The Russian Ruble Goes for Gold

The following is a guest post from Blake Hall, a senior majoring in Political Science-Economics at Anderson University. He is preparing to begin graduate study in business. His research interests include global finance, global political economy, investment strategy, and emerging markets. You can follow him on Twitter @SBHall765.

Lights. Camera. Action. The Sochi Winter Games began Thursday with the opening ceremony scheduled for Friday evening. What a spectacle for Russia and my key player is the Russian Ruble, will it be able to achieve gold as direct result of the games or will it be another drag/bust on the already ailing economy?

Ruchir Sharma's "Breakout Nations"

As someone who teaches regularly on global economic interconnection, trying to find meaningful, book-length treatments of contemporary markets that are written for a broad audience is important to me. Even when there is a lot to be critiqued in a work, the efforts are valuable. Among the more popular examples of such a work is Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American World, which discussed the "rise of the rest" relative to the developed economies, and even made a brief cameo as a debate point in the 2012 presidential campaign.

I am pleased to report that Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations is a worthy successor to Zakaria’s snapshot of the state of the global economy. Despite some notable flaws, Sharma’s work is ambitious and informed. It has much to critique precisely because it is so ambitious. Sharma’s major conclusions are spot on, though I still have unanswered questions.

Stuck in the Middle: Protests in Brazil and Turkey

Emerging markets, middle powers, whatever term you want to use to describe countries on the relative rise in terms of power, the bottom line is that two of the poster children for the new century are seeing some growing pains. Brazil and Turkey, along with other countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, are growing in terms of both their stock markets and their geopolitical significance. But, as recent events have shown, something is afoot in the middle powers.