Latest news with #think tanks
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
China Tells Brokers to Stop Touting Stablecoins to Cool Frenzy
China told local brokers and other bodies to stop publishing research or hold seminars to promote stablecoins, seeking to rein in the asset class to avoid instability. Some leading brokerages and think tanks in late July and earlier this month received guidance from financial regulators, urging them to cancel seminars and halt disseminating research on stablecoins, people familiar with the matter said.
Russia Today
2 days ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
‘Democracy' is the new colonialism
A ballot floats through the air like a mechanical butterfly, delicate in descent, but once it touches ground, everything freezes. The jungle goes mute. The city forgets its language. A ritual begins: one created not in oracle chambers but in air-conditioned think tanks with sliding doors and corporate logos. Democracy arrives as gospel, prepackaged and barcode-approved, dropped from drones or delivered via diplomatic pouch. It conquers like a parasite: nesting in the heart, feeding on belief, and killing the host with false promises. It persuades, it seduces, it infects. Men in suits descend like missionaries, their scriptures printed on glossy paper, their symbols cleaned for export. They bring PowerPoints and gender training modules instead of muskets. They come bearing good news: sovereignty is obsolete, local gods are outdated, and every village will be updated with Wi-Fi and murals of unveiled women raising fists beneath UN slogans. The savannah no longer trembles under the boots of British redcoats. It shudders under the impact of slogans. 'Civic engagement' is murmured like a spell. 'Open society' is etched into blackboards where elders once traced cosmologies. The thunder of artillery has been replaced by keynote addresses. A revolution is rehearsed before it is broadcast. The new coup comes dressed for television. The old king disappears, replaced by a consensus candidate with a Yale degree and NATO approval. A constitution is unveiled like a luxury car: shiny, expensive, foreign. No one reads it. It reads them. The people applaud. Their applause is scheduled. The tyrant's head is displayed: pixelated and streaming. Laugh tracks rise. Purple ink stains the skin like a holy mark, as if casting a vote could cleanse the past and summon salvation. A sacred document lies open, its pages humming with subclauses and subversion. Article 1: Surrender to the algorithm. Article 2: Sterilize the folk soul. Article 3: Criminalize memory. The priests of procedure nod. They light candles made from recycled narratives. They chant slogans curated by Silicon Valley. The TED talk tone becomes the new church service – blessed by click-through rates. Buzzwords are incanted: 'resilience,' 'visibility,' 'empowerment.' Words hollowed out and worn like medals. The empire has remodeled. It is clad in linen. It carries clipboards. Its armies are task forces. Its tanks are now lettered agencies: USAID, UNHCR, OSCE. Smiles replace bayonets, and seminars replace firing squads. Democracy arrives on a private jet with an Instagram account. Its viceroys order oat-milk lattes while planning cultural transformations. A rainbow banner flies over every blasted zone. Baghdad bleeds beneath the missiles. Tripoli hums with foreign NGOs. Kiev hosts parades that mock its soil. Sacred ruins get rebranded. Temple stones are reused for embassy courtyards. The rituals change. The domination remains. In a village, a woman sings an ancestral tune. A man offers a prayer in a dialect that has no Unicode. A stone is lifted to rebuild a shrine. These things cannot be allowed. A survey is conducted. A briefing is written. A donor threatens. The local minister corrects course. An election is held. The outcome is known. It always is. This is what they call consent. This is what they mean by freedom. Uniformity parades as universality. Diversity becomes deletion. Identity is redesigned by foreign interns. Language becomes emoji. The dead are archived. Museums replace tombs. Grandfathers are described in footnotes written by their enemies. Tears fall in exhibition halls where relics of resistance are sanitized. The conquerors mourn – always in public, always with cameras. Their grief is a spectacle. Their mercy is management. The liberal preacher wears a smile that has been photoshopped. He gives interviews about 'trauma' and 'tolerance.' He never wields a sword; he commissions reports. His gospel: guilt without end. His miracle: the regeneration of conflict. His sacraments are embargoes and media campaigns. He baptizes children in ideology. He breathes in incense made from treaties and sanctions. He sings a hymn with verses about gender fluidity and carbon offset credits. His voice, thin and sweet, drowns entire cultures in its syrup. Yet across the map, the earth remembers. Forests speak in rustling defiance. Mountains echo with chants unscripted. The Danube shivers beneath steel bridges. The Volga murmurs secrets to the steppe. Across Eurasia, across Africa, across the zones marked 'developing,' something stirs. Trump does not rise as emperor; he crashes through the screen like a malfunction, an interruption in the broadcast. Serbia remembers its ruins. Iran cradles its martyrs. Russia bares its teeth. Hungary builds walls – not out of fear but out of fidelity to her own. Multipolarity emerges, not like a plan but like a rite remembered. It does not wait for validation. It speaks in a hundred dialects, none requiring translation. It holds torches, not flashlights. It charts no global roadmap. It builds thresholds. It invokes gods buried under glass towers. It honors spirits banned from textbooks. In each land, new mythologies are forged from the ruins of development. The ballot box is abandoned, its promise of mechanical salvation discarded. In its place stands the stone of ancestral law, stained with sacrifice and inscribed with the unspoken codes of blood, land, and loyalty. So let the ballots fall, let the slogans swirl like ash in the wind. Let the consultants keep writing. None of it halts the return. The sacred pulses again in veins unmapped by Western metrics. Democracy, once garlanded as deliverance, strips down and stands revealed: an agent of extraction, a theater of consent. Multipolarity does not debate it. Multipolarity replaces it – with stone, with flame, with song. The world moves again, towards the myth reborn.
South China Morning Post
5 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
China needs smarter, not less, investment to unlock household demand
'Boosting consumption' has become one of the most familiar refrains when it comes to discussing China's economy. From official statements to think tank reports, the idea that China must pivot away from its decades-long reliance on investment and exports towards a more consumer-driven model has gained near-universal traction. However, this growing consensus risks simplifying a far more complex question: what exactly is the role of consumption in China's growth, and is its perceived weakness truly the root of the country's economic challenges? China's supposed failure to unlock household demand is viewed not just as an internal policy misstep – it's the structural flaw underpinning everything from global overcapacity to unfair trade advantage. Critics argue that Beijing's preference for supply-side expansion – more factories, more infrastructure, more exports – has crowded out domestic demand at the expense of foreign producers, justifying protectionist responses In more ideological corners, this economic trajectory is portrayed as the result of a development playbook that prioritises national power and industrial dominance over household welfare. The implication is clear: China will never become a 'normal' consumer-driven economy because it lacks the political incentives to do so. Ironically, even within China, the post-Covid policy discourse has begun to echo this narrative. Since 2022, 'expanding domestic demand' has re-emerged as a central theme of economic policymaking. That shift has been welcomed by many economists, who view it as overdue recognition that China must transition from an investment-led growth model to a more balanced one. Moreover, in public perception, building a 'consumption-oriented economy' has begun to sound like the end goal in itself – a necessary badge of economic maturity and a way for China to finally enter the ranks of developed economies.
