By Faiz Sobhan. The Strategy to counter violent extremism has to be unique to the situation of Bangladesh The recent horrific killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, in London by two Islamic extremists has once again highlighted the [...]

    By Nima Ch.   Iran Election Protest 2009 “The green movement” supporters, me included,  believed and believe that Iran’s presidential election of 2009 was rigged . Now, the next Iran election [...]

  By Ernest Chan. A reader pointed out an interesting paper that suggests using option volatility smirk as a factor to rank stocks. Volatility smirk is the difference between the implied volatilities of the OTM put option and the ATM [...]

  By Ajay Shah.   The first step in the economics of business cycles is to establish `stylised facts’ about the characteristics of business cycle fluctuations. Once these are know, alternative models can be judged on the extent [...]

      By Ted Burnett.   Introduction If you haven’t already figured this out by now, know that “life” is simply a series of problems from birth to death, from our beginning to our end.  Even our own birth was fraught [...]

  By James M. Dorsey. Synopsis In a strategy fraught with risk, Russian President Vladimir Putin is exploiting deep- seated domestic anger at the United States and fundamentalist Russian Orthodoxy to justify his support for embattled [...]

    Julian French.   Moscow, Russia. The Moscow River flows through this ancient seat of Russian power like a timeless reminder of a timeless country and its seemingly endless space. The Moscow European Security Conference at [...]

      By Thomas J. Fox.       Putting a compliance policy into practice is not something that most companies do very well. How do you get buy-in for a new or amended compliance policy? How do you determine if a [...]

  By Lisa Nielsen.    Jeff Bliss got our attention when he shared his frustration with his teacher, classmates, and the world about his learning environment. The now viral video captures a room of passionless students, some with [...]

By Julian Lindley-French. Alphen, Netherlands.  20 May. “It is my responsibility as a leader of a founder member of the European Union…to pull Europe out of this torpor that has gripped it, and to reduce people’s disenchantment [...]

By Djavad Salehi. The statistics most readily available for Iran are about prices, yet they are seen as the least believable.  Last week the Statistical Center of Iran that reports on unemployment, household budget and national income, and [...]

  By Donna Ross Jones. My Top 10 IEP “No No’s” I don’t know about all of you, but Nick’s  first IEP, was also my first IEP and I made mistakes. Since then I’ve made more, and I’ve heard about [...]

By David Andolfatto. I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this piece by Brad DeLong. He seems to think that some people in the profession are confused about things like the natural rate of interest and its relation to the market [...]

By Robert Kelly. Newsweek Japan asked me to write an introductory essay for its January 16 special issue on tension in Northeast Asia (cover story to the left). I should have put this up 4 months ago, but I forgot and the arguments [...]

By Ajay Shah. Yu Hua has a great piece in the New York Times titled In China, Power is Arrogant where he says: Several of these rules have since been revoked, but their wacky and arbitrary nature demonstrates the arrogance of power in China. [...]

By Ernest Chan. I have long been partial to linear strategies due to their simplicity and relative immunity to overfitting. They can be used quite easily to profit from mean-reversion. However, there is a serious problem: they are quite fragile, i.e. vulnerable [...]

By Michael T. Snyder. In America tonight, tens of millions of men and women will struggle to get to sleep because they are stressed out about not making enough money even though they are working as hard as they possibly can.  They are [...]

By Brian Proffitt. Where you are and what you’re doing increasingly play key roles in how you search the Internet. In fact, your search may just conduct itself. This concept, called “contextual search,” is improving so gradually the [...]

By Alton Parrish. There may be a way for older people to prevent natural aging of their minds, and it could be as simple as playing a video game. Research shows mental agility game slows cognitive decline in older people That’s according [...]

By Louis Fishman. The Syrian uprising started a little over two years ago and few of us remember it in its first days when thousands of peaceful protestors throughout the country joined in unison, calling for a democratic transition. However, [...]