Charles de Gaulle, the French Resistance leader and later president of France, was once warned that he should not hate his friends more than his enemies. “France,” he replied, “has no friends, only interests.”It would be interesting to know how he would have responded had he learned, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently did, that his phone communications had been secretly monitored by an American spy agency. But it’s a pretty safe bet that he wouldn’t have been surprised.Merkel herself pr

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2013

For months it was a matter of intense speculation: Who would President Obama nominate to chair the Federal Reserve? Now that he has named Janet Yellen, currently the Fed’s vice chair and an exceptionally well-qualified candidate, maybe we can move on to discussing a more important issue: the challenges facing the nation’s central bank.After having taken extraordinary steps to support the economy since the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Fed must now engineer a return to more normal policies, a

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2013

BERKELEY, California ― The first time I went to Washington, D.C., as an adult was in 1993, when I arrived to work for President Bill Clinton in the Treasury Department. Back then, America urgently needed to rebalance the federal budget to rein in explosive growth in the debt/GDP ratio; to overhaul America’s extraordinarily expensive and inefficient health care system; and to begin to deal with global warming via a slow ramp-up of a carbon tax.Beyond these three immediate issues were long-run pol

Viewpoints Oct. 30, 2013

The last thing many Koreans want to see is Japanese soldiers setting foot on this soil again. They shudder at the mere thought of Japanese boots here as it brings back memories of Japan’s ruthless colonial rule.To their dismay, however, the specter of Japanese troops being deployed here has loomed, as Tokyo is seeking, with the full backing of the United States, to lift a self-imposed ban on collective self-defense.The United Nations Charter declares that each member country has the inherent rig

Editorial Oct. 29, 2013

Public utility charges are expected to rise sharply as state-run corporations seek to increase their income to rein in their mounting debt.The government recently told the 41 public entities with assets exceeding 2 trillion won to submit medium- to long-term plans to curb their fast growing debt. One solution suggested by many of the organizations was to transfer a large chunk of the debt to the public through gradual hikes in utility charges.For instance, Korea Express Corp., which is 25 trilli

Editorial Oct. 29, 2013

If imitation really is the greatest form of flattery, Shinzo Abe should be thrilled the Chinese are copying his “Abenomics” strategy to excite investors. The rest of the world shouldn’t be.China isn’t cribbing the Japanese prime minister’s actual blueprint, but his formula of spin and hype that has convinced the world something that doesn’t yet exist is real. The key to a great ad campaign is attracting customers and keeping them, something Abe has done with a brilliance that could teach the Ede

Viewpoints Oct. 29, 2013

Today it’s easy to assume that social media platforms are a recent development, a phenomenon unique to the Internet age. But the exchange of media along social networks of friends and acquaintances is in fact much older than Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.Consider the situation in the late Roman republic, in the 1st century BC. At the time there were no printing presses and no paper. Instead, information circulated among the intermarried families of the Roman elite through the exchange of papyrus

Viewpoints Oct. 29, 2013

Chancellor Angela Merkel won re-election in Germany with an impressive share of the vote, but talks to form a coalition remain jammed over whether to establish a minimum wage. This focus is myopic.The next government ― probably a grand coalition between Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party ― will need to concentrate on fundamental issues affecting the next generation that have been neglected under Merkel as she concentrated on balancing the budget.Germany may be th

Viewpoints Oct. 29, 2013

Thirty, 20 or even 10 years from now, will historians write that the unbridled zeal of the National Security Agency fatally undermined U.S. leadership in the Information Age and the creation of a truly global Internet?The latest sign this could happen comes from the European Parliament, where legislators have advanced privacy legislation that would forbid the transfer of data generated in the European Union to an outside country unless the subject in question and the EU source country first give

Viewpoints Oct. 28, 2013

The HealthCare.gov website is a disaster ― symbolic to Obamacare opponents, disheartening to supporters, and incredibly frustrating to people who just need to buy insurance. Some computer experts are saying the only way to save the system is to scrap the current bloated code and start over.Looking back, it seems crazy that neither the Barack Obama administration nor the public was prepared for the startup difficulties. There’s no shortage of database experts willing to opine on the complexities

Viewpoints Oct. 28, 2013