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George Ryan: A Flawed Man Taking on a Flawed System
George Ryan is a hero tainted by scandal. As governor of Illinois, Mr Ryan followed in the wake of two of his three predecessors and was convicted, in 2006, to over six years in prison for taking bribes. He was
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From Somalia to the United States – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Big Questions of Our Time Barely twenty years ago, Ayaan Hirsi Ali aged 23 at the time, arrived in The Netherlands to apply for political asylum and eager to make her mark on a society she considered both “surprisingly
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UN Reports FDI Hit $1.4 Trillion in 2013, Upward Trend to Continue
Global foreign direct investment is up and expected to rise over the next three years, driven mainly by stronger economies in developed countries, according to a new United Nations report which highlights the key role that transnational corporations and foreign
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Measuring Wealth to Track Sustainability
The new edition of the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book, released on World Environment Day 2014, includes a new indicator called change in wealth per capita for more than 200 countries. The World Bank Group has adopted change in
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Paul Krugman: A Plea for a Return to Basics in Finance
Author of no less than twenty books, over 200 scholarly essays in peer-reviewed academic journals and more than 750 articles as a columnist, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is not one to hide his mostly liberal opinions. As an economist, Mr
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Otaviano Canuto, World Bank Group: Macroeconomics and Stagnation – Keynesian-Schumpeterian Wars
Policy makers in the advanced economies at the core of the global financial crisis can make the claim that they prevented a new “Great Depression”. However, recovery since the outbreak of the crisis more than five years ago has been
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Robert Shiller: Making Sense of the Irrationality of Markets
The question of what motivates a trader to buy or sell shares at any particular moment is probably as old as the stock market itself. Given that trading securities often is a pursuit largely devoid of rational behaviour – though
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Inez Murray: Women in Business – Bankers Advised to Take Note
Getting banks to notice women is quite the challenge. Whereas research consistently shows that women are exceedingly good at managing money and budgets, banks often ignore the female demographic or fail to put processes in place that facilitate the financial
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Bitcoin – Chronicle of a Failure Foretold
Transaction malleability – a fraudulent, though most lucrative, way of receiving money without anyone actually sending it – is driving another nail into Bitcoin’s coffin. The digital money is by no means dead (yet), and could even perform a Phoenix
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Barry E. Silbert: Going Out on a Limb, Reinventing Capital Markets
SecondMarket was set up in 2004 and has since expanded into multibillion dollar trading platform with well over 53,000 registered participants. The exchange offers a bewildering array of securities ranging from public debt instruments to bankruptcy claims and credit derivatives.
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