The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies will host the upcoming symposium, “How Democracy Survives: The Crises of the Nation State.” In this three-day online symposium, leading scholars and activists from around the world will explore how democratic values and institutions can evolve and adapt to the growing challenges that are now destabilizing democratic nation states, such as climate change, resurgent nationalism, ethnic and religious conflict, human rights abuses, and deepening levels of economic inequality. The Streit Council's Executive Director, Dr. Tiziana Stella, will speak in a session titled "World Organization Through Democracy: Clarence Streit’s Federalist Wager for Reordering the World." (Register to Attend)

Steve H. Hanke, writing in National Review, calls on US Secetary of State Mike Pompeo to increase the international use of the dollar to compete with China's renminbi. One way this can be done is through "dollarization," or the adoption of the dollar as legal tender in countries which currently possess "junk currencies." Another is through the creation of dollar-based currency boards. (Read More)

In an article for the CATO Journal, Steve H. Hanke - noting that monetary instability poses a threat to free societies - argues for four changes. "First, the U.S. dollar and the euro should be formally, loosely linked together. Second, most central banks in developing countries should be mothballed and replaced by currency boards. Third, private currency boards should be permitted to enter the international monetary sphere." (Read More)

If the EU is to respond effectively to the crises it faces - including COVID-19, climate change, the departure of Britain, and shifts in US foreign policy - Domènec Ruiz Devesa argues it must form three unions: health, financial and political. (Watch Here)

In an article for Salon, Davenport argues for a broad alliance of democracies to form a pandemic prevention system. Such a system would be more cost effective than the fragmented and expensive response to COVID-19, and if it had been in place "COVID-19 might not have spread beyond the Wuhan area." What we need is not "less globalism," but "more global cooperation and governance that complement global trade and travel." (Read More)

Hanke and Greenwood argue that the Federal Reserve should do more than reduce interest rates to mitigate the economic distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. "In other words, the Fed needs to supply liquidity to deal with the panic - whether by quantitative-easing purchases of long bonds, by Treasury bill purchases, by repos or, most important, by increasing the amounts of U.S. dollar swaps available to the central banks of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong." (Read More)

Simms argues that his main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-Semitism and his determination to secure the “living space” necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States. Hitler's aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany – a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or between German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called “Anglo-Saxons.”  (Read More)

In an interview on CNN’s  GPS program with Fareed Zakaria, Steve H. Hanke, Professor of Applied Economics at John Hopkins University, and Richard C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at John Hopkins University, argued for the creation of a single time zone spanning the entire planet. They suggested that all clocks be set to Coordinated Universal Time. (Watch Here)

"What’s missing here is not the capacity to talk but a political consensus on both sides to reaffirm why both countries still need to cooperate and how to go about finding it." Given the stalling of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, nuclear arms control talks, and other formal arrangements, Weisbrode and Goodby advocate an informal route to forging a new consensus. (Read More)