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I’ve got a short piece about organised crime on the Guardian’s blog Comment is Free. From the intro:
The annual report from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, published yesterday, is a mix of self-congratulation and spectacular underachievement. While the rhetoric from politicians has been to get tough on organised crime, the reality is more humbling: we [...]

Tomorrow the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will publish its annual report/ threat assessment. It will make for uncomfortable reading at the Home Office and No.10. The Agency is not living up to the great expectations officials placed upon it in 2006. In the febrile political atmosphere of Westminster you can be sure the Conservative [...]

From a piece on the credit crunch in the current London Review of Books, the sort of opening that you find yourself reading more than once…
Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St [...]

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

I’ve just published a new Chatham House paper on why food prices are rising and what it means for development: download it here.
One of the paper’s main arguments is that we need to make sure that the urgent doesn’t crowd out the essential in discussions of global food strategies: immediate action on humanitarian assistance needs to [...]

Interesting times for the peak oil debate.  Last week came the news that Russian oil had peaked: its Q1 oil production in 2008 fell, for the first time in a decade.  Later in the week, oil touched a new all-time high of $117 after Nigerian insurgents attacked a Shell pipeline there.
And today, the news emerges [...]

So far, most of the consensus on what to do about food prices is (as you might expect) strongly focused on the short term: measures like spending more cash on humanitarian aid, or building up social protection systems for the poorest and most at risk.  But one medium term measure also seems to command widespread [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

We’re now in the point-the-finger phase of the present financial crisis. The G7 says its all the banks’ faults, and wants to increase their capital adequacy requirements. The banks say its nobody’s fault, and want governments to bail them out. Many economists say its Alan Greenspan’s fault for cutting rates so low and for [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Martin Wolf penned an FT op-ed proclaiming that the rescue of Bear Stearns “marked liberalisation’s limit”.  We should remember Friday March 14th 2008, he said, for it was “the day the dream of global free- market capitalism died”: 
For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision [...]

Below the jump, Alex and my talk at last weekend’s Progressive Governance summit - it’s a four minute summary of our paper on multilateralism and global risks.

I’m a big fan of Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim - he was the first person to spot the potential for China’s Olympics to become a debacle, for instance - but I was left a bit cold by his LA Times article yesterday on the pressures that accompany the emergence of a truly global middle [...]

In our Progressive Governance paper, Alex and I argued that ad hoc ‘shared platforms’ are a vital part of the management of a globalised world, particularly at times of rapid change. In Newsweek, David Rothkopf provides a glimpse of how these platforms have swung into action during the current financial meltdown:
To get a sense of [...]

Nouriel Roubini wins the prize for metaphor of the week: will the US recession be shaped like a V (short and shallow), a U (a bit more sustained at the bottom, but with recovery after 12-18 months); a W (a double dip, in other words) - or, horror, an L (a protracted slump like Japan’s [...]

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On Saturday, Alex and I presented our paper on multilateralism and global risks to heads of state at the Progressive [...]

As David mentioned yesterday, Downing Street’s asked us to prepare a paper on reform of international institutions and present it to various heads of state and international agencies at tomorrow’s Progressive Governance Summit outside London. 
Our central argument is that the international system’s core challenge is to get better at managing global risks like climate change, [...]

On Saturday, Alex and I will be at the Progressive Governance Summit, where we’ll be presenting a new paper on multilateralism and global risks to twenty or so heads of state.
The summit’s website has just been launched on the Downing Street domain. Our paper will be published there on Saturday morning. Hopefully, we’ll have a [...]

Record commodities prices have given countries like China, Singapore, Russia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and UAE control over trillions of dollars, which they have stowed away in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), that are now hovering over the global financial system like mighty hoovers, sucking up whatever assets cross their path.
The SWFs have, in the last 12 [...]

I was astounded to read today of the FSB’s arrest of Ilya Zaslavsky, who’s a manager at TNK-BP in Moscow, and also the organizer of the Russian branch of the Oxford Alumni, on charges of industrial espionage.
The Russian-Oxford alumni association held monthly drinks in Moscow, which I went along to a few times. Can’t say [...]

Back in September 2002, I wrote a cover story for Euromoney called ‘The End of Unfettered Capitalism’. I interviewed various wise sages of finance (Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros, er…Ann Pettifor) who opined to me of the end of neo-liberalism and the need for a new economic model.
Back then, in the aftermath of Enron [...]

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