4 Items

British Prime Minister Theresa May and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte pose for the media ahead of their meeting in The Hague, Netherlands, Monday, Oct. 10, 2016.

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Theresa May’s Abbanomics and Brexit’s new class war

| October 10, 2016

“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”

Those were the key words of a speech by Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last week. My response — as a fully paid-up member of the rootless cosmopolitan class — was: Ooh la la!

Welcome to the new class war, Brexit edition.

On one side, the citizens of the world — the Weltbürger — who are only citizens in the sense that Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was a citizen. We have at least two passports. We speak at least three languages. And we have at least four homes, not one of them in the town where we were born.

President Barack Obama talks with China's President Hu Jintao at the start of the morning plenary session at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Friday, Sept. 25, 2009.

AP Photo

Magazine Article - American Interest

What 'Chimerica' Hath Wrought

| January/February 2010

"For a time, [Chimerica] was a symbiotic relationship that seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Put simply, one half did the saving, the other half the spending. Comparing net national savings as a proportion of Gross National Income, American savings declined from above 5 percent in the mid 1990s to virtually zero by 2005, while Chinese savings surged from below 30 percent to nearly 45 percent. This divergence in saving patterns allowed a tremendous explosion of debt in the United States, for one effect of the Asian "savings glut" was to make it much cheaper for households to borrow money than would otherwise have been the case."

President Barack Obama speaks at a town hall style event with Chinese youths at the Museum of Science and Technology in Shanghai, China, Nov. 16, 2009.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - The New York Times

The Great Wallop

| November 16, 2009

"A few years ago we came up with the term "Chimerica" to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy," says Niall Ferguson member of the Belfer Center's board of directors. "Correcting the economic imbalance between the United States and China - the dissolution of Chimerica - is now indispensable if equilibrium is to be restored to the world economy."