Search Results for: economy

The Great Afghan Bank Heist

Longreads Pick

The troubles at Kabul Bank stand as a parable for the sometimes malign effect that the influx of billions of foreign dollars has had on this impoverished country since 2001. While the Western money spent has done a great deal to create a modern economy, much of it has been captured by a tiny minority of well-connected Afghan businessmen and politicians, and much of it illegitimately. The loss of seven hundred million dollars or more at Kabul Bank represents a significant percentage of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, which stands at only about twelve billion dollars.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,370 words)

Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing Poppies?

Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing Poppies?

Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?

Longreads Pick

“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization.

Published: Jan 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,367 words)

The Atlantic: The Rise Of The New Global Elite

The Atlantic: The Rise Of The New Global Elite

Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants

Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants

Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants

Longreads Pick

“We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem,” said John Reed, 71, a former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc., who estimated only 25 percent of needed changes have been enacted. “I’m astounded because we basically dropped the world’s biggest economy because of an error in bank management.”

Source: Bloomberg
Published: Dec 28, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,189 words)

Anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China is a long way from consuming too much. Saying that China does not have a big-enough consumer economy is really another way of saying that not enough of its resources reach the broad mass of its people. If they had more resources, they would surely spend more. This is why the recent labor strikes, and the pay increases that followed, were so important. They were a sign that Chinese households might start to enjoy more of the fruits of the long boom.

What Good Is Wall Street?

Longreads Pick

Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell my labor for as much as I can until nobody wants to buy it.’ But you, I asked, what do you think? ‘I tend to think we do create value,’ he said. ‘It’s not a productive value in a very visible sense, like finding a cure for cancer. We’re middlemen. We bring together two sides of a deal. That’s not a very elevated thing, but I can’t think of any elevated economy that doesn’t need middlemen.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 22, 2010
Length: 31 minutes (7,987 words)

Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview

Longreads Pick

In an Oval Office interview, the president discusses the Tea Party, the war, the economy and what’s at stake this November

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Sep 28, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,065 words)

The Fifty-First State?

Longreads Pick

Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq’s borders, and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 1, 2002
Length: 38 minutes (9,715 words)