Ohene

By Pavlos Eleftheriadis Just a few years ago, Greece came perilously close to defaulting on its debts and exiting the eurozone. Today, thanks to the largest sovereign bailout in history, the country’s economy is showing new signs of life. In exchange for promises that Athens would enact aggressive austerity measures, the so-called troika -- the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund -- provided tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans. From the perspective of many global investors and European officials, those policies have paid off. Excluding a one-off expenditure to recapitalize its banks, Greece’s budget shortfall totaled roughly two percent last year, down from nearly 16 percent in 2009. Last year, the country ran a current account surplus for the first time in over three decades. And this past April, Greece returned to the international debt markets it had been locked out of for four years, issuing $4 billion in five-year governm

WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTS: LEADERSHIP 125 Years of Change in the U.S. Economy—and the Dow How the Business World Has Been Transformed, From the Democratization of Capital to the Rise and Fall of Labor By JOHN STEELE GORDON July 7, 2014 For the past 125 years, The Wall Street Journal has been covering the evolution of the American economic ecosystem and the businesses that make it up. It has thus chronicled the most extraordinary period of economic change and growth in world history. A DIFFERENT WORLD Indeed, the business world of 1889 today seems almost something from an alien planet. Offices were nearly totally masculine preserves. About the only jobs for women outside the home were as teachers, nurses and telephone operators. Almost all large corporations were run by members of the WASP establishment. Ledgers were mostly handwritten, as were most invoices and even many contracts. There were no standardized rules for keeping books, and almost no government regulation of busi

Ohene Aku Kwapong It is difficult to repair the pride of a nation that has unnecessarily been bruised and even more difficult to repair a lost trust when we all witness events that create unworthy news for us on the world stage.  So, I offer this speech which I believe a nation would have appreciated from its President. "My fellow citizens, I come to you this evening to thank you, on behalf of our cherished Blackstars, for the unqualified support you've shown them throughout the 2014 World Cup.  As your president, and on behalf of the nation, I also want to thank the team for giving us their best effort in representing Ghana.  We have asked the best of you and we appreciate what you gave. In the 2010 World Cup, the Blackstars made the country proud, lifting our expectations and our collective desire, as a nation, to take our rightful place on the international soccer stage. I know we can because we have a pool of 25 million Ghanaians to do this.  Unfortunately, the 2014 W

There is a general consensus that Ghana as a country is either heading in the wrong direction or getting just plain messed up.  Power crises and the persistent power outages that we thought belonged to decades gone are back, blatant corruption now are back with new schemes of supposed debt judgments, and the leaders we have are neither able to articulate a path forward nor deliver solutions that inspire confidence. Unfortunately, these perceptions have not just been with the current government but also with previous ones. My advice to the President of Ghana, if I had an opportunity to advise him today, will be to have the courage to reshuffle the cabinet and bring in Ghanaians, regardless of political affiliation, with substantial, relevant experience that will benefit him and his government. “Magnanimity does indeed accrue greatness to leadership"- our history of entrusting decision-making responsibilities to folks without relevant experience is destroying the country.  This is