After discussing the troubled rural banks in Henan in my previous post, it is important to note that what happened in Henan was not the first adverse credit event to hit the Chinese financial system. It was just the most recent in the country’s latest string of notable financial events, which can be said to have started back in May 2019 with the intervention in Baoshang Bank. A little over a year later, Baoshang became the first Chinese bank to be shut down since Shantou Commercial Bank closed shop in 2001. The Baoshang case was followed by interventions or investigations involving several other…

Former USA president Donald Trump slammed “globalists” and the American neoconservative establishment in a video posted to his social media accounts on Thursday, declaring that the US and “some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us” are the “greatest threat to Western civilization today.” “These globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home,” the 2024 presidential candidate explained. Trump warned that the Biden administration had brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe than ever before by pouring money and…

International conversations on climate reparations are gaining momentum In 2022, Pakistan was hit by some of the worst flooding in the nation’s history. Close to 1,300 people lost their lives, and over one-third of the country was underwater. While the damage to lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure was assessed, Pakistan’s climate minister, Sherry Rehman, was clear on the historic injustice of the disaster: “There is so much loss and damage with so little reparations to countries that contributed so little to the world’s carbon footprint that obviously the bargain made between the Global North and Global South is not working.” The argument isn’t unreasonable.…

Tech giant Google has reportedly agreed to pay $391.5 million in a settlement with 40 state attorneys general over the company’s deceptive location tracking features. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said, “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.” TechCrunch reports that Google has agreed to pay $391.5 million in a settlement with 40 state attorneys general over its location tracking practices, following an investigation that found Google had misled users into thinking they had turned off location tracking even…

As the world increasingly re-divides into hostile blocs, the need for dialogue is increasing but the number of places for such conversations is shrinking. This year, there were no Russian or Iranian officials at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January, and none were invited to the venerable Munich Security Conference in Germany, which takes place this weekend. While understandable given egregious actions by both governments, it is also unfortunate. The Munich conference, held since 1963 at an upscale hotel in Bavaria, bills itself as “a unique platform for high-level debates on the greatest foreign and security policy challenges of…