Sol W. Sanders We live in dangerous times. Not so much that the world economy threatens to crash, that our carefully nuanced political system in the U.S. is momentarily checkmated, or even that while the U.S. is running the highest unemployment rates in recent memory the European Community has not resolved its disintegrating common […]
Sol W. Sanders ZURICH – Europeans seem determined to ignore the depth of an approaching economic and political crisis which will end its longest period of prosperity and peace in history and threatens the very foundations of post-World War II democratic progression. In the fleshpots of Vienna and Zurich I have just visited, for […]
Sol W. Sanders MUMBAI (BOMBAY), India — Is the Indian economy retreating back into “the Hindu rate of growth” which characterized the stagnation of four decades when New Delhi ran the economy with its imitation of Soviet planning? A returning former resident finds more than a touch of Calcutta’s notorious chaos and poverty in […]
Sol W. Sanders JERUSALEM — One of the most quoted of Maynard Milord many clever aphorisms is: “You can’t push on a string”. Keynes was referring to extending credit to an unreceptive investment market. [Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are you listening?] The quip comes to mind this morning on the eve of President Barack […]
Sol W. Sanders An old saw has it that only the British would build a city on a small, mountainous, rocky, waterless island and only the Chinese would live in it. Something of a backwater until 1949 when the miseries and violence of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists inflicted on the Mainland of China […]
Sol W. Sanders TAIPEI – The U.S.’ 50-year-old alliance with [Formosa] Taiwan is eroding slowly but surely in the face of Beijing’s siren call and growing indifference of the Obama administration. Yet at a moment when U.S. strategy ostensibly calls for a “pivot” toward Asia, the de facto alliance could never have been more […]
Sol W. Sanders BEIJING – Only a few hours in this capital of a country with 1.3 billion people are enough to pose the question of whether the control of the Communist Party may not be cracking under the growing strains accompanying the exposure of its economy to the outside world. Stalin perhaps had […]
Sol W. Sanders Tokyo – Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is racing against time. His recent landslide victory was a vote against the fumbling incumbent Democratic Party of Japan, which was from its inception a collection of diametrically opposed ideological partners. It scooped up leftwing socialists and disgruntled conservatives who left Abe’s “government” […]
Sol W. Sanders The President’s nominations for his second security cabinet – State, Defense and CIA – mark a break with America’s post-World War II strategies. Now that the first shoe has dropped, his nomination of favorites for the jobs, it remains to be seen what allies in Europe and Asia will make of […]
Sol W. Sanders Perhaps more than Westerners, Chinese have a gambling streak. Even during the darkest hours of Maoist oppression and pretended Puritanism, Beijing tolerated gambling on its southern flank in the Portuguese colony of Macau. Now reincorporated into China, in 2012 the world’s largest casino, holding the country’s only legal gambling monopoly, raked […]