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Ministries of Truth to Purge Marketplaces of Lies?!
No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 Truth has always been treated either as a hypocritical or a hyperventilated “something”. Beginning with this inconvenient truth, teaming up with Ștefan-Dominic Georgescu, Georgiana Camelia Georgescu and Vlad I. Roșca, we explored precisely the dilemma stated from the title of this small by-product of a larger essay published in issue 73/2026 of the scientific journal Amfiteatru Economic: “The Enemy of My Enemy Is (Not) My Friend: A More-Than-Economic Inquiry into Fighting Private Fake News with Public Propaganda.” For who can dare the fact that everyone invokes the truth, yet fewer genuinely seek it, and fewer still are willing to bear all the consequences of finding it. Error, illusion, fraud, deception, manipulation and propaganda, by contrast, have long enjoyed a considerable competitive advantage: they are often cheaper, more appealing, more comforting and, at times, more profitable. More
Readiness in the Age of Permanent Compromise
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Living in a world of constant cyber threats has become such a routine condition of modern life that most of us have stopped asking what it actually demands of us. The phrase itself has calcified into a rhetorical tic, invoked in conference keynotes and ministerial statements alike, somewhere between a warning and a shrug. Everyone agrees the threat is constant. Far fewer agree on what a society, a company, or a government owes itself in response, beyond spending more on firewalls and hoping the next headline belongs to somebody else. More
Diplomacy in Orbit: The New Race for Space Resources and Sovereignty
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was written for a world in which no private company was a serious actor beyond the atmosphere. It says, in its second article, that outer space cannot be subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by use, or by occupation. Nearly sixty years later, that single sentence sits underneath a space economy the treaty’s drafters could not have imagined: one that the World Economic Forum and McKinsey expect to grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035, expanding at roughly twice the pace of global GDP. Supply chains, food production, state-funded defence, retail, and digital communications are set to generate more than 60% of that growth. The treaty’s silence on who, if anyone, may own a mined asteroid or a bucket of lunar water has stopped being an academic curiosity and become the terrain on which the major space powers now compete. More
The End of Innocent Interdependence
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Perhaps one of the mistakes of the past few decades was not that we believed too much in globalization, but that we spent too much time looking at the glass as half full. And we had good reasons to do so. Trade created prosperity, investment crossed borders, and global production chains connected economies that once had little reason to depend on one another. We thus arrived at a seductive conclusion: the more we stood to gain together, the more we stood to lose apart. Interdependence was supposed to make rivalry too costly to remain rational. More
US Tariffs and the Strategic Responses of China, the EU, and Japan
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 International trade relations between the four biggest economic powers – the European Union, the United States, Japan, and China – have changed significantly in recent years, as an escalation of tariffs turned into trade war confrontations, particularly those initiated by the US. The EU, Japan, and China, three of the US’s major trading partners, all had to decide how to respond. China chose to retaliate against the US, the EU responded through calibrated countermeasures that matched the value of the US tariffs, and Japan relied on negotiation to reach an agreement with the US. Although the three economies faced the same external pressure, their responses differed according to their trade dependencies and strategic interests. More
The National Bank and Trust in the Leu
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Although the statement may sound abstract, money is the foundation of modern economic systems and an essential element in the decisions made by consumers, firms, and financial intermediaries. It is the means through which households and businesses earn income, purchase goods and services, save, invest, pay social security contributions and property and personal insurance premiums, extend and receive credit, while financial markets allocate capital to finance economic activity. More
Babson’s Early Warning: Reassessing a Neglected Voice in the History of Economic Thought
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Great Depression of the 1930s is often portrayed as an event that caught the economic and financial establishment entirely by surprise. Yet Roger Ward Babson – frequently described as a precursor to contemporary crisis forecasters such as Nouriel Roubini – issued a remarkably explicit warning on 5 September 1929, at the National Business Conference. He cautioned that a “crash” was imminent, pointing to factory closures, rising unemployment, and “a serious decline in business activity.” His intervention came at a moment when Irving Fisher, the distinguished Yale economist whose name is associated with the Fisher equation, the Fisher theorem, and the Fisher effect, continued to argue that although stock prices might undergo some downward adjustment, nothing “in the nature of a crash” was foreseeable. Even on 21 October 1929, just days before the dramatic collapse, Fisher referred merely to “a slight shake‑out in some of the more marginal circles of the stock market.” More
Romania, Shortest Working Life Among EU Member States
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Romania has the shortest working life among EU Member States, according to data published by Eurostat for last year. With a value of 32.7 years, our country ranked last in this respect, after Italy (33.0 years) and Bulgaria (34.6 years). By contrast, in seven EU countries, the average expected duration of working life is 40 years or more: the Netherlands (44.0 years), Sweden (43.4), Denmark (42.6), Estonia (41.5), Ireland (40.7), Germany (40.2) and Finland (40.1). More
A Missing Violet Piece
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 We may well be approaching an important moment for Romanian football: the possible return of Politehnica Timișoara to the top flight. After years spent trudging through the mud of the lower leagues, the white-and-violets have risen from adversity with remarkable endurance. Backed with increasing determination by the Polytechnic University of Timișoara, the city’s flagship football institution has gradually reclaimed the values, identity, and spirit that have always made it worthy of the highest stage. More
Whose Soil? Capital, Patrimony, and the European Land Question
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 In the summer of 2018, on the alluvial plain where the Danube splits to form what Romanians call the Great Island of Brăila, the operating rights to a 57,000-hectare farm changed hands for an estimated €230 million. The seller was a Romanian entrepreneur, Constantin Dulute, who had built Agricost over two decades into the largest single contiguous farm in the European Union. The buyer was Al Dahra, a UAE-based agribusiness founded by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the country’s president, and half-owned since 2020 by ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. The land itself remained the property of the Romanian state, leased under a concession running to 2032 that the new operator inherited. What had been sold was not soil but the right to direct what the soil produced. More
Hablamos Fútbol
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The story of the Tower of Babel tells us that humanity scattered the moment it ceased to speak the same language. Football suggests the opposite: that humanity occasionally remembers it still does. More
A Quarter of a Millennium of Freedom
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The United States of America is celebrating 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The moment marks the final break with the British Empire, after an escalation of the economic, fiscal, political and principled conflict between the metropolis and the North American colonies. The anniversary is an important one in American secular religion as a moment of affirmation of national identity. Its importance has gradually grown, as significant waves of migration (especially the most recent) have distanced America from the hard Anglo-Saxon and British core of its founding, and then the European one of its perfection as a global power. The quarter-millennium is important not only symbolically, but also politically, as an opportunity for the Trump Administration, surrounded on several sides and facing a difficult congressional campaign, to march on the rituals of the American republic to encourage national unity at a time of maximum division. Americans have celebrated their other major anniversaries with pomp, but, measuring every 50 years, the US has never faced another anniversary in such a difficult situation, although the uncertainties of the Cold War or the post-Civil War period were probably on Americans’ minds at the time. The relative decline of American power instruments as a whole, relative to the coalition of revisionist countries that oppose it and that are accelerating the transition to a multipolar world, constitutes a challenge not only to their Great Power calculus, but also to America’s self-conception as an exceptional country. The Administration’s bombastic style is in line with what Americans want from the celebration, but Donald Trump’s self-promotional tendency and “imperious and imperial” leadership style risk alienating that part of the opposition that could be mollified. After the confetti has settled and the hot dogs have been digested, Americans will return to a world that has become largely ambivalent about the idea of American leadership. The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 will pit the United States against allies fearful of the current Administration’s unpredictability and caprices, but also of long-term structural changes to the United States and its presence in the world, regardless of the political color of the White House and Congress. More
