The curtain has come down after Act I of the Fiscal Cliff. Some critics have proclaimed it a victory for the president over his Republican enemies. Others have complained that, once again, the president failed to take a sufficiently firm stance in favor of the positions he took as a...

The European crisis has been going on for a long time, and it promises to continue a lot longer. The reasons are not simply politicians kicking the can down the road and avoiding difficult decisions. Nor is it simply a matter of the Germans not realizing that it would be...

Shortly after registering my own investment adviser firm in 1967, I found myself offering to apply socially responsible selection criteria to my clients' portfolios, as well as helping my clients exercise other shareholder powers in order to achieve changes in companies' behavior. I also helped educate management and other shareholders...

Who

A couple of weeks ago European leaders held another all-night pajama party, staggering out into the morning light to proclaim that they had reached yet another game-changing agreement. The spin from France and the troubled peripheral countries was that the Germans had backed down. The Germans were now willing...

Is impact investing really the new kid on the block or just the same old kid in new clothes with a new name? Amy Domini complained in a March Huffington Post blog that it is definitely only a new name for what she and others have been doing...

In this time of declining living standards and high unemployment, many people feel bitterness and disappointment. And justifiably so, as overwhelming evidence demonstrates the rich have gotten richer at the expense of the middle class, the working poor, and the unemployed. The rising differential between executive and worker incomes and...

Many people are worried about the recent sharp declines in stock markets around the world along with increasing turmoil in other markets and ominous indications of increased violence and political malice.

This is indeed a proper time to be worried. Reductions have barely begun in the debt issued during...

In Europe, the policies of retrenchment that have been imposed upon Greece and Ireland have begun to produce their inevitable consequences: contracting economies, rising unemployment and social turmoil, falling tax revenues, rising deficits and rapidly rising ratios of debt to national income, the exact opposite of the purported aims of...

In the days before people could do anything "virtually" on the Internet, restless teenage boys used to play a game called "chicken" in which two contestants would race their cars directly toward each other. The first to swerve in order to avoid crashing was the "chicken" and loser of the...

The slow motion train wreck that is the Eurozone continues to roil bond markets, banks and governments. The complex issues involved cannot be described, yet alone adequately explained, in this short piece but bear with me.

Economic activity is still contracting in much of Europe including the UK, Spain, Portugal,...

The witches' cauldron is boiling furiously with momentous effects all over the world. An Arab Spring of popular protests against autocratic governments has spread to almost every country in the Arab world, resonating also in Iran and parts of central Africa and eliciting protective responses as far away as China....

Never in his term as President or before has Barack Obama proposed or negotiated a public policy so beneficial to America's workers as the "deal" he hammered out at the White House with the Republican leadership. And perhaps never in all of American history has a President acted with such...

A glum consensus about the economic future has enveloped our collective minds like fog descending on the coast at sunset. It is now almost universally agreed that economies in the United States along with Europe and Japan are likely to grow at only about two percent a year or less...

Addiction

Corrupt regulatory oversight, cutting corners to save costs, plus citizens and politicians chanting "Drill, baby, drill" -- is the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe really any surprise? The spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst man-made environmental disaster in the U.S., is a consequence of our addiction to oil....

Not long ago, Japan lost a decade. "Japan once invited admiration" said The Economist in a 1998 article, "Now, however, it invites despair, as it fails to escape from the economic stagnation of this lost decade." Since then Japan has had another dozen years of negative equity returns and real...

The rise from the ashes of the American and world economies has been slow and is likely to continue to be slow, at least in the world's highest income countries. As with all previous recoveries from major financial crises, there is a serious drag from large debts remaining to be...

There can no longer be any doubt that the U.S. and global economies came out of the tunnel of the Great Recession into the light of an economic recovery in the middle of this year. The trouble is that most people don't see the light at the start of an...