Last week’s leaked report by the People’s Bank of China on the future liberalisation of China’s capital account and the internationalisation of the renminbi managed the difficult job of suggesting both ambition and caution. It said little that the Bank has not been saying...
With the Doha Round of world trade negotiations now effectively dead after ten years of talks the US is looking for ways to reboot the basis of its trade policy. The US is attempting to regain the leverage over China and the other BRICs it believes it has lost in the WTO...
Polls suggest that François Hollande begins the French Presidential campaign as clear favourite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in April/May. Although the race is still contestable, Hollande currently leads Sarkozy across almost all demographics and professional cohorts.
Russia’s ‘Winter’ is not an Arab Spring, but its impact will leave a lasting and profound change on the country. It has injected genuine competition into the political process. Fear has been sucked out of the system.
A new generation of political leaders is starting to make its...
The new EU fiscal stability treaty focuses almost exclusively on imposing tighter fiscal disciplines on signatory states. Fear of difficult ratification debates and a big step into fiscal integration that would have divided the EU have ensured that the new treaty is narrow...
There is now a significant probability of some form of new Financial Transaction Tax at some level in Europe.
The fact that the UK is strongly opposed to such a tax and will veto any such measure at the EU level will not preclude an FTT being introduced among the...
The Eurozone enters 2012 badly weakened and with a number of key interrelated risks hanging over it. Greece remains the most fundamental, but the weakness of the European banking system, the deteriorating economic outlook and the French election all have to factored in as significant...
This week’s Durban climate change summit got good reviews. Optimists highlighted the fact that any agreement at all was actually secured. By the unusually low standards of modern multilateral diplomacy, they have a point.
There is a commitment to further negotiations and a...
The dust is settling on what may be an historic EU Summit in Brussels on 9 December, with a potentially far-reaching agreement on a step towards greater fiscal integration of 26 EU member states, from which the UK alone has chosen to be excluded.
Ministers, the media, business leaders and the civil service in India openly describe 2011 as the worst year for governance in India’s recent history and a political inflection point in the seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory of the last decade.
