Through the Financial Crisis of 2008, policymakers were all too aware of the mistakes made after the Great Depression. After all, it took a world war to get out of an economic downward spiral. One economist who specialized in depression-era economics, a certain Princeton professor, Ben Bernanke, is currently the Chairman of the Federal Reserve
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The Asia/Pacific region is increasingly divided between markets that are still closely linked with the global trade cycle, and those that have been able to delink themselves from it. This trend is reflected in the latest MasterCard consumer confidence survey. The strong improvement in consumer sentiment in Indonesia and Philippines are cases in point. The
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When asked how consumers should feel about the control large companies like Yahoo! Inc., Google Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com and Facebook Inc. exercise over the Internet, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer says, “I think privacy will always be something that users should consider, but I also think that privacy is always a tradeoff, because when you
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Future historians may well refer to the decade before the of 2008/09 crisis as a one-off “decade of emerging markets”—a brilliant flash in the pan. The unique convergence of factors which made that decade possible is sorely absent today, namely: a global flood of easy money and cheap credit, subdued inflation which was due in
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It’s that time of the year, when everyone is making predictions. I’ve been reading many such predictions over the last few days; but in the payments industry the most broad-based predictions have stronger implications for our future business than they do considered on their own. Read about them here: Five Technology Trends for 2013.
In 2011 South Africa became a member of the new emerging economic power grouping known as the BRICS, along with Brazil, Russia, India and China. What began as a loose grouping of emerging and populous economies is rapidly morphing into a more coherent power grouping that reflects the shifting balance of power in the global
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When talking about Gen Y consumers today, several significant themes are likely to emerge – like the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the rise and influence of social media and the inexplicable obsession with all things vampire. But there is one topic at the crux of all conversations – one that defined the tone of
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