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China is not the Soviet Union

Published at: 16-04-2023

Posted on: April 16th, 2023 by RaduC No Comments

While all eyes are on the tragedy in Ukraine these days, there is a consensus among political and military analysts that the defining issue for this century will not be US relations with Russia, but those between the US and China. In this sense, the quasi-unanimous belief is that a new cold war is about […]

We need bad economic news

Published at: 26-02-2023

Posted on: February 26th, 2023 by RaduC No Comments

While the most predicted recession in the developed world is about to ignore the consensus and not show up, the news that has been labelled “good” until recently continues to cause concern and lead to stock market falls. At a first glance, it seems like a paradox, doesn’t it? Let’s not forget, however, the context […]

The Romanian yield curve has inverted. What does it mean?

Published at: 31-07-2022

Posted on: July 31st, 2022 by RaduC No Comments

The yield curve plots the returns on government bonds by maturity, starting from the shortest and going up to the longest ones. The chart is closely watched as it can provide interesting indicators about the investors’ perception of future economic trends. Usually, the yield curve slopes upward. Short maturities come with lower yields and, as […]

The inflation that nobody measures

Published at: 31-08-2018

Posted on: August 31st, 2018 by RaduC No Comments

Measuring inflation by keeping an eye on a basket of goods and services is not infallible. And that is not only due to the one-year delay in updating the consumer basket`s contents or because the contents vary with the population group. There are plenty other sources of distorting the real value of inflation. A frequent […]

A pseudo solution that won`t get us out of the trap

Published at: 25-05-2018

Posted on: May 25th, 2018 by RaduC No Comments

The other days I discussed with a well-known journalist about the reasons of Viktor Orban`s success in Hungary. My interlocutor was talking admiringly about him because he had understood that Hungary could no longer be underpinned by a foreign direct investment model and that Romania should follow suit. He argued that foreign capital flows leaving […]

Romania`s parallel states

Published at: 04-03-2018

Posted on: March 4th, 2018 by RaduC

I spent quite a while hesitating between two title versions. The other version would have asked „Is Romania a torn country?”. The “torn country” concept was coined by Samuel P. Huntington in his celebrated book The Clash of Civilizations, where he explained that with the ideological fault lines feeding the cold war gone, conflicts will […]

Military alliances cannot run at two speeds

Published at: 16-02-2018

Posted on: February 16th, 2018 by RaduC

Faced with many problems which question its very existence, the EU is trying to re-invent itself. The organization is clearly at a crossroad which is harder to overcome as the diversity of its members` priorities makes a consensus on the way forward highly unlikely. There is a visible decoupling of the mainstream national elites that […]

We have been flooded with money. What`s next?

Published at: 13-10-2017

Posted on: October 13th, 2017 by RaduC No Comments

Some pundits or opinion leaders` temptation to estimate the future by looking at historical changes does not cease to amaze me. It is the clear proof that we are still in the dark as to what we are going through, we fail to understand that as witnesses and subjects to a total paradigm shift we […]

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