This is a fascinating story: the State Department, the Iranian government, and the NBA have joined forces to arrange for the Iranian men's basketball team to train and play next week against NBA teams in Salt Lake City: Iran will take part in the Rocky Mountain Revue, the Utah-hosted summer league and will play four games. The team will also observe...
The Copenhagen Consensus is the brain child of self-described 'skeptical environmentalist' and statistician Bjorn Lomborg; housed at the Copenhagen Business School, it seeks to apply cost benefit analysis to the world's leading problems in development, poverty, the environment, etc., with the assistance of a range of leading economists, and come up with not just a list of issues, but a...
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...
Everyone loves microfinance. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is super enthusiastic, but so is the World Bank, so are all those private equity kids who now want to do politically progressive 'venture philanthropy' with their gazillions, and so is Natalie Portman, peering winsomly from the cover of the NYT Magazine a couple of months ago. Muhammad Yunus...
