As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I was privileged to be taught by a history professor who made the astute observation that political revolutions are fundamentally “revolutions of rising expectations” and that history often affords second chances. Her position was that people do not often resort to violence when circumstances are at their lowest, or, when
There are three ways that organizations in the Middle East and North Africa region and elsewhere might respond to Covid-19 variants, war in Europe, stagflation, and the uncertainty and costs associated with these things. Of course, it is highly unlikely for anyone with decision-making power to always guess correctly and therefore be precisely in sync with chaotic events.
Being naturally gloomy, economists often speculate that our world’s social and political fabric is fragile. This fragility is very obviously heightened as oil and other commodity prices approach historically high levels against a backdrop of pre-existing supply shocks. Without an increase in oil production, it is all but guaranteed that stagflation will be the result and that
To paraphrase Mark Twain, history never repeats itself but it does often rhyme. The 2011 Arab Spring witnessed the geopolitical and domestic collision of incompetence (or often corruption), food insecurity, and generally rising prices. It came just after the height of the world financial crisis, and also followed a period of poor leadership in the Middle East and North Africa
I have written before about how the US Federal Reserve finds itself in a near-impossible position. Overheating equity markets in America and around the world have combined with historically high rates of inflation and unemployment and low levels of labor force participation for the better part of a year. The quandary, of course, for the central bank’s Chair Jerome Powell is