Trade and Globalization

Can savings-led programs ensure poverty reduction?

Stockman, who once served as Ronald Reagan's budget director, spent two decades on Wall Street preparing for this moment. After stints at Salomon Brothers and the Blackstone Group, Stockman in 1999 set up his own private investment fund, Heartland Industrial Partners. He then used Heartland to shape a set of companies -- mainly in the automotive sector -- each dedicated to dominating a particular group of production activities.

The United States hasn't prevailed in Mexico City since Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee fought alongside each other to vanquish Santa Ana, but the American soccer team will try again today as it takes on the Mexican national team in a key World Cup qualifying match in Azteca Stadium. Despite how fiercely competitive the U.S.-Mexico soccer rivalry has become in the last two decades, the Americans have never won in Mexico City.

Barack Obama and a number of his cabinet members are only the second-most prominent American team to descend on Mexico this week (the U.S. president traveled to Guadalajara for the annual "Rodney Dangerfield summit," where Canada and Mexico try to get some respect from their disinterested neighbor). Most Mexicans are paying far more attention to the visit of a different delegation from north of the Rio Grande, the U.S. national soccer team that takes on Mexico in a crucial World Cup qualifying match at Mexico City's imposing Aztec Stadium on Wednesday.

Will China and the Gulf oil states have the U.S. over the proverbial barrel, or will the world's leading capitalist economy get lucky once again? On May 26, 2009, two of the New America Foundation's leading experts on geopolitics and the global economy joined with Foreign Policy magazine to debate which countries will emerge relatively stronger in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Please join Lori Wallach and Todd Tucker in a discussion of their book The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority.

The digital version of the book is available at www.FastTrackHistory.org.

What will the world look like when the present emergency has passed? The safest prediction is that the post-crisis financial sector will be downsized and more heavily regulated, nationally and internationally. The financial sector as a whole, which peaked at 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States in 2006, may shrink as much as 50 percent in the aftermath of the emergency.

Declaring Mexico a "failed state" has become the new mantra in Washington and among the media. Over the last two years, the country's drug wars have claimed 10,000 lives, many in grisly beheadings reminiscent of Iraq or the Afghan-Pakistan border regions. But we have been bad neighbors, too: American narco-dollars have made Mexico the main conduit for Colombian cocaine, and an estimated 90 percent of the weapons used by Mexican drug cartels come from the United States.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld is the dark, riveting journey through the panoply of criminal organizations flourishing in an increasingly globalized world, reaching from the sex trade in Bulgaria and internet fraud in Nigeria to the ‘caviar mafia’ in Central Asia and marijuana markets in British Columbia.

If the debate over the global economic crisis seems confusing, it's because the debate is confusing. Proponents of different cures can't even agree on the diagnosis of the disease.