BERKELEY — US President Donald Trump’s erratic unilateralism represents nothing less than abdication of global economic and political leadership.

BERKELEY — Donald Trump’s first year as US president has been, if nothing else, a bounteous source of surprises.One of the big ones in the circles I frequent is dollar weakness.

Mark Twain never actually said “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. But the misquote is too delicious to die a natural death of its own.

With Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election, and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union enjoying a comfortable lead in opinion polls ahead of Germany’s general election on September 24, a window has opened for eurozone reform.The euro has always been a

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Asian financial crisis — or, more precisely, of the event that triggered the crisis: the devaluation of Thailand’s baht.While such anniversaries are not exactly cause for celebration, they at least afford an opportunity to look back an

Donald Trump took office promising a raft of sweeping economic-policy changes for the United States.He has quickly discovered, like previous US presidents, that America’s political system is designed to prevent rapid, large-scale change, by interposing formidable institutional ob

At the start of October, China’s currency, the renminbi, was added to the basket of currencies that make up the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Special Drawing Rights, or SDR.Previously, the SDR had been defined as a weighted average of the dollar, euro, British pound and Jap

I have no special expertise on the question of whether Britain should leave (or “Brexit”) the European Union.True, I did live in the United Kingdom until a bit less than a year ago.

The silly season that is a presidential election campaign in the United States has taken a particularly absurd turn as the candidates offer their proposals for monetary policy reform.This is not the first time, of course, that presidential candidates have proposed changing how US