The Longest Run

I had the great fortune while at an Executive Education course at Harvard Business School last week to participate in a case discussion with Professor Rawi Abdelal , an expert in international political economy. We studied a case concerning the U.S. current account deficit and the various causes and effects of the issues now affecting the global economy. It would be hard to put in a nutshell everything that was covered, so I'll just share what I left the room thinking about. First, the fact that the savings rate in the U.S. is zero is extremely unhealthy and Americans need to start saving more (understandably hard to do when incomes are stagnant/falling and unemployment is rising). Second, solving the problems will be incredibly difficult and complex because it is likely to require close coordination of many countries around the world and such coordination is difficult under the best of circumstances; in addition, for Americans to save more, we will need to spend less - which doesn...

A couple of years ago we published a book by George Friedman , founder of a private intelligence service called Stratfor . Leading up to Friday night's presidential debate, Stratfor is running a series of articles The first article, The New President and the Global Landscape , was posted yesterday. It's a great overview of the range of issues the next president will face, how they are interrelated, and what options the President will have to address them. Definitely worth a read.