Stratfor's Contributions

The European Central Bank (ECB) announced on Dec. 8 that it would extend its bond-buying program through December 2017 rather than end it in March as it originally intended. Starting in April, however, the bank will decrease...

In Turkey, patriotism appears to be running deeper than a profit motive. A number of major Turkish companies in the past few days have announced that they will heed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's behest announced Friday to convert...

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announced his resignation shortly after midnight on Dec. 5 after his government was defeated in a referendum on constitutional reforms. According to early results, roughly 60 percent voted against...

Despite its checkered reputation in the United States, NAFTA has been an unequivocal boon for Mexico. Since the agreement took effect in 1994, NAFTA's lowered tariff barriers have spurred investment in Mexico...

Sluggish construction growth and skyrocketing debt, coupled with sharp reductions in debt maturity periods, could cause corporate defaults and bankruptcies to spike next year, testing Beijing's legal and institutional abilities to cope with them. Meanwhile, increasing U.S...

The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency has set the world abuzz. US allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, smiling through their teeth, are feverishly hoping that Washington will maintain its security commitments.

After the devastating US stock market crash of 1929, the United States introduced the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 to prevent it from ever happening again. The law separated the activities of retail and investment banks,

The presence of armed drones is a reality of the modern battlefield, but only a limited group of countries has the technological ability to produce them or the military capacity to operate them. The United States once held the edge in...

The European Central Bank (ECB) is in a bind. Since increasing its quantitative easing program in April, the institution each month has had to purchase bonds worth 80 billion euros (nearly $88 billion) to meet its self-imposed quota.

Brazil's northern state of Roraima, which shares a lengthy border with Venezuela, will create an emergency Cabinet to address the issues stemming from the influx of some 30,000 Venezuelans who are fleeing deteriorating economic...

If the study of geopolitics focuses on the structural forces shaping the international system, then domestic elections only rarely matter. Leaders tend to bend to their environment, not the other way around. And yet in the final months of 2016 the United States...

The European Union's future has been up for debate since the Continent's economic crisis began nearly a decade ago. But questions about the bloc's path have multiplied in recent years as Greece came close to quitting the eurozone and the United Kingdom voted to relinquish its EU membership for good. "The bloc's

British Prime Minister Theresa May used the first day of the Conservative Party Conference on Oct. 2 to make a series of announcements related to the process of leaving the European Union. According to May, the British government will formally...

Germany's banks have had a tough week. Deutsche Bank, the country's largest lender, saw its share price drop sharply on Monday and Tuesday following news of a possible $14 billion fine from the US Department of Justice for misselling...

Sixty years ago, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg shocked the world with the first serious scientific paper detailing the feasibility of human cloning. Four decades later, a sheep named Dolly — the first large mammal ever cloned — brought his prediction a step closer to becoming a reality.

Following a recent visit to Elon Musk's Tesla electric car factory in California, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed interest in a less mature but potentially more groundbreaking idea: Hyperloop. Musk, the founder of...

New data from China's National Bureau of Statistics suggest that sweeping changes may be taking place in the country's financial system, though largely away from the public eye. On Sept. 14, the bureau reported that Chinese...

As the Japanese economy struggles to grow, the country's leaders are starting to question their numbers. In August, the Bank of Japan released a study revealing a discrepancy between its gross domestic product estimate in 2014...

Getting old can be a drag, for both people and nations. As people age, they tend to become less physically active. This leads to loss of muscle mass and the gain of fat, which causes the body's metabolism — the process of converting...

After the results of the Brexit referendum, many EU governments and officials went out of their way to emphasize that the vote did not herald the end of the European Union and could even make it stronger.