The Dollar

Dominant and dangerous
As America’s economic supremacy fades, the primacy of the dollar looks unsustainable

IF HEGEMONS are good for anything, it is for conferring stability on the systems they dominate. For 70 years the dollar has been the superpower of the financial and monetary system. Despite talk of the yuan’s rise, the primacy of the greenback is unchallenged. As a means of payment, a store of value and a reserve asset, nothing can touch it. Yet the dollar’s rule has brittle foundations, and the system it underpins is unstable. Worse, the alternative reserve currencies are flawed. A transition to a more secure order will be devilishly hard. ......... The United States accounts for 23% of global GDP and 12% of merchandise trade. Yet about 60% of the world’s output, and a similar share of the planet’s people, lie within a de facto dollar zone, in which currencies are pegged to the dollar or move in some sympathy with it. American firms’ share of the stock of international corporate investment has fallen from 39% in 1999 to 24% today. But Wall Street sets the rhythm of markets globally more than it ever did. American fund managers run 55% of the world’s assets under management, up from 44% a decade ago.......

the costs of dollar dominance are starting to outweigh the benefits.

..... In recent months the prospect of even a tiny rate rise in America has sucked capital from emerging markets, battering currencies and share prices. .... Decisions of the Federal Reserve affect offshore dollar debts and deposits worth about $9 trillion. Because some countries link their currencies to the dollar, their central banks must react to the Fed. Foreigners own 20-50% of local-currency government bonds in places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey: they are more likely to abandon emerging markets when American rates rise. .......

America is the biggest export market for only 32 countries, down from 44 in 1994; the figure for China has risen from two to 43.

A system in which the Fed dispenses and the world convulses is unstable....... A second problem is the lack of a backstop for the offshore dollar system if it faces a crisis. In 2008-09 the Fed reluctantly came to the rescue, acting as a lender of last resort by offering $1 trillion of dollar liquidity to foreign banks and central banks. The sums involved in a future crisis would be far higher.

The offshore dollar world is almost twice as large as it was in 2007. By the 2020s it could be as big as America’s banking industry.

Since 2008-09, Congress has grown wary of the Fed’s emergency lending. Come the next crisis, the Fed’s plans to issue vast swaplines might meet regulatory or congressional resistance. For how long will countries be ready to tie their financial systems to America’s fractious and dysfunctional politics?........ America increasingly uses its financial clout as a political tool. Policymakers and prosecutors use the dollar payment system to assert control not just over wayward bankers and dodgy football officials, but also errant regimes like Russia and Iran. Rival powers bridle at this vulnerability to American foreign policy. ........ If the Fed fails to act as lender of last resort in a dollar liquidity crisis, the ensuing collapse abroad will rebound on America’s economy. ....... If foreigners continue to accumulate reserves, they will dominate the Treasury market by the 2030s. To satisfy growing foreign demand for safe dollar-denominated assets, America’s government could issue more Treasuries—adding to its debts. Or it could leave foreigners to buy up other securities—but that might lead to asset bubbles, just as in the mortgage boom of the 2000s. ........ The baton of financial superpower has been passed before, when America overtook Britain in 1920-45. But Britain and America were allies, which made the transfer orderly. And America came with ready-made attributes: a dynamic economy and, like Britain, political cohesiveness and the rule of law ........ The euro is a currency whose very existence cannot be taken for granted. ......

As for the yuan, China’s government has created the monetary equivalent of an eight-lane motorway—a vast network of currency swaps with foreign central banks—but there is no one on it.

Until China opens its financial markets, the yuan will be only a bit-player. And until it embraces the rule of law, no investor will see its currency as truly safe. ........ More likely is a splintering of the system, as other countries choose to insulate themselves from Fed decisions by embracing capital controls. The dollar has no peers. But the system that it anchors is cracking.

Banking and nothingness
Europe’s dithering banks are losing ground to their decisive American rivals

Seven years after the height of the financial crisis, Europe’s large banks still behave as if they are in the thick of the storm. Plans for radical restructurings are shelved before they are even implemented, often accompanied by management defenestrations—Barclays is one of four big European banks with new leaders. And they have dithered on the most basic questions, for example on how much capital they need or whether to scale back misfiring investment-banking arms. ..... Europe’s banking market is fragmented and includes politically controlled lenders, such as Landesbanken in Germany, which sap profits for everyone. ....... Few seem to mind tapping a Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch for operations that require global reach. That may annoy European bankers, but is hardly a reason to mollycoddle them. If their investment banks cannot pay their way under the current rules, it is the banks that must change, not the regulations.

Russia's Ego Is Geopolitical

English: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria . Original background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Russia is such a huge country geographically, never mind it has fewer people than Pakistan, never mind its economy is smaller than India's, but the largest country in the world, geographically speaking, feels the need to prove it is a military superpower on par with the United States. China, on the other hand, has no qualms that its global prestige can not exceed its economic might, and so stays economy focused. A large population can make you do that. Grow or get challenged, from inside. There is also a hunger among ordinary Russians for someone like Putin, someone who will make them feel like the superpower they were.

Geopolitics is very real. All large countries have spheres of influence, just like Jupiter's gravity is felt on its moons. Russia's geopolitical pull will still hold to be true should some day Russia become a democracy in the western sense of the word.

Russia is a big country: deal with it.

Russian Military Uses Syria as Proving Ground, and West Takes Notice

a public demonstration of new weaponry, tactics and strategy. ..... The strikes have involved aircraft never before tested in combat ..... a ship-based cruise missile fired more than 900 miles from the Caspian Sea, which, according to some analysts, surpasses the American equivalent in technological capability. ...... might soon back an Iranian-led offensive that appeared to be forming in the northern province of Aleppo ......

months of meticulous planning behind Russia’s first military campaign outside former Soviet borders since the dissolution of the Soviet Union

..... a little-noticed — and still incomplete — modernization that has been underway in Russia for several years, despite strains on the country’s budget......

Putin had overseen the most rapid transformation of the country’s armed forces since the 1930s.

..... Russia’s fighter jets are, for now at least, conducting nearly as many strikes in a typical day against rebel troops opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad as the American-led coalition targeting the Islamic State has been carrying out each month this year....... an increasingly confrontational and defiant Russia under Mr. Putin ...... the operation could be intended to send a message to the United States and the West about the restoration of the country’s military prowess and global reach after decades of post-Soviet decay. ....... we are going to school on what the Russian military is capable of today.” ....... Russian military spending .. has surged to its highest level in a quarter-century, reaching $81 billion, or 4.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product ...... Moscow’s largest deployment to the Middle East since the Soviet Union deployed in Egypt in the 1970s. ....... their ability to move a lot of stuff real far, real fast ...... Russia is not only bringing some of its most advanced hardware to the fight, it has also deployed large field kitchens and even dancers and singers to entertain the troops — all signs that Moscow is settling in for the long haul ...... American officials say Russia has closely coordinated with its allies to plan its current fight. .......... the Russians are already harvesting lessons from the campaign to apply to their other military operations .....

“Russia is using their incursion into Syria as an operational proving ground.”

Putin Says U.S. Fails to Cooperate in Syria

suggesting that they had “mush for brains.” ..... widespread accusations in the West that Russian warplanes were targeting practically every group opposed to the Syrian government except the Islamic State ...... “Recently, we have offered the Americans: ‘Give us objects that we shouldn’t target.’ Again, no answer,” he said. “It seems to me that some of our partners have mush for brains.” ...... Aside from propping up Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s staunchest regional ally, the Russian government is believed to be motivated by the idea of ending its international isolation stemming from the Ukraine crisis. It also wants to be treated as an equal partner by the West in addressing the intractable problems facing Syria, which include the spread of the Islamic State extremist group and the need to shape a political transition to end the civil war that has killed at least 250,000 people and displaced millions. ........ For more than four years, the government has held central Damascus while shelling the poorer towns ringing the city, where many residents were among the first to rebel against Mr. Assad. ....... a call by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, for revenge attacks against Russia. ...... urged jihadists from the Caucasus to kill one Russian for every Syrian who had died. ...... He said the horrors to be visited on the Russians would overwhelm the memories of what happened to them in Afghanistan in the 1980s. ..... Jambulat Umarov, the foreign and information minister for Chechnya, also in the Caucasus, called the group “obsolete” and bragged that his region of Russia was the only place in the world that had gained the upper hand against Islamic militants....... Both Russia and the United States have said that the Islamic State is the target of their attacks in Syria. Russia also maintains that removing Mr. Assad now will bring chaos, a position that the West and regional states reject.

U.S. Weaponry Is Turning Syria Into Proxy War With Russia

Insurgent commanders say that since Russia began air attacks in support of the Syrian government, they are receiving for the first time bountiful supplies of powerful American-made antitank missiles. ...... the Syrian conflict is edging closer to an all-out proxy war between the United States and Russia. ..... The increased levels of support have raised morale on both sides of the conflict, broadening war aims and hardening political positions, making a diplomatic settlement all the more unlikely. ..... Spirits are rising on the government side as well. Weapons and morale are “at a new level,” said an official with the newly revived alliance of Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah that is fighting on the behalf of Damascus. ..... the alliance is seeking something closer to victory. The aim now is to retake Syrian land that had been given up for lost, take the ouster of Mr. Assad off the table for good and reach a far more advantageous political solution after establishing “new facts on the ground.” ...... One official with a rebel group that is fighting in Hama called the supply “carte blanche.” “We can get as much as we need and whenever we need them,” he said ...... “By bombing us, Russia is bombing the 13 ‘Friends of Syria’ countries,” he said, referring to the group of the United States and its allies that called for the ouster of Mr. Assad after his crackdown on political protests in 2011. ..... Russian attack helicopters swoop low over fields, seemingly close enough to touch, then veer upward to unleash barrages of rockets, flares and heavy machine-gun fire. Explosions pepper distant villages, with smoke rising over clusters of houses as narrators declare progress against

“terrorists.”

....... Both Russia and the United States have declared they are fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but the two global powers support opposite sides in the battle between Mr. Assad and the Syrians who rebelled against his rule.

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Bihar Is Make Or Break For Modi

The impending state elections in the state of Bihar are, in some ways, as important to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as was the national election last year where he scored a resounding victory and put an end to an almost three decade run of coalition governments in India. Modi sold tea on a railway platform as a young boy, was not born to high caste parents, and personifies Indian democracy at its best. Many imagine him to be a combination of Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kuan Yew who might rein for two decades and turn India into a First World Country. But if he loses in Bihar, he might face an emboldened opposition that might chase him all the way to 2019. A victory might pave the way for another victory in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state, in 2017, which would take his party to a majority also in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house, thus finally allowing him bold reform manouevres that have so far eluded him. The bold reforms might bring in double digit growth rates, an inch up from the already fastest growth rate in the world surpassing China, that might pretty much guarantee not only re-election but perhaps a bigger mandate, and the BJP’s expansion into more states, perhaps in the East and the South, making his party the natural party of power in the largest democracy. Modi would become the BJP’s Nehru.

One of the most curious developments on the election trail has been polls showing half the Muslims in Bihar wanting to vote for Modi’s party. This is tectonic. A party rightly or wrongly accused of Hindu supremacist tendencies making such remarkable inroads into the Muslim voter base has implications that go beyond the state, country and region. Top that with the bonhomie Modi shares with Bagladesh, a Muslim nation, with whom (and Nepal and Bhutan) India has signed papers to effect an economic union within a decade, India might finally showcase itself as a country where democracy is working for Muslisms on a vast scale. Modi’s laser focus on what he calls development seems to be winning hearts. He is disciplined about staying away from divisive rhetoric that an earlier generation of BJP leaders specialized in.

If Modi wins Bihar, the obvious casualty will be Nitish Kumar who has been an illustrious Chief Minister for a decade, the first seven of which he had the BJP as his junior partner, but who he parted ways with precisely because the BJP picked Modi as its prime ministerial candidate. Nitish fashioned himself a national alternative to Modi. Nitish Kumar’s leadership turned Bihar into India’s fastest growing state. That was a remarkable step up from the lawlessness that prevailed when he took the reins. If the BJP wins, very likely Sushil Modi, who was Nitish Kumar’s Deputy Chief Minister, will become the Chief Minister: a Modi in Delhi, another Modi in Patna, Bihar’s capital. Sushil Modi claims his party has been indispensable to Nitish Kumar’s success, since it held key ministries like education, health and roads while the turnaround was being engineered.

Bihar, India’s poorest state, has had a glorious history. It was in Bihar that the Buddha attained enlightenment. At one point Bihar boasted the world’s top university: Nalanda. Some of India’s most glorious emperors called Bihar home including Ashoka whose chakra, or wheel, you see on India’s flag. Mahatma Gandhi, once back from South Africa, picked Bihar to launch his big push in India. Independent India’s first president was from Bihar. But somewhere along the way, Bihar fell through the cracks mightily. And India now can not lose its Third World status unless Bihar and Uttar Pradesh lose theirs.

The president of Narendra Modi’s party, Amit Shah, claims if they win Bihar now, that will trounce the opposition for the next 15-20 years nationally. His battle plans are amazingly detailed, his ground operations thick and thorough like a comb, and he has been at it for months before the official clarion call was made by the Election Commission. Mastering the dizzying caste arithmetic, constituency by constituency, electoral booth by electoral booth, has not been left to chance, although the offical focus is on “development.”

If Nitish Kumar loses, it will be because he has been in power for 10 years, and his ally, the colorful, witty (he spoke in tweets before there was a Twitter) Laloo Yadav, for the 15 years before that. Anti-incumbency will have hit a 25 year stretch of rule by two “backward caste” leaders, friends from student days, who might get replaced by another of the same, and also a friend of theirs from student days. Modi is no high caste last name, not for Narendra, not for Sushil.

If the country’s population growth was 2-3% and its economic growth also was 2-3%, many feel India stagnated for decades even after it broke free from Britain’s clutches. Modi seeks a population growth rate below 1% and an economic growth rate that is a sustained 10% plus by making a sharp break from India’s socialist ways: most of the top entrepreneurs in the country feel love for him. Bihar is where he seeks and hopefully gets a second national mandate after his emergence on the national scene last year, and his subsequent global emergence, built up over foreign visit after foreign visit, making him the most popular politician on the planet today. Brazil had its Lula, India has Modi.

Hillary Looks Ready

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India And Energy

India’s Energy Crisis
Can India modernize its manufacturing economy and supply electricity to its growing population without relying heavily on coal—and quite possibly destroying the global climate?

At least 300 million of India’s 1.25 billion people live without electricity ..... Another quarter-billion or so get only spotty power from India’s decrepit grid, finding it available for as little as three or four hours a day. The lack of power affects rural and urban areas alike, limiting efforts to advance both living standards and the country’s manufacturing sector. ....... Modi ... has promised to increase India’s renewable-energy capacity to 175 gigawatts, including 100 gigawatts of solar, by 2022. ..... (That’s about the total power generation capacity of Germany.) ...... India is attempting to do something no nation has ever done: build a modern industrialized economy, and bring light and power to its entire population, without dramatically increasing carbon emissions. Simply to keep up with rising demand for electricity, it must add around 15 gigawatts each year over the next 30 years. ......

The country gets most of its electricity from aging, dirty coal-fired plants.

...... a massive 2012 outage that left more than 600 million people in the dark and drew attention to a utility sector in disarray, with an estimated $70 billion of accumulated debt. ...... China is now the world’s largest emitter of carbon..... Its population is expected to grow by another 400 million people over the next three decades, bringing it to 1.7 billion by 2050. ...... By 2050, India will have roughly 20 percent of the world’s population .....

these younger politicians tend to be pragmatists, seeking to encourage economic growth through neoliberal policies such as deregulation and privatization of state industries.

Since his appointment, Goyal has emerged as a champion of renewable energy, calling for investments of $100 billion in renewables and another $50 billion in upgrading the country’s faltering grid. Almost every week he appears in the newspapers cutting the ribbon on a new solar power plant or wind farm or hydropower installation......... coal remains the cheapest source of power, and India’s coal industry has embarked on a building boom, doubling installed capacity since 2008. India consumes around 800 million tons of coal a year and could more than double that number by 2035 ..... Almost 70 percent of India’s electricity today comes from coal-fired plants. About 17 percent comes from hydropower, much of it from large dams in the northeast. Another 3.5 percent comes from nuclear. That leaves about 10 percent, depending on daily conditions, from renewables—mostly wind farms. ...... Over the next 25 years, “with the most aggressive assumptions in terms of renewables, we could go up to 18 or 20 percent from renewables,” Ramesh told me. “Hydro takes longer—it involves displacement of people and submergence of land, but we could expect that 17 percent contribution to go up to 25 percent. Nuclear is at 3.5 percent right now and, under the most aggressive assumptions, could go up to 5 or 6 percent. So under the best scenario—the most aggressive programs for nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind—bloody coal will still be at 50 percent.” In other words, while low- or zero-carbon sources would make up a greater portion of India’s energy supply, overall carbon emissions would nearly double: from around 2.1 billion tons in 2014 to more than four billion tons by 2040..........

In 2012, when Modi was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he presided over the launch of the world’s largest solar installation: a group of plants totaling nearly one gigawatt combined.

..... the government plans a program of building nuclear plants that would roughly triple capacity by 2024 and supply one-quarter of the country’s electricity needs by 2050. India also aims to further capitalize on its abundant potential for water power, particularly in the far northeastern states ....... the planned construction of an ultra-deepwater natural-gas pipeline across the Arabian Sea, from Iran to India’s west coast......

building all these new projects will be extremely expensive, requiring a level of fiscal discipline and political will that India’s fractious, corrupt government has seldom achieved.

Modi, who has surrounded himself with a group of capable, mostly well-respected technocrats like Goyal, has limited power to compel the states to implement and enforce clean-energy mandates, beyond the promise of central-government largesse. Rules requiring utilities to use a minimum amount of renewable power have mostly been ignored. Key pieces of legislation, including important amendments to the Electricity Act of 2003, are stalled in parliament because few of the country’s politicians are willing to tackle the key issue: utilities are currently forced to sell electricity at below costs. Efforts to modernize the country’s antiquated utilities—as must happen if there is to be any chance of implementing Modi’s ambitious energy agenda—seem no closer to success than they did when he took office...........

“The West will have to pay for the damage they have caused to the world and the planet,” Goyal said in a climate-change address in London in May.

........ Modi is trying to create a world-class renewable-energy industry while reforming a corrupt and bankrupt utility sector, growing the country’s manufacturing sector, keeping deficits low, and sustaining economic growth at around 8 percent a year. ......... Power losses in transmission and distribution across India average around 25 percent, and in some areas they can reach 50 percent. That means that half of the electricity being generated either never reaches an end user or is used but never paid for. Power losses in the developed world seldom reach 10 percent. For a grid about to be tested by the addition of large amounts of power from intermittent renewable sources, that outdated infrastructure is a huge problem............ the daily rolling brownouts that plague Delhi, along with most other Indian cities. With grid power uncertain, major Indian companies such as IT giant Infosys have installed their own power plants: Infosys is planning a 50-megawatt solar park to serve its offices in Bangalore, Mysore, and Mangalore.......

Promising free water and electricity, without specifying a way to pay for it, is an old tradition in Indian state and local election campaigns.

Under the Aam Aadmi Party’s platform, Delhi families will get 20,000 liters of free water a month, and those who use less than 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month will get a 50 percent discount on their electric bills. Those subsidies will cost the government up to 16.7 billion rupees ($250 million) annually—and they will not help the discoms run profitable businesses......... Under the agricultural subsidies that have become the third rail of energy politics in India, farmers essentially get free power, which means the utilities that serve them lose money on every customer. Some of the loss is made up in handouts from the central government—but upgrading the grid will be of little use unless utilities can develop viable business models. The sector has been bailed out, to the tune of billions of rupees, twice in the last 13 years. The cumulative losses have increased so drastically that they could “pull down the whole growth agenda” of the Modi government .......

Full reform, however, will require steps that remain politically off limits for now: complete privatization, less interference by state governments in utility operations, and, above all, an end to free electricity for farmers.

..... India’s vastness. ..... Expanding the grid to reach every home and business would require many trillions of rupees that the central and state governments simply don’t have. For many, gaining access to electricity through solar microgrids and other local power sources that bypass the traditional utility model is a far more practical option.........

India’s energy problems will require solutions tailored to the country’s history, its technology and economy, and its place in the world.

..... Although Appapur is located inside a tiger reserve, the real problems are leopards, snakes, and wild boars. Leopards take 10 to 15 domestic cows and goats a year ...... A number of Indian and foreign providers, including fast-growing companies like Visionary Lighting and Energy and Greenlight Planet, are spreading small home solar systems across South Asia, driven by government incentives, plummeting costs for the technology, and high demand......... Every town in India, even the dustiest roadside hamlet, has banners and billboards advertising small battery and inverter systems. A new energy ecosystem is arising in complex and not always predictable ways...... The combination of failing utilities, heavy reliance on coal, a faulty grid, and an energy sector crippled by government subsidies and interference seems to argue that India has no chance: no path to economic growth and energy abundance except one that’s disastrous for the environment. But at ground level, the picture is more complicated and less bleak........ “The central government and outside investors are, naturally, focused on these big mega-projects, where they’re getting ridiculous financing, but

the real innovation is happening at the village level

,” says Anshu Bharadwaj, the executive director of the Center for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy, a Delhi think tank.

“The most impactful way is to develop a large number of 100-kilowatt, half-a-megawatt projects that are distributed across the country, close to rural loads.”

........... You can’t extend the grid to every village and hut in India, but you also can’t develop and operate a 21st-century manufacturing base using unpredictable distributed solar power. ....... Bihar is typical of India’s rural states: it has more than 100 million people, less than one-fifth of whom have access to reliable electricity. The state discom is more or less bankrupt, subsidized electricity bills are artificially low, and electricity losses on the grid are close to 50 percent. The reach of the grid is random ...... “I visited a village today that doesn’t have electricity,” he told me in July,

“and 100 meters away, the next village has good electricity. It’s confusing.

They may get it next month, next decade, or never.” ...... happens to be embarking on its modernization phase at a time when prices for renewable-energy generation, and for the technology to make it work at the local level, are starting to rival prices for traditional fossil-fuel-generated power. ...... Every microgrid and local solar system deployed reduces by a fraction the need to extend the grid; every new renewable-energy system installed by a business or factory reduces the pressure to build ultra-mega power plants........

The Indian genius for adaptation and survival in chaotic and challenging circumstances

provides hope that the country can solve the seemingly insurmountable challenge of expanding its economy in a clean and sustainable fashion. In many ways there is no choice. “India cannot afford to replicate the American or Chinese ‘Grow now, pay later’ model,” says Jairam Ramesh. “We cannot afford to say, ‘We’re going to have 25 years of 8 percent GDP growth, then do a cleanup act later.’”

Europe's Conquest

How Europe Conquered the World

a Single-Minded Focus on War .... between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe .... Why and how did Europe rise to the top, even when societies in Asia and the Middle East were far more advanced? ..... the Europeans were the first to industrialize, and they were immune to the diseases, such as smallpox, that devastated indigenous populations ..... fails to explain Europe’s colonization of India, since the Indians had similar immunity. Industrialization also falls short as an explanation: the Europeans had taken control of more than 35 percent of the planet even before they began to industrialize ....... the incentives that political leaders faced in Europe—incentives that drove them not just to make war, but also to spend huge sums on it .... In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to attend to people’s livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed European kings. ...... The huge sums of money showered on fighting in Europe gave military leaders the flexibility to buy new weapons and battleships and try out new tactics, fortifications, and methods of supply. In the process, they learned from their mistakes and improved their technologies. ......

Without a single-minded focus on war and the extraordinary ability to tax, there may never have been any European empires.

.... In the late eighteenth century, per-capita taxes were 15 times higher in France than in China, and 40 times higher in England ..... Europe’s military lead continued into the nineteenth century. Tax revenues rose as Europe industrialized, and the innovations from the Industrial Revolution—applied science and engineering—made it possible for Europeans to improve their technology not just by waging war, but also by conducting research, which magnified what the Europeans learned on the battlefield. ..... Europe’s ability to tax was no small achievement. China could not raise equivalent tax revenues, even in the nineteenth century. And countries in sub-Saharan Africa today still lack the basic capacity to tax, which keeps them from providing security and other basic public goods to their citizens. ..... the Dutch East India Company .. the first business to issue tradable shares of stock. ..... Western Europe .. centuries of warfare by bands of warriors whose leaders resembled modern-day warlords. .... “no object, thought, or profession but war.”

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Trump On The Wrong Continent?

Trevor Noah thinks Donald Trump might make for a better African leader than an American one.

Posted by The Daily Show on Friday, October 2, 2015