My wife and I had an opportunity to join an archaeological tour of Turkey with friends. We decided to visit Greece and Italy at the same time. We spent an entire month in this interconnected region.

Turkey and Greece have been assaulted by invading armies since the earliest recorded history....

We live in the Star Trek generation. Images of space travel are commonplace in movies and on TV. But most of us are oblivious to how drastically our world view has shifted during the past century. I have witnessed much of this shift during my own lifetime.

I grew in...

I retired a few years ago from a career as an international banker and corporate executive. In my economic blogs I have for two years been predicting a momentous global downturn, long before any official sources admitted such a possibility. (They are still partly in denial.)

Now I would offer...

With worldwide equity markets down by 40 - 50%, it seems virtually certain that we are already falling into a depression. Hopefully it will be far smaller than the Great Depression of the 1930's where the economic contraction was 40%. But a 10% or a 20% contraction of GDP is...

My father often told me the story of going into Tessmer's General Store in Hartville, Ohio one day in1929, when he was 23 years old. Old Mr. Tessmer looked up at him from reading the financial pages of the newspaper and said: "Young man, you don't understand yet what this...