Why Your Bank Wants No Part of Your Business

Post-Recession Banking Reforms Are Throttling Small Independent Companies

Capital is cheap almost everywhere except for in the heart of the American economy—independent U.S. companies with less than $100 million in revenues.

This is the downside of regulations, enacted after the Great Recession, that made banks safer than ever. Unfortunately, those same regulations also caused banks to focus on mortgages and publicly traded loans, rather than lending to growing private companies. This dislocation may explain why the economic recovery since 2007 has been the most tepid in the past 50 years.

Middle market companies in the U.S., defined as companies …

What Does China’s Growing Middle Class Desire Most? Blue Skies.

Decades of Rapid Industrialization Created Massive Pollution, Now Wealthier Chinese Are Demanding a Cleaner Environment

Over the last 35 years, China’s economy has completely transformed itself, thanks to urbanization and industrialization.

As their country has become the “world’s factory,” hundreds of millions of Chinese people …

Daniel Boone’s Legend Defines the American Mystique

Why a Contemporary Canadian Author Fell in Love With the Tall Tales of the Famous Frontiersman

I’m not American. My childhood social studies curriculum covered Canada’s geography and indigenous peoples, in French (le Saskatchewan, les Iroquois).

So I didn’t grow up learning about Daniel Boone …

Don’t You Dare Speak Ill of Thailand’s King

Even a Facebook Joke About the Monarch, Entering His Eighth Decade of Rule, Could Send You to Prison for Decades

Since the military coup of 2006, the Thai government has prosecuted hundreds of Thai citizens who made comments about the monarchy, under the authority of Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws. The sentences …

Are Replicas Changing the Way We Experience Art?

Precise Digital Reproductions Allow More People to Own and View Masterpieces, Minus the Work’s Soul

You are in the Chauvet cave, 35,000 years old. As you enter, the walkway you traverse winds around spot-lit, saber-toothed stalactites and stalagmites. The rough-skin texture of the stone walls …

Americans Mostly Kill the Ones We Know

For All the Media Obsession With Mass Shootings, Homicides in the U.S. Are Most Often About Familiarity and Contempt

Turn on your television in the coming months, and you will see and hear just how much Americans fear strangers and guns.

Yet when it comes to violent crime, especially …