After months of wrangling, the showdown between Greece and its European creditors has come down to a stand-off over pensions and taxes.Greece is refusing to acquiesce to demands by its creditors that it cut payments to the elderly and raise the value-added tax on their medicine a

This week’s G-7 meeting at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps marked a major breakthrough in climate-change policy.The seven largest high income economies (the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada) made the revolutionary decision to decarbon

Ours is a world of impunity.

The nuclear framework agreement between Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council members (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia) plus Germany is an important achievement in global diplomacy. The deal announced earlier this month represents the tr

ExxonMobil’s current business strategy is a danger to its shareholders and the world. We were reminded of this once again in a report of the National Petroleum Council’s Arctic Committee, chaired by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. The report calls on the US government

One year ago, I was in Brazil to launch the Brazilian chapter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an initiative of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The main message I heard that day was that São Paulo was suffering from a mega-drought,

The European Central Bank (ECB) has finally launched a policy of quantitative easing (QE).

The purpose of the global financial system is to allocate the world’s savings to their most productive uses. When the system works properly, these savings are channelled into investments that raise living standards; when it malfunctions, as in recent years, savings are cha

Two schools of thought tend to dominate today’s economic debates. According to free-market economists, governments should cut taxes, reduce regulations, reform labour laws, and then get out of the way to let consumers consume and producers create jobs. According to Keynes