I’ve just come back from a few days in Puerto Rico. Somehow I always find myself in the middle of stories. This one is about Puerto Rico’s financial and economic crisis that is in the headlines. The island, a territory of the United States, owes more than it can pay back to financial markets. Standard […]…
About: William Holstein
Author Archives: William Holstein
Anxiety Rising Over Relations Between Japan and China
I’d like to congratulate Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times for breaking this story only 24 hours after I did. Unfortunately, he had to travel to Davos to figure it out, but I was able to do it from the comfort of my North American regional headquarters: January 27, 2014 Anxiety Rising Over […]…
Earth to Apple: You Have a Problem in China
For several decades now, Apple and many other major manufacturers have assumed that a basic model of manufacturing in China would endure forever: the Chinese would allow virtually unlimited import of Japanese parts for assembly into products destined for both the Chinese market and the world. The Apple iPhone, according to one study, consists of […]…
China-U.S. Relations, 35 Years Later
It was 35 years ago this month that the United States and China normalized relations. It was also 35 years ago this month that I arrived in Hong Kong as a correspondent for United Press International. I didn’t realize how impeccable my timing was. China has exploded economically, as many of us thought it would. […]…
There Go The Idiot Economists Again
I think that when the history of this era is written, and future historians wonder why we Americans did not respond to our economic challenges, the conclusion will be that the entire economics profession failed. We are now five years into our economic crisis, which is half a decade. It’s not hard to imagine that […]…
