Eye of the Beholder: Trends in the Political and Commercial World

When the worldwide financial turmoil erupted following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the broader subprime mortgage crisis that fundamentally led to an erosion of trust in financial markets, the Earth stood still. Having covered the genesis of the worst gamble in history in my previous post, in this sequel I shall endeavour to provide a clear-cut analysis of the global economic consequences of this blunder and hereto policy responses, as well as the subsequent polemic debates in employment law surrounding job cuts, equality of opportunity across all genders, and racial discrimination. The global financial crisis, after boiling for a long-time under the housing bubble, manifested its deleterious effects in the middle of 2007 and through to 2008. All around the world stock markets plummeted, large financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers floundered, and governments in the wealthiest of nations were forced to step in with bailout plans in order to rescue their respective c...

The global financial crisis of 2008 that emerged as a consequence of the burst of the American housing bubble has undoubtedly been the most severe socio-economic calamity of the 21st Century thus far. Initially affecting the subprime buyers venturing into an unstable housing market, the fiasco quickly spread to investment banks and other financial institutions. This led to widespread bankruptcy filings and severe restrictions to credit access, effectively halting any form of investment due to a then-toxic financial system. In this entry, I shall attempt to argue via Ulrich Beck's theory of the Risk Society that this financial apocalypse was inevitable due to the very fact that we currently inhabit a world that is predicated on manufactured risks, yet our lack of understanding of said risks and associated ontological insecurities impede the creation of a secure social climate. Risk has become normalised and in their actions, people adopt both optimistic-fatalistic attitudes due to t...

Recent American foreign dealings have been significantly dominated by the increasing threat of a North Korean nuclear attack, due to the staggering progress made by the latter in its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles potentially capable of carrying nuclear warheads. North Korea's overzealous and megalomaniac leader shows no intention of relenting, being adamant in stating repeatedly that the nation's survival is wholly dependent on the complete decimation of the United States. Furthermore, due to the watertight bilateral relationship between North Korea and China, the U.S. finds itself between a rock and a hard place and it seems, from ongoing political dynamics, that this crisis is part of a larger, dangerous game of chess between two of the world's leading economic powers: America and the People's Republic of China. North Korea is an important pawn in China's plans for economic dominance, as outlined in Xi Jinping's doctrine of the "Chine...

It has become commonplace to label Turkey as an autocracy following the despotic policies of its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A wave of ideological purges succeeded the failed coup d'etat of June 2016, by a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces, namely the Peace at Home Council. The motivating factors behind the coup appear to be a combination of an increasing feeling of eradication of secularism within the country, and Turkey's declining influence on the global political stage. The supposed spearhead of this entire operation has been namechecked as Fethullah Gullen, a Turkish religious figure who used to be an ally of the president but withdrew his support amidst the 2013 Turkish corruption scandals, and whom Erdoğan equally accused of having organised. However, it is highly likely that such accusations serve as pretenses for the president to consolidate his grip over the country in an attempt to erode the influence Kemalist ideology and revert to Islamic rule, thus effe...