[Prue Clarke] How foreign aid fuels African media’s payola problem

At a recent press conference, a small group of Liberian journalists made a courageous admission: They confessed they were all “on the take.” To supplement salaries as low as $40 a month, the journalists said they often rely on payments from the very people they write about.The revelation confirmed a dirty secret of African journalism: Reporters earn most of their income from payments by their sources. And the dirtiest secret of all is that the international aid community is among the most prolif

Feb. 14, 2019

[John Kass] Teaching moment from Virginia Democrats

If there were a state that could educate Americans on politics, and what happens when virtue smacks up against raw political power, you’d have to say it’s Virginia.Illinois is broken. People flee Illinois for the same reason they flee New York: taxes.But they don’t run from Virginia. They gravitate to Northern Virginia, home to some of the wealthiest counties in the country, and all those rich lawyers and lobbyists and journos and politicos and equestrians work in Washington.These are the rulers

Feb. 14, 2019

[Nobuko Kobayashi] Japan’s women need more than jobs

Japan’s leaders seem happy to rest the country’s fate on the shoulders of its women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to get more of them out of the home to compensate for a shrinking workforce. His deputy Taro Aso, on the other hand, had to apologize recently after blaming them for not having enough kids. I can hear women secretly seethe, “What now, they want us to work, have kids and take care of husbands?” Male participation in chores is notoriously low in Japan.At Davos this year, Abe rightfu

Feb. 13, 2019

[Shuli Ren] China’s 5G riches are a blocked number for investors

How can investors profit from China’s race with the US for 5G supremacy? Finding the answer is as tricky as figuring out the geopolitics.The nation’s sleepy telecom stocks came back to life after Huawei Technologies Co. CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada in early December. While the official charge was that the company had violated US sanctions on Iran, many in China interpreted the action as another attempt by the American government to thwart the country’s advance in 5G. Huawei leads the

Feb. 13, 2019

[Conor Sen] Older workers need different kind of layoff

The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why Wall Street sent both stocks higher Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the US economy. This merger isn’t born out of

Feb. 13, 2019

[Andy Mukherjee] India’s shadow bank tumult casts widening gloom

It’s time India’s policymakers acknowledged the real problem facing the country’s shadow banks. What they are experiencing is no longer a vanilla liquidity shortage; the entire industry has crashed against a wall of mistrust.On the other side of that wall are a clutch of wealthy property developers and their middle-class customers, as well as teeming multitudes of poor. Everyone is at risk.A crisis of confidence has made financiers’ own borrowing costs jump. The excess yield over government secu

Feb. 12, 2019

[Hal Brands] South America is battlefield in new Cold War

The political crisis in Venezuela has pitted the US against a dictator who refuses to leave office. But the crisis has a broader significance: It shows that Latin America has again become an arena in which rival great powers struggle for influence and advantage. As the US faces surging geopolitical rivalry around the world, its position is also coming under pressure in its own backyard.The region has been the focus of global competition before, of course, from the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of t

Feb. 12, 2019

[J. Kyle Bass] Trump shouldn’t take the easy way out over China

When it comes to the trade talks with China, President Donald Trump and his negotiators have more leverage than any US administration has ever had. Chinese policymakers are desperate for a trade truce with the US in order to avoid more damage to China’s economy by further pressuring its trade surplus and export industries.There is speculation that Trump has told his negotiators to “get a deal done” in order to put an end to recent market volatility, but that would mean forgoing a historic opport

Feb. 12, 2019

[Hussein Ibish] What Iran means to Arab world

Iran has represented many things to many people during its 40 years of Islamic revolution. To the Arab world that surrounds it today, it’s both a danger and an excuse.Arab reaction to the 1979 Iranian revolution was split from the onset, and still is. Arab governments, particularly in the Gulf region reacted in a panic, hurriedly forming the now barely functional Gulf Cooperation Council for collective self-defense.The Arab states of North Africa, notably Egypt, barely noticed the upheaval in Te

Feb. 11, 2019

[Jonathan Bernstein] Trump wants vacancies in his cabinet lineup

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced his resignation on Dec. 20. He left the job at the end of the year. That was seven weeks ago, and President Donald Trump has not nominated a permanent replacement.How rare is that? There have only been two acting defense secretaries since the department began in 1947. In 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated James Schlesinger to replace Elliot Richardson, who was confirmed as attorney general a few weeks later. But Schlesinger was not confirme

Feb. 11, 2019

[Leonid Bershidsky] In Finland, money can buy you happiness

The first results of Finland’s two-year experiment with a universal basic income are in, and if they’re confirmed by further research, they will probably hurt the unconditional income cause. The trial run showed that “money for nothing” makes people happier, but doesn’t inspire them to find work any more than traditional unemployment benefits would.The Finnish experiment, conducted in 2017 and 2018 by Kela, the country’s social insurance institution, was extremely important for world policymaker

Feb. 11, 2019

[Mihir Sharma] Even the right American is wrong for World Bank

In many ways, David Malpass, whom US President Donald Trump nominated to head the World Bank, is an unsurprising choice. He’s a senior Treasury official overseeing international affairs. Plus, his background absolutely screams “Trump nominee”: He isn’t a woman. He is an outspoken critic of the institution he is now to head. And he has a controversial Wall Street background, as well as some embarrassing calls in his past.　Ironically, there’s a germ of a good idea in Malpass’ appointment. Some of

Feb. 10, 2019