Written By: Jay Mistry

31.46 trillion dollars. You may be wondering what this figure is, one thing is for certain that this is a significant amount of money. This figure is the amount of money that the United States of America owes to its creditors. In recent history, the USA has been the biggest economy in the world, with a GDP of 23.32 trillion dollars (1). Along with being the biggest economy in the world, it also carries the most debt. In 1917, the United States came up with a measure to control the amount of debt the nation can surmount called the debt ceiling (2). In theory, this should keep a nation’s finance in line, but this can have some significant consequences on both the USA and the global economy.

Continue reading…

Written By: Gurkomal Gill 

While the market was fixated on the interest rate hikes, March 2023 began with a string of 4 back-to-back bank failures in the United States. After Washington Mutual’s fall in 2008, First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapses were the second, third and fourth largest banking collapses in US, respectively (1). Bank runs and liquidity troubles were the start of woes for these banks. The panic among investors and swift withdrawals exposed the underlying liquidity crisis. This article dives into the developments unique to each bank and explores the commonalities that led to the crises.

Continue reading…

Written By: Sneha Elavarasan

The problem of ethnic division and civil conflict in developing countries is a complex issue with deep historical roots. The West African country of Côte d’Ivoire is no exception. Since its independence from France in 1960 the country has faced ethnic conflicts resulting in devastating civil wars and political instability. This article analyzes the causes of ethnic conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and recommends actionable proposals to resolve the conflict.

Continue reading…

Written By: Finn O’Connor

After forming the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Mao attempted to rapidly develop China’ economy through a series of centrally administered 5-year plans based on the Stalinist industrial policy. The most famous of these plans is the second one between 1958 and 1962, commonly referred to as the Great Leap Forward (GLF). These plans came at an enormous economic and social cost, resulting in the death of between 15 and 55 million people through one of, if not, the largest famine in history. The failure of Mao’s economic policy led him to double-down on the Chinese Communist Party’s social control, purging dissidents and rewriting Chinese history through the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. After the Chairman’s death and subsequent reorganization of power within the CCP, Deng Xiaoping undertook broad economic reforms that moved the Chinese economy away from its command structure to a more free-market approach through the household responsibility and Town-Village Enterprise (TVE) programs that stimulated market-driven economic growth. Paired with an opening-up policy that ended decades of economic isolation from the world economy, Deng cultivated some of the most rapid development in history, setting the PRC on track to become one of the strongest of today’s economies.  Continue reading…

Written By: Finn O’Connor

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report released in late March has once again spurred discussion on how we can reconcile humanity’s massive consumption with the relative continuation of our way of life (1). One solution that has long been discussed is the possibility of harnessing resources outside the terrestrial ecosystem to bolster our scarce supply. The most attractive place to start this process is with asteroids; mineral-rich rocks that orbit our sun. Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries cropped up in recent years intending to harvest asteroids for their resources and transport them back to Earth. However, they have barely begun the exploratory stage, where probes are sent to assess the composition of target asteroids (2). Continue reading…