PRESS AND PUBLICATIONS
EXPANDING THE CORPORATE OPPORTUNITY DOCTRINE
Important disclaimer: the contents are for general informativepurposes and do not constitute legal or other professional advice.Readers should seek legal or other professional advicein relation to any particular matters they may have Corporate opportunity doctrine is a legal principle rooted in case law which mandates that directors, officers and controlling shareholders......
EXPLORING THE RATIONALE BEHIND GLASS-STEAGAL
Readers, who have basic knowledge of the U.S. financial system history, have certainly heard about the famous “Glass-Steagall” Act, which was one of the measures enacted in response to the financial collapse experienced during great Depression. Due to conflict of interest concerns and due to incompatibility of high risk inherent......
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CORPORATE FIDUCIARY DUTIES: DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY OF THE CONCEPT
Important disclaimer: the contents are for general informative purposes and do not constitute legal or other professional advice. Readers should seek legal or other professional advice in relation to any particular matters they may have. More than four centuries have passed since the first corporations ever were established and respectively......
CORPORATE CHRONICLE FROM DELAWARE
It is of no secret that Delaware is the go-to jurisdiction when it comes to registering business entities in the US. To understand the magnitude of Delaware’s popularity in this area consider two of the following facts: 1) the number of businesses registered in this state exceeds its overall population.......
APPLYING COACHING TOOLS TO PUBLIC POLICY OBJECTIVES
Industrial revolutions coupled with progression of capitalism and the competitive nature of human beings has led to a society that is more than ever obsessed with goal-setting, achievement and efficiency. No wonder a new profession known as coaching has emerged in the second half of the last century and has......
CSDR MANDATORY BUY-IN REGULATIONS: WHAT THE FALLINGS-OUT ARE ABOUT
Mandatory buy-ins are one of the most controversial rules in the EU Securities Market that are set to enter into force in the near future. Ever since their adoption, the regulators and the industry participants have been in strong disagreements about their effectiveness for ensuring the safety of securities settlement......
JUDGES, DISCRETION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
Policymakers across the world have reached wide if not absolute consensus that courts are a key component to economic development. The OECD has long recognized the crucial role judicial systems play in determining economic performance by guaranteeing the security of property rights and the enforcement of contracts [1]. It occasionally......
COVID-19: Key measures taken by governments and central banks
Response to the coronavirus pandemic How Global Central Banks are Responding to COVID-19 When times get tough, central banks typically act as the first line of defense. However, modern economies are incredibly complex—and mishaps like the 2008 financial crisis have already pushed traditional policy tools to their limits. In response,......
Helicopter yes, or Helicopter no
Synopsis This is an unconventional monetary policy tool. It involves printing money and distributing it to the public. Imagine waking one morning to find extra cash in your account, a gift from your country’s central bank. But the concept of so-called helicopter money has been seriously debated by economists for......
Interest rates will fall in 2026. But will bond yields fall, too? – The Economist
In normal times the year ahead would look like a good one in which to hold government bonds. Central banks, including America’s Federal Reserve, have been cutting interest rates. Global growth has slowed and China is suffering from deflation. America’s stockmarket valuations have reached extraordinary highs from which it is......
What nostalgia for the 1990s leaves out – The Financial Times
AI-generated videos set in the 1990s and 1980s have been popping up on social media this year. In them, teenagers hang out in video shops, ride the streets on their bikes, and talk about how good life is compared with 2025.In one, a girl and boy watch the sunset on......
Euro Zone Set for Moderate Growth After Resilience in 2025 – Bloomberg
The euro-area economy will maintain its moderate expansion after weathering Donald Trump’s tariff turmoil better than expected, according to the European Commission. Output will rise 1.3% in 2025, 1.2% in 2026 and 1.4% in 2027, the European Union’s executive arm said Monday in its autumn outlook. That’s an upgrade for......
Commodity prices could hit new lows in 2026 – The Economist
Since 2020, commodity markets have been drunk on adrenaline as pandemic-era disruptions, Trump tantrums, war and sanctions rocked supply and demand. In 2026 a general sobering-up may prevail. Individual commodities will fall into one of three buckets....
The contradiction at the heart of the trillion-dollar AI race – BBC News
Google’s ultra-private CEO Sundar Pichai is showing me around Googleplex, its California headquarters. A walkway runs along the length of it, passing by a giant dinosaur skeleton, a beach volleyball pitch and dozens of Googlers lunching under the hazy November sun....
Further concerns voiced over BoE’s crypto proposals – The Banker
The Bank of England’s proposals to stem any rapid deposit outflow as consumers and businesses increasingly hold crypto assets is largely counter-productive, a Treasury committee was told by an industry panel on Tuesday....
In defence of personal finance – The Economist
Like many people, your columnist spends a lot of time looking forward to the Saturday following his payday. How could he not? It is the most exciting one of the whole month: time to update the household accounts. Separate spreadsheets monitor cash accounts, pension pots, portfolio allocations and expected returns.......
Fed Vice Chair Says Economic Trade-Offs Justify Lowering Rates Slowly – WSJ
Federal Reserve officials face a challenge resolving differences over how to set interest rates with little new economic data to guide tricky judgment calls. Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson offered a case study in the central bank’s predicament on Monday, acknowledging the risk of stubborn inflation and weaker employment conditions—dueling......
The Job Market Is Heating Up — for Jobs That People Usually Don’t Want – WSJ
Jobseekers can’t be choosy in today’s stalling US labor market. Even when the job is flagging traffic for 12 hours in the Atlanta sun.Two years ago, the chief executive officer of AQC Traffic Control fielded around 10 applications a week for long shifts directing motorists to stop or slow down......
Invest in crypto? Here’s what to know about your 2025 taxes – CNN
When it comes to voluntarily paying taxes on time to the IRS, crypto investors may not have a great record. At least, not according to an IRS review from 2023, which showed “the potential for” a mere 25% compliance rate. Translation: Only about a quarter of crypto investors are likely......
OpenAI’s New Model Just Got Much Better At Writing More Secure Code – Forbes
When OpenAI launched its latest version of its chatbot GPT-5 in August, CEO Sam Altman boasted of its “PHD” level abilities. A flood of complaints soon rolled in about its lack of conversational warmth and a dearth in obvious improvements, and Altman later conceded the release had been “screwed up.”...
Crypto market sheds $1.2tn as traders shun speculative assets – The Financial Times
More than $1tn has been wiped from the cryptocurrency market in the past six weeks as concerns about lofty tech valuations and the path of US interest rates have fuelled a sell-off in speculative assets...
Global trade will continue, but will become more complex – The Economist
It was a bruising year for free trade. Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” in April 2025 sent shockwaves worldwide, as tariffs hit allies and rivals alike. His announcement shattered what remained of the rules-based trading system, exposing the weakness of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and confirming America’s retreat as its......
Wall Street Blows Past Bubble Worries to Supercharge AI Spending Frenzy – WSJ
Not long ago, Blue Owl Capital OWL -1.35% was an upstart investment firm that lent money to midsize U.S. companies such as Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. These days, the firm is financing massive data centers costing tens of billions of dollars for the likes of Meta and Oracle—a sign of......
The battle over stablecoins will reach fever pitch – The Economist
For issuers of stablecoins, the buzziest part of the crypto world, 2025 was a great year. The incoming American administration was markedly more pro-crypto than its predecessors. The market grew by more than 50%, rising to $310bn in total. Standard Chartered, a bank, says it could reach $2trn by 2028....
Why Bonds Are on Pace for the Best Returns in Five Years – WSJ
Almost everything has lined up for bonds lately. Job growth and consumer spending are slowing, keeping hopes for further interest-rate cuts alive, but not pointing to an imminent recession. Inflation pressures have continued to moderate, despite fears that tariffs would drive prices higher....
Private credit pushing reinsurers into riskier business, industry warns – The Financial Times
A flood of capital from private credit firms is pushing reinsurers into taking on riskier business through more lightly regulated intermediaries, industry bosses told the Financial Times. Private capital firms have been muscling into the $2tn property and casualty sector with direct acquisitions, and by providing reinsurance capital through asset......
Global uncertainty is here to stay, says the head of the IMF – The Economist
The world economy has proven more resilient than many feared. The nightmare of an all-out trade war has so far been averted, as has a global recession. Businesses are adapting to trade disruption. Past reforms, especially in emerging markets, have helped countries manage in a fast-changing landscape....
Government Will Release Delayed Jobs Report on Thursday – WSJ
The reopened federal government on Thursday will release the first backlogged monthly jobs report, for the month of September. And a flood of other data is due to start flowing soon. There is pent-up demand for new numbers after the longest shutdown on record—topping six weeks—delayed a critical batch of......
Google bets €5.5 billion on Germany’s AI future – EuroNews
The tech giant is making its biggest European investment yet and ensuring it dominates AI-related technologies in the continent’s biggest economy.The tech giant on Monday unveiled a €5.5 billion investment package that will stretch through 2029, expanding its cloud and AI infrastructure and establishing a major foothold in Europe....
Circular Flow Model: Definition and Calculation
The circular flow model demonstrates how money moves through society. It flows from producers to workers as wages and flows back to producers as payment for products. An economy is an endless circular flow of money....
AI Agents Threaten Free Societies
Accountability for one’s actions is a bedrock principle of any society built on the rule of law. Yet while we understand human autonomy and the responsibilities that come with it, the workings of machine autonomy lie beyond our comprehension, making AI agents an obvious risk to democratic governance....
PODCAST: Gordon Hanson on Shifting Trade Alliances
It’s not unusual for countries to reevaluate trade relationships as the global economy evolves. However, the persistent uncertainty brought on by tariffs has prompted entire regions to reconsider long-established alliances and rethink new ones that were unimaginable only a year ago. ...
What is the Influencer Economy
In recent years, influencer marketing has emerged as a formidable force within the broader landscape of digital marketing. This phenomenon can be traced back to the early days of social media, where individuals began to cultivate personal brands and amassed followers through engaging content. As platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and......
Fiscal Rules Foster Stability as Spending Pressures Grow
Prudent anchors, corrective mechanisms, and supportive institutions can help countries comply with their fiscal rules and commit to sound public finances...
PODCAST: At The Money: Automate Your Investing
Have you taken full advantage of automating your investments? You can improve your returns, reduce emotional decision-making, and generally end up with better results simply by putting your investing on autopilot. Jeffrey Ptak is the managing director at Morningstar. Previously, he was the chief ratings officer. ...
Adam Smith and the Moral Economy We Have Lost
Adam Smith favored neither state socialism nor unbridled markets, but something subtler: a moral economy grounded in sympathy and the pursuit of human flourishing. In a world where markets look increasingly unmoored from ethics, we could do worse than to revisit what the “founding father” of economics actually wrote....
The rise of the reliable, resilient data centre
Data centres are essential to digital technology, and their numbers are growing, driven by the expansion of cloud computing and AI. Global demand is set to grow at a CAGR of 8.5 per cent to 2030 according to a recent report – and that may be a conservative estimate....
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933: Definition, Effects, and Repeal
The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 forced commercial banks to refrain from investment banking activities to protect depositors from potential losses through stock speculation. Glass-Steagall aimed to prevent a repeat of the 1929 stock market crash and the wave of commercial bank failures....
What Does the Market Really Think About AI?
Despite all the enthusiasm for AI, which has undoubtedly demonstrated impressive capabilities, the signal from bond markets suggests that investors are unconvinced that the technology will generate sustained or widespread growth, let alone a more extreme positive or negative outcome. What accounts for this disconnect?...
PODCAST: Weight distribution: how GLP-1s are going global
Ahandpicked article read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. A new wave of weight-loss drugs is spreading beyond the rich world. As patents expire, the treatments could transform health care for millions in poorer countries....
What is AI, how does it work and why are some people concerned about it?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly become part of everyday life over the past decade. It is being used to personalise social media feeds, spot friends and family in smartphone photos and pave the way for medical breakthroughs. But the rise of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta AI has been......
Measuring AI’s Economic Impact
Despite the hype and vast sums pouring into AI, we still lack convincing evidence that it is transforming the global economy or boosting productivity and growth. Without reliable data on its uses and benefits, we cannot tell whether we are witnessing a genuine transformation or yet another speculative bubble....
PODCAST: OpenAI’s long-awaited restructuring deal
OpenAI said it had completed a long-awaited restructuring, and Tesla’s chair has stepped up her campaign to win shareholder support for Elon Musk’s $1tn pay package. Plus, South Korea’s Kospi is the world’s top-performing major stock index by far this year....
How Education and Training Affect the Economy
As the labor supply increases, the wage rate experiences downward pressure. If demand for labor doesn’t keep up with the labor supply, then wages usually fall. An excess supply of workers is particularly harmful to employees working in industries with low barriers to entry for new employees—that is, those with......
What is a Financial Instrument?
Financial instruments are contracts for monetary assets that can be purchased, traded, created, modified, or settled for. In terms of contracts, there is a contractual obligation between involved parties during a financial instrument transaction....
PODCAST: Gita Gopinath: an interview with the former second in command at the IMF Gita Gopinath: an interview with the...
The coronavirus pandemic, war in Europe and the perpetual problem that is Argentina have made the last few years some of the most tumultuous in the International Monetary Fund’s history. As the fund’s chief economist, then as First Deputy Managing Director, Gita Gopinath was in the middle of the upheaval....
Will AI Bury Future Generations in Cognitive Debt?
As companies seek to automate repetitive tasks in the name of cost-cutting, they should consider the longer-term implications. If we transfer all codified knowledge to machines, we will bequeath to future generations a world where it will be ever harder to learn by doing, to achieve mastery, and thus to......
Who is most affected by inflation? Consider the source
For the first time in years, inflation has surged across the world. In the U.S. and Europe, consumer prices grew in 2022 by almost 9 percent after years of inflation rates around 2 percent or less.[1] This surge has reignited interest in a longstanding question: Who is most hurt by......
PODCAST: Demystifying the CIO and Board Relationship
Tech leaders and boards are teaming up to transform businesses. Nationwide Board Member Sara Tucker and Jim Fowler, Nationwide EVP and CTO, take us behind the scenes to show how it can be done. Together they explore skills tech execs should have to make it happen....
AT1: Investors’ Risky Bets that Keep the Banks Running (by Hayk Khekoyan)
When you hear the word CoCo you probably think of a leather bag with the famous Chanel logo on it, or the 2017 critically acclaimed and commercially successful animated movie of the same name. What you probably do not think about is a complex financial instrument, created with the purpose......
Is Artificial Intelligence Going to Replace Us All? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Nowadays it seems borderline impossible to spend even a few hours without coming across the subject of “Artificial Intelligence”. There is just way too much talk, hype, arguments, doomsday prophecies or bold optimistic statements on how this or that technological advancement or tool, or AI in general is going to......
Did the 2022 World Cup Really Cost More than All the Previous Ones Combined? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
As the World Cup final is played in Lusail, a city that did not even exist a few years ago, Qatar 2022 will go down in the history books for many reasons, not all of them exactly football‑related. Nothing in the world exists as a separate entity in a vacuum:......
The Growing Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Business (by Hayk Khekoyan)
These days it is borderline impossible to spend a day in the business world without hearing the phrase “emotional intelligence”, its abbreviation “EI” or the closely related term “EQ” (emotional quotient, similar to intelligence quotient colloquially known as IQ). While the concept of emotional intelligence is becoming increasingly prevalent throughout......
The Streaming Wars: Part 2 (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Last year I wrote about the so-called “Streaming Wars”. This term is used to describe the process of the rising number of streaming video on demand (VOD) services from all sorts of corporations trying to position themselves in an ever-growing and yet such a tight market. The world is a......
Working Less or Working Smarter and Better? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Work less, earn more. That is the plan for most people. Barring the rare cases of people actually loving their work, for most of us a job is simply a means to survive. If you haven’t won the genetic lottery to be born into outrageous wealth, just staying alive requires......
To the Moon or to the Ground? The Jury is Still Out on Bitcoin (by Hayk Khekoyan)
Bitcoin is back. Back to inexplicably losing more than half of its value in six months, back to being one of the biggest controversies in the world, but definitely not back to its all-time highs of more than $60,000 achieved twice during 2021. “When you find yourself in a hole,......
How to Increase Savings in Armenia (by Alexandra Ouzounian from The Pingry School, New Jersey)
Financial literacy is broadly defined as an individual’s financial knowledge and ability to use financial tools to execute his or her financial goals. The people of Armenia demonstrate a level of financial literacy (Figure 1) and gross savings rate (Figure 2) that is lower than the average financial literacy of......
Personal data protection: EU perspective (by Diana Javadyan)
Nowadays, more than ever, data protection issues are actual and crucial in terms of both data protection standard setting and data protection standard implementation. Recent Fintech developments, e-communities, artificial intelligence application and other technological advancements throughout the world bring up the need of robust data protection framework and protected data......
The Streaming Wars that will Shape the Future of Entertainment (by Hayk Khekoyan)
When the CEOs of Netflix and Blockbuster met in the distant year 2000 to discuss a merger between the two, Netflix was a 3-year-old company valuing itself at a measly $50 mln compared to Blockbuster’s market capitalization of around $5 bln (Sloan, 2020). Perhaps, having taken note of the phrase......
Why You Should Consider Learning Cybersecurity (by Hayk Khekoyan)
3.12 million. This is the estimated number of cybersecurity specialists needed globally as cyberattacks around the world keep growing in both frequency and magnitude (Duffy, 2021). The last few months alone have seen some of the biggest security breaches in history, more on which later. The most important development in the......
Will Energy Ever Be the Same Again? (by Hayk Khekoyan)
As recently as the year 2013, the largest publicly traded corporation in the world was an oil company. Exxon Mobil had a market capitalization well north of $400 bln at the time, which was quite the feat considering there were no trillion-dollar companies in the world yet. Fast forward......
A Possible Future of Money (by Hayk Khekoyan)
If you have not spent the last few years in a cave or on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the words cryptocurrency or digital currency should sound familiar. I will not pretend to know or try to explain all the details of the technology behind Bitcoin,......
The Simple, Yet Quite Complex Global Issue (by Hayk Khekoyan)
For almost a week in the end of March one of the most important marine routes of the world was blocked by a giant vessel, approximately matching in size with New York’s famous Empire State Building. It took almost another week after the vessel was removed for the traffic jam......
The Consequences of the Mass Investment Platforms (by Hayk Khekoyan)
By January 11 not as many people had heard about the American company Gamestop as they have today. As of January 11 Gamestop cost around 1.5 billion USD and was a network of computer games and electronics’ stores situated in several states of the USA as well as in a......
Why We Need Governments (by Hayk Khekoyan)
The man regarded as the father of economics devoted a great deal of time and a big chunk of his work talking about how free markets produce the best outcomes for everyone involved. Adam Smith, in his book “The Wealth of Nations”, told us about the invisible hand that guides......