Regions

Financial intermediation is a dicey proposition these days, and 'asset securitization' a downright dirty word in a world in which securitization allowed the obfuscation of risk - purses from sows' ears, but actually just fancy looking sows' ears, it turns out, everywhere you looked. Nonetheless, one of the important longterm issues for microfinance (and for the whole, newly emerging...

In today’s Washington Post, a front page article titled, “Multitude of Forces Drains the Spirit of Giving,” by staff writer Philip Rucker. Compared with the tsunami of 2004 and Katrina, the natural disasters of Burma and China have not produced anywhere near the outpouring of American charitable aid donations: In the weeks since a cyclone laid waste to Burma's delta...

I notice that none of us have posted on the Israeli military assault on Gaza.  This is not surprising, there is very little useful to say about it, especially from a legal point of view.  There is something depressingly predictable about the commentary arising out of Israel's military incursion into Gaza.   Critics of Israeli policy in general have denounced the incursion, alleging...