan on Southern China’s coast destined to become famous? Could it be that decades from now China scholars will refer to the “Wukan Rebellion” as the critical event that led to the beginning of a democratic transformation of this gigantic, and in [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 3, 2012 WASHINGTON – Famed Harvard economist and co-author, with Carmen Reinhart, of “This Time is Different“, a major work on financial crises, writes that America needs voters who understand economic policy. In his The Financial Times contribution, (Our ignorance will yield more crises in capitalism, February 2, 2012), to [...]
By Paolo von Schirach February 2, 2012 WASHINGTON- Crusty economics professor Mario Monti, the non political Prime Minister of terminally messy Italy, called upon to save the country on the edge of the fiscal abyss, sounded upbeat in recent interviews. It would appear that his souped up austerity program concocted by his team of technocrats is beginning to [...]
By Paolo von Schirach January 28, 2012 WASHINGTON – “The truth is always revolutionary“, wrote Antonio Gramsci, (1891-1937), Italian Communist Party leader and revered Marxist intellectual. If this is so, somehow the heirs of the Chinese Revolution are not always favoring ”revolutionary truth”. For political expediency they often prefer to obfuscate the truth. That said, what does it mean when [...]
By Paolo von Schirach January 26, 2012 WASHINGTON – It is quite depressing to observe Washington total political paralysis, accompanied by cheap and openly divisive populism. Admittedly, it is difficult to govern when the two parties are so deeply divided. But the president has to try. This is what he was elected to do and what he gets paid [...]
By Paolo von Schirach January 25, 2012 WASHINGTON – Whatever his presidential credentials, let’s agree that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is not especially diplomatic in his public statements. Sometimes he is deliberately bombastic, just for effect. And so he attacks Romney for being an investor and thus a “bad” capitalist, as opposed to the “good” capitalists [...]