Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Confucius Institutes quietly disappear from six Australian universities By foreign affairs reporter  Stephen Dziedzic  and national education and parenting reporter  Conor Duffy A University of Queensland spokesperson says an agreement with Tianjin University to run its Confucius Institute concluded at the end of last year. (ABC News: Giulio Saggin) In short: Nearly half of the Australian universities with Chinese government-linked Confucius Institutes on their campuses have cut ties with the controversial education centres. Some cited the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as the main reason for their exit, while an expert says the government's concerns around foreign interference were also "likely to be one factor". What's next? Seven Confucius Institutes remain open, but Queensland University of Technology (QUT) says the arrangement will be reviewed next year. Six Australian universities have now closed Chinese government-linked Confucius Institutes on their campus...

  La Cina corteggia i suoi vicini ma il Pentagono avverte: difenderemo Taiwan 31 marzo 2025, 17:02 - Aggiornata il 31 marzo 2025 , 17:31 Ascolta l'articolo 9 min i La priorità per gli Usa: sbarrare la strada alla Cina qualora tenti l’annessione di Taiwan. Ma per averne i mezzi la Difesa dev’essere disposta a «prendersi dei rischi in Europa», ovvero ridurre le forze dispiegate nelle basi Nato e le risorse dedicate alla protezione del Vecchio Continente Arrivare in Giappone in questi giorni significa assistere all’altra faccia dello shock-Trump:  visto dall’Estremo Oriente . Il trattamento riservato agli europei – sia sui dazi che sul fronte militare – fa temere agli alleati storici in Asia di non poter più contare sulla protezione americana.  Xi Jinping ne approfitta per lanciare un’offensiva della seduzione:  nell’arco di una settimana ben due vertici triangolari Cina-Giappone-Corea del Sud, si sono tenuti qui a Tokyo. Ed ecco che da Washington, con singolare tempism...

  Trump and the Fed Are on a Collision Course The US economy is heading for “fiscal dominance.” That isn’t good. 31 March 2025 at 10:30 pm AEDT That was then. Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images North America Save Translate 5:40 The threat of “fiscal dominance” has been of mainly academic interest in recent decades, at least as far as advanced economies are concerned. People came to take for granted that central banks and monetary policy led the way on short-term macroeconomic policy, acting independently of governments to discharge their price-stability mandate and obliging fiscal policy to fall into line for stabilization purposes. This presumption of monetary dominance, if you will, has worked well, keeping inflation low at relatively little cost. Which is why it became so entrenched. Before much longer, the US seems likely to cast it aside. The conditions for fiscal dominance — when a central bank’s ability to control inflation through monetary policy is effectively negated...

  The realpolitik of Trump’s tariffs Rana Foroohar rana.foroohar@ft.com · 31 Mar 2025 T-day — or Tariff Day — is coming this week. Or not. We simply won’t know until it’s here, given that President Donald Trump changes his mind about policy daily. But assuming reciprocal tariffs do go into effect, it’s worth thinking about them as Trump himself probably does. Economists might fret about their inflationary effects, but Trump isn’t motivated by classical economic theory. To the extent that he thinks about tariffs in purely economic terms at all, he would look at the evidence of the increased tariffs against China during his first term, between 2018 and 2019, and note that, even though these represented a material adjustment in rates, they had minimal inflationary effect. As Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it in his now infamous report “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System”, the result of these tariffs was that “the dollar ros...

  It’s time for the EU to solve its Orbán problem Mujtaba Rahman The writer is managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group · 31 Mar 2025 The EU has a long-standing Viktor Orbán problem. For many years, it has proved to be manageable. Now it is life-threatening. US President Donald Trump’s strategic goal of normalising relations with Russia and shifting his focus to China and the Indo-Pacific means disengagement from Europe — certainly from Ukraine, and possibly from Nato. This will destabilise the EU. That may be something that this US administration can accept; it may even be its aim. Yet senior EU officials view the Ukraine war as existential. They argue there is no reason to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin, now enabled by Trump, will stop at Ukraine if he is successful there. French President Emmanuel Macron and Sir Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, hope Putin’s ambitions can be contained, working in partnership with the US. Yet the truth is the US is unlikely to p...

  How to Prepare Your Portfolio for the Next Market Mess Much of the insurance provided by any investment depends on how other people react.   Photo:  Jeenah Moon/Reuters What happens if it all goes wrong? Investments designed to preserve your wealth in a  stock-market downturn  can help preserve your sanity too, allowing you to avoid dumping your favorite stocks as prices tumble. But finding this market insurance has become harder, with Treasurys and perhaps even the dollar no longer offering the protection they used to. No wonder gold is up so much. The basic problem: Much of the insurance provided by any investment depends on how other people react. A secondary issue that’s particularly important for Treasurys is the new era of inflation sensitivity. The selloff  since the S&P 500 peaked in mid-February is illustrative of what’s meant to happen, and what’s not. Treasurys did what they are supposed to do, and profited as stocks fell. The dollar didn’t...

  Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder JD Vance speaks at the US military's Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, 28 March 2025. Photograph: Jim Watson/AP No one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit of his office.” – Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes Elon Musk and  Donald Trump  inherited a state with unprecedented power and functionality, and are taking it apart. They also inherited a set of alliances and relationships that underpinned the largest economy in world history. This too they are breaking. The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited a US base in Greenland for  three hours on Friday , along with his wife. National security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife also went along. Fresh from  using an unsafe social media platform  to carry out an entirely unnecessary...