by John E. Charalambakis | Apr 14, 2014 | Commentaries
What a week! It had everything. The Greek bond offering was oversubscribed four times while the Chinese bond auction failed! This is great, isn’t it? Greece is the new China. The problem is that China is a bubble, and we all know that sooner or later bubbles burst....
by John E. Charalambakis | Mar 20, 2014 | Commentaries
I landed in St. Petersburg around midnight. Got into a taxi (an old Volga bought by the driver in former Eastern Germany when he was serving there on a special assignment) and we started driving toward the hotel. The driver’s name was Nitup. From the very start the...
by John E. Charalambakis | Mar 13, 2014 | Commentaries
In 1940, the then Soviet Union overthrew the governments of the Baltic nations (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania), rigged the elections, and forced the newly “elected” governments to request admission into the USSR. Today’s Russia plans to annex the Crimea region after...
by John E. Charalambakis | Mar 4, 2014 | Commentaries
The first part of the title above – meaning “I came, I saw, I conquered” – was pronounced by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C. when he emerged victorious over Pharnaces, the king of Pontus. The second part is taken from Virgil and means “Why should fear seize the...
by John E. Charalambakis | Feb 23, 2014 | Commentaries
More than twenty years ago, the late Samuel Huntington coined the phrase “Democracy’s Third Wave”. By that Huntington described the three phases/waves of democratic revolution that the world has experienced, starting with the Jacksonian democracy in the US in the 19th...