adding context_

Politicians in Brussels and Washington long profess fealty to open markets and the efficiencies of comparative advantage. Yet beneath the rhetoric of free trade lies a dense web of duties, remedies and regulatory walls that function as selective protectionism. The…

When the European Central Bank unveiled a permanent, globally available euro repo backstop in February 2026, it did more than tweak crisis plumbing: it signalled an institutional ambition to tilt the architecture of global finance. By converting temporary emergency lines…

Over the past few months, since the Trump administration unveiled the GENIUS Act as a new federal framework for stablecoins, former Greek finance minster and economist Yanis Varoufakis published and repeated sharp public commentary arguing the law “privatised the American…

In the two decades before 2008 the American financial system accreted layers of markets, institutions and instruments intended to solve familiar frictions — how to fund long‑dated loans, how to allocate credit efficiently, how to hedge and price default risk…

In 1990 global finance was already a powerful engine of growth and allocation: banks underwrote trade and credit, national exchanges listed the bulk of public companies, and cross‑border flows were meaningful but comparatively narrow. Thirty‑six years on — in 2026…

China’s recent high-profile removals of senior People’s Liberation Army officers — culminating in the January 2026 public investigation of Gen. Zhang Youxia and probes of other top commanders — read as an instrument of political consolidation that also exposes tensions…