When the Enron scandal broke in 2001, it was not long before the press homed in on the company’s auditor Arthur Andersen. In the end Andersen was found guilty on criminal charges and was forced to exit auditing. So here is a question: which of the global Big Four auditing firms missed the recently reported... Read More

When Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean patriarch, was asked to name the twentieth century’s most consequential invention, he gave a characteristically counterintuitive answer. Not for him anything so obvious as television, antibiotics, the transistor, or the internet. His suggestion: the air-conditioner. It is a topical thought as, with the arrival of July, we enter... Read More

With the Shanghai index down nearly 20 percent from vertiginous heights reached in mid-May, a lot of people are wondering what next – and not a few are suggesting the Chinese economy is headed off a cliff. Pat Choate begs to differ. “The connection between Chinese stocks and the real economy is zero,� he pronounces.... Read More

The other day the New York Times highlighted anti-black discrimination in Japan. Focusing on the experiences of Ariana Miyamoto, a half-black/half-Japanese beauty queen who was born in Japan and enjoys full Japanese citizenship, the Timespresented a troubling and convincing account of a degree of explicit racial discrimination long unthinkable in respectable circles in the United... Read More

The news from Europe today is that the Euro-cent is fighting for its life. The coin, which is very similar to the U.S. Lincoln penny in value, color, and size, has already been abolished in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium. According to the Dublin-based Irish Independent newspaper, Ireland will soon become the next EU nation... Read More

President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was at least temporarily sidetracked yesterday by a vote in the lower house of Congress. The TPP is a proposed trade and investment pact that would join the United States with eleven other Pacific-fringing nations. Presented as a major part of Obama’s “pivot� to Asia, the pact notably excludes China... Read More

The London-based magazine Restaurant is generating headlines this morning for its ranking of the world’s supposedly 100 best restaurants. Boy, is the list controversial. For the well traveled, America’s showing – 13 top restaurants – looks on the high side, and so does the United Kingdom’s five. (If Restaurant’s ranking is to be credited, the... Read More

Vietnam has largely dropped out of sight since the Communists won a bloody North-South civil war in 1975. But, with a population of 93 million, it has hardly gone away. Now it is in the news again thanks to Noble, an acclaimed new movie. Directed by Stephen Bradley and starring Deirdre O’Kane, Noble is a... Read More

In this space yesterday, I suggested that most Americans make common cause in wanting to stamp out all forms of human trafficking. Not a controversial statement, I thought. But Mr. XYZ, a regular reader who, like me, shares an understanding of the extent to which America has reneged on traditional values in pursuit of globalism... Read More

Americans of all political persuasions abhor human trafficking. So why is the Obama administration pushing a highly controversial trade pact that would reward nations with some of the world’s worst human trafficking records? It is a good question, and one that has been brought into sharp focus by reports overnight of the discovery of mass... Read More

The obvious question about bitcoins is who invented them. The obvious answer – certainly obvious to me – is that it was not Satoshi Nakamoto. For sure the arcane treatise that launched the bitcoin concept was authored by a person of this Japanese-sounding name. But after nearly 27 years watching the world from a base... Read More

Even in these days of light-speed communication, some information still travels as slowly as in the medieval era. Take, for instance, the recent history of global manufacturing. In the Anglophone world, many if not most of the more prominent commentators have long held that a first-rank economy no longer needs manufacturing. The Economist magazine in... Read More

In this space last Sunday, I highlighted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to address a joint session of Congress. As I pointed out, never before has a Japanese Prime Minister been accorded such an honor. Yet of all Japan’s post-1945 Prime Ministers, Abe would appear to be the least... Read More

Perhaps the highest honor the United States can confer on a foreign dignitary is to invite him or her to address both houses of Congress. Invitees join an exclusive club that has included such esteemed figures as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Yitzhak Rabin, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Corazon Aquino. Now the currency is... Read More

Since the Netherlands became the world’s first nation to recognize same-sex marriage in 2001, the concept has spread rapidly. If Wikipedia is to be believed, at last count 16 national jurisdictions had followed suit. So had 36 U.S. states. The concept has had its greatest acceptance in Western and Northern Europe, but parts of Latin... Read More

It seems only yesterday that most of the world’s largest corporations were based in the United States. In the auto industry, for instance, there was General Motors, which not only towered over Ford and Chrysler but made Toyota and Volkswagen look positively Lilliputian. Those days are gone. On most measures Toyota and Volkswagen are now... Read More

Oil prices swooned on Thursday as John Kerry claimed a major breakthrough in talks with Iran. They later recovered a bit but markets remained unsettled. Will the deal sink oil prices? Probably not. Even if the Obama administration succeeds in getting a workable deal through Congress (a significant “if,� of course), there are at least... Read More

In the spring of 1995 – twenty years ago almost to the day – I published a book about Japan entitledBlindside. Endorsed by such long-time Japan watchers as James Fallows, Sir James Goldsmith, and John Kenneth Galbraith (Galbraith had clocked considerable on-the-spot experience as a senior official of the American occupation in the late 1940s),... Read More

When Singapore’s success first attracted notice, American and British economists scrambled to claim it as a victory for textbook laissez-faire. Supposedly if only the United States and the United Kingdom would let markets rip, they too could enjoy Singapore-like growth. This could hardly have been more wrong. In common with virtually ever other economy, Singapore... Read More

A famous maxim has it that in the short run markets are voting machines, but in the longer run weighing machines. The point is that though short run movements can be remarkably fickle and irrational, markets do – eventually – self-correct and produce reasonable prices. But “eventually� can be a long time, especially where currency... Read More

The Financial Times this morning carries an important exclusive on British Prime Minister David Cameron’s defiance of a White House effort to counter Chinese financial power. The White House had been trying to organize a G7 boycott of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is seen in Washington as a Chinese-inspired rival to the... Read More

Those who know their history know that the British have a special knack for pioneering influential new political ideas. A latter-day example is Nigel Farage, head of the anti-EU UKIP party, who today threw down the gauntlet in a daring challenge to Europe’s unpopular continent-wide free market in labor. He argued for a reverse-course in... Read More

How much silicon is there in Silicon Valley? Not much, if we are talking super-pure monocrystalline silicon, which is the high-end material driving the digital revolution. As with countless other advanced materials these days, most of the world’s semiconductor-grade silicon comes from Japan (yes, Japan Inc has kept on trucking even if this is rarely... Read More

The big news this morning is that “Jihadi John� has been identified. According to the Washington Post, the barbaric executioner who has featured in several ISIS beheading videos is Mohammed Emwazi. Born in Kuwait, he is a British citizen who grew up in a well-to-do family in London and earned a British degree in computer... Read More

In my early days as a financial journalist, I worked for the Anglo-French publisher Sir James Goldsmith. Although I can’t say I knew him well, he was a presence around the building, and he went on to provide a fulsome commendation for a book I published in 1995. One of his memorable characteristics was his... Read More