Societal issues are also the ultimate test of corporate citizenship—of whether a company can carry out the essential mission of global capitalism: fusing high performance with high integrity and sound risk management. 

Now that military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has declared his intention to run for Egypt’s presidency, he should keep something in mind: Both Hosni Mubarak and his successor, Mohammed Morsi, weren’t only ousted from the country’s highest office because they suppressed political and constitutional rights, writes Ben Heineman. They also fell because fitful economic reforms failed to address poverty and near-poverty, high unemployment, extremely high youth unemployment, and unchecked inflation.

Every casual reader of business news knows that JP Morgan Chase & Co. is in a world of legal hurt.  But, it is not alone.  Many other major  financial institutions — Bank of America,  Citigroup, HSBC, Barclay’s, Wells Fargo, UBS, etc. — have their share of big dollar controversies with regulators and private claimants.  The immediate news coverage is focused on the size of financial penalties for the institutions,  on the potential civil or criminal culpability of  bank officials and on the reputational harm to both the bank and its senior officers.

In President Obama's second term, the United States has an ambitious and challenging Atlantic and Pacific trade agenda which could significantly alter the architecture of the global economy.

Labor markets have for the past quarter century been at the center of the globalization disputes under the "off-shoring and out-sourcing" rubric. How many jobs were lost at home to cheap labor abroad? What were conditions for those overseas workers?

Downtown Abbey is entertainment. Its illustrious predecessor in television mega-success about the English upper class, Brideshead Revisited, is art. This distinction between entertainment and art helps explain the decline in Downton this year—it is simply not as entertaining. For those, who have a chance to see the Brideshead DVD (of the 30-year-old series) its power as art is undiminished.

The apparition of 2008 returns once more. Two recently released JP Morgan Chase (JPM) reports on the causes of the "London Whale" trading losses raise important questions about whether financial service firms can exorcise the spectral issues which were so central to the financial crisis. They read as if JPM and a key headquarters unit — the Chief Investment Office — had not learned a single lesson from the meltdown four years ago. And unfortunately, they suggest that, in our huge, complex financial institutions, major failures of organizational discipline and major losses are likely to recur, despite greater attention to risk management.

The international media have made a huge story out of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's power-consolidating decrees and the balloting on his proposed constitution. How the fundamental political disputes -- between factions of the religious and secular, Islamic and Christian, and civilian and military, and between rich and poor and urban and rural -- will be resolved in the Middle East's most populous nation is seen as a harbinger for the political impact of the Arab Spring.

Just after the New Year, President Obama will have to decide whether to take a dramatic, high-stakes gamble on a very unsexy topic: a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. It will be one of the key high-risk, high-reward choices of his second term, writes Ben Heineman.

Addressing governance and corruption in a failed state like Afghanistan would be enormously challenging if they were "just" issues of development, but the "development" of Afghanistan, of course, takes place in the midst of a fierce civil war and intense regional rivalries and interference under what most experts consider a wholly unrealistic deadline (progress by next summer).