Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Jason Miks.

February 6, 2018

The Dow Has Been Wild this Week. That Says Less Than You Think

The Dow came roaring back Tuesday after its biggest one-day point fall ever on Monday. But reading too much into the recent roller coaster ride would be a mistake, writes Ben Chu for The Independent. Speculators may be sweating, but these wild swings don't necessarily suggest the global economy is ailing – or that a recession is imminent.

"Equity markets have slumped before without causing a recession, most obviously after the internet bubble burst in 2000. The FTSE 100 fell more than 50 percent in the following years, but there was no recession in the UK," Chu writes.

"More recently, the Chinese stock market in 2015 dropped more than 40 percent in months but its domestic economy was largely unruffled. In 1987 US stock markets plunged by more than 20 percent in a single day – Black Monday – but there was no discernible impact on the real economy. The large stock market drops in 2008-09 coincided with the global financial crisis, but they were not the cause of the crisis itself. Responsibility for that genuine economic disaster lay with the fragility of the global banking system.

"Equity markets do matter for ordinary people. But they matter in entirely different ways than Trump thinks and many commentators imply. The performance of the companies in an index matters for ordinary people over the long term. That's because the stock of companies is a repository for peoples' savings. And most people are not saving for tomorrow, or next week, but for decades in the future."

Team Trump's Iran Playbook Looks a Lot Like the Iraq Playbook

The Trump administration's recent statements on Iran bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the Bush administration's playbook for preparing to go to war in Iraq. I know, because I helped create that playbook, suggests Lawrence Wilkerson in The New York Times.

"As I watched [UN Ambassador Nikki] Haley at the Defense Intelligence Agency, I wanted to play the video of [Colin] Powell on the wall behind her, so that Americans could recognize instantly how they were being driven down the same path as in 2003 — ultimately to war. Only this war with Iran, a country of almost 80 million people whose vast strategic depth and difficult terrain make it a far greater challenge than Iraq, would be 10 to 15 times worse than the Iraq war in terms of casualties and costs," Wilkerson writes.

"As I look back at our lock-step march toward war with Iraq, I realize that it didn't seem to matter to us that we used shoddy or cherry-picked intelligence; that it was unrealistic to argue that the war would 'pay for itself,' rather than cost trillions of dollars; that we might be hopelessly naïve in thinking that the war would lead to democracy instead of pushing the region into a downward spiral.

"The sole purpose of our actions was to sell the American people on the case for war with Iraq. Polls show that we did. Mr. Trump and his team are trying to do it again. If we're not careful, they'll succeed."

The "Stupidity" of Poland's New Holocaust Bill

Poland's new Holocaust bill, which would make it illegal to accuse the nation of complicity in crimes committed by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust, is "simply ludicrous, even laughable," writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. In fact, it is already backfiring.

"Will the long arm of the Polish state reach out to academic conferences in Tokyo or Buenos Aires if someone uses an incorrect phrase? Will people be punished for politically incorrect memoirs? In a pompous speech the Polish prime minister gave supporting the law, an automatic translation service made it appear as if he himself said that 'camps where millions of Jews were murdered were Polish.' Should he go to prison, too? Should Google Translate? The very stupidity and unenforceability of this law is what has brought on the Streisand effect: Beginning in Israel but moving quickly across all forms of social media around the world, the use of the phrase 'Polish death camps' has suddenly spiked and has now been used many more times than ever before in history," Applebaum writes.

The Folly of the Pentagon's New Nuke Plans

The just-released Nuclear Posture Review offers solutions to problems that don't exist, writes Stephen Walt for Foreign Policy. The Pentagon wants a new generation of smaller nuclear weapons. But that sends a dangerous message to the rest of the world.

"Are other countries likely to be significantly more intimidated by US development of nuclear bombs that are bigger than the Massive Ordnance Air Blast but smaller than its existing nuclear weapons? Will violent extremists like al Qaeda or the Islamic State suddenly cease their activities after the United States upgrades its ability to put a thermonuclear weapon in more places more rapidly? Will any of these new features boost the US economy, slow climate change, reduce inequality, make the United States more popular around the world, or restore the confidence in US judgment that has been lost under Trump? The questions answer themselves," Walt argues.

"The new Posture Review sends a clear message to the rest of the world. It says that even if you are a continent-sized superpower with the world's largest economy, the world's most powerful conventional forces, no enemies nearby, and no powerful adversaries openly seeking to overthrow your government, you still need lots and lots of highly sophisticated and expensive nuclear weapons in order to be secure. Unfortunately, that message will make it pretty damn hard to convince far weaker and more vulnerable countries like North Korea or Iran that they don't need nuclear weapons to be safe, and it will make it harder to convince countries like China or Russia that they have no need to build up sophisticated war-fighting capacities of their own."

China's "Expanding Orwellian Eye"

Imagine a country where the government rates your trustworthiness based on your social media activity or online shopping habits, even as it watches your every movement outside. If that sounds like a distant dystopian nightmare – and far-fetched – it shouldn't, write Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond in The Atlantic. That future is almost here, in China, at least.

"The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China's communist party-state is developing a 'citizen score' to incentivize 'good' behavior," they write. "A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens' movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve 'public safety,' it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world."

It's not just China. The sheer scale and scope of surveillance around the world is breathtaking. It could also mark the end of privacy as we once knew it, suggests Robert Draper in National Geographic.

"Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves," Draper writes.

"Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals…Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent."

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