The Korea Herald

[Tobin Harshaw] Macron’s make-nice Trump ploy didn’t work for Abe

Give President Emmanuel Macron of France an A for effort -- he is pulling out all the stops in his effort to manage the mercurial Donald Trump. Last week, Macron visited Washington for what was surely the handsiest summit in the history of French-American diplomatic relations, as part of his continuing bid to influence a volatile US president by hugging him as tightly as possible.　Macron’s is a strategy that a number of US allies have been pursuing, and so far it has borne some fruit. But now it

Viewpoints April 29, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Nobel Prize for Trump and Kim is no joke

Coral, one of the top British bookmakers, has Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un as favorites -- at 2-to-1 odds -- to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year. They’re ahead of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Saudi activist Raif Badawi, Pope Francis and other potential winners. With Friday’s summit between Kim and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in, they could both deserve it.　There’s a lesson in this, and it’s about more than “normalization” -- a phrase we’ve been endlessly cautio

Viewpoints April 29, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Nobel Prize for Trump and Kim is no joke

[Adam Minter] For China’s Buddhist monks, an IPO too far

In China, religion is big business. The famed Shaolin Temple owns dozens of companies and its abbot is popularly known as the “CEO monk.” Two of China’s four sacred Buddhist mountains are publicly listed. So management at Mount Putuo Tourism Development, which oversees a third holy mountain, probably thought that their own initial public offering would cause little controversy.It didn’t work out that way. Last week, after an unrelenting campaign against the IPO by furious monks, China’s top secu

Viewpoints April 27, 2018

[Adam Minter] For China’s Buddhist monks, an IPO too far

[Leonid Bershidsky] Why a Trump-Kim deal has a good shot

Saturday’s announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that his country will stop testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a sign that Kim is ready to do a deal with Donald Trump -- and that he understands how a deal with Trump can be made. It’s a delicate dance that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Iran are no doubt watching closely. If Kim can swing this, the devil himself presumably could.　Even before the US enters an agreement with North Korea

Viewpoints April 26, 2018

[Michael Schuman] Don’t waste Korea summit

Hope is again rising on the Korean Peninsula. On Friday, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un are to hold a summit in the Demilitarized Zone that has divided the two states for 65 years. The meeting raises the prospect that this pointless and anachronistic conflict can finally be brought to an end, or at the very least, the tensions now threatening global security and world financial markets can be reduced.　But it‘s important to remember that we’ve been here

Viewpoints April 26, 2018

[Michael Schuman] Don’t waste Korea summit

[Francis Wilkinson] America still needs its ‘new seed’ immigrants

The case for high-skilled immigration to the US isn’t hard to make. All those Ph.D.s in science and technology help build the nation’s advanced infrastructure while adding to the store of human capital and generating national wealth.　As a 2016 Congressional Research Service report stated, “This workforce is seen by many as a catalyst of US global economic competitiveness and is likewise considered a key element of the legislative options aimed at stimulating economic growth.”　 The low-skilled im

Viewpoints April 26, 2018

[James Stavridis] North Korea’s secret weapon: A huge electromagnetic storm

The diplomatic circuit is awash in optimism as the proposed summit between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump draws near. Indeed, Trump is right to go to the table with the North Koreans and negotiate for full denuclearization.Still, given the long history of North Korea’s double-dealing, outright lying, and surreptitious construction of weapons of mass destruction, the likelihood of Kim actually surrendering his nuclear weapons is extremely low, no matter what he says

Viewpoints April 26, 2018

[James Stavridis] North Korea’s secret weapon: A huge electromagnetic storm

[Elizabeth Rosenberg, Neil Bhatiya] Don’t let up on North Korea now

The administration of US President Donald Trump may or may not be right in thinking that its “maximum pressure” campaign has brought North Korea to the bargaining table. What’s certain is that there remain cracks in that campaign. To sustain pressure on the Pyongyang regime and give the US leverage in upcoming talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they need to be plugged.　Certainly, the Trump administration deserves credit for coordinating the harshest set of sanctions ever le

Viewpoints April 25, 2018

[Elizabeth Rosenberg, Neil Bhatiya] Don’t let up on North Korea now

[Hal Brands] Congress again punts on Trump’s war powers

Something odd is happening in the relationship between Congress and the executive branch regarding the use of military force. For decades, or even longer, countless senators and representatives have complained that presidents are not properly respectful of their constitutional prerogatives in making decisions on employing US military power. And today, most Democrats and a number of Republicans seem to agree that President Donald Trump is an impulsive, erratic, even dangerous commander-in-chief.　

Viewpoints April 24, 2018

[Therese Raphael] Wenger wasn’t just a soccer coach

The leader of what was once considered one of the best-managed soccer clubs in the world stepped down Friday and the Twittersphere erupted in two opposite directions: jubilation and sadness.　Half of English football fans seem to regard the departure from the Arsenal Football Club of 68-year-old Arsene Wenger as coming years too late. The other half rues the brutality of a changing industry that turned his virtues into handicaps. Wenger was enormously successful and his club was nicely profitable

Viewpoints April 24, 2018

[Barry Ritholtz] Billionaire Bezos and warehouse workers

We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?“Both” is the obvious answer, but to this Amazon aficionado that answer is incomplete.The pay figure, which was disclosed for the first time in Amazon’s annual proxy statement, reflects the large number of low-paid retail and warehouse employe

Viewpoints April 23, 2018

[Barry Ritholtz] Billionaire Bezos and warehouse workers

[Bloomberg] Cuba after the Castros

When Cuba’s President Raul Castro hands over power, the change will be more symbolic than substantive. The 86-year-old Castro will remain party leader until 2021 -- and his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, wasn’t chosen for his determination to dismantle Cuba’s police state or abandon its socialist economic system. Nonetheless, the end of the Castros’ era is an opportunity for change, and Diaz-Canel has every reason to try to seize it.Cuba’s economy is in a truly dismal state. After year

Viewpoints April 23, 2018

[Matthew Winkler] Trade wars don’t faze this US-China investor

The steadfast stock market of 2017 turned into a roller coaster this year by the time President Donald Trump tweeted, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” The rhetoric directed at China soon became Trump tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. China responded with duties on 128 products. Daily price fluctuations of publicly traded companies caught in the US-China crossfire are

Viewpoints April 22, 2018

[Matthew Winkler] Trade wars don’t faze this US-China investor

[Eli Lake] Trump is not Nixon and North Korea is not China

If you Google “Trump,” “Nixon” and “China,” you will find billions of pixels devoted to comparing the 37th president’s breakthrough with Beijing to the potential summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.　 The parallel is understandable. It took a committed anti-communist to open relations with Communist China. Perhaps it will take a president who threatened “fire and fury” to open ties to the leader he called “little rocket man.” In 1972 when Mao Zedong hosted President Richard Nixon in Beiji

Viewpoints April 22, 2018

[Hal Brands] New threat to the US: the axis of autocracy

It sounded like an echo of Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s and 1960s when China’s new defense minister, Wei Fenghe, said at a meeting in Moscow this month, “The Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.”　 A full-blown military alliance remains a long ways off, of course, and it is easy to dismiss Wei’s remarks as rhetorical posturing. But that would be a mistake, because Wei nonetheless captured an ominous feature of world politics tod

Viewpoints April 22, 2018

Articles by Bloomberg