Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman

Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, 2022.

Read the full article at Nature

Other Writing:

Essay

Bitcoin is Losing the Midas Touch

Bitcoin, the decentralised, mainly digital currency that is neither issued nor guaranteed by central banks, has always seemed like a magic trick. Rather than spinning straw into gold it transforms wasted computing power into money that people will actually accept as payment. Radical libertarians have desperately wanted to believe in it because they hope it ...
Read Article
Essay

AI’s Big Rift is Like a Religious Schism

TWO CENTURIES ago Henri de Saint-Simon, a French utopian, proposed a new religion, worshipping the godlike force of progress, with Isaac Newton as its chief saint. He believed that humanity’s sole uniting interest, “the progress of the sciences”, should be directed by the “elect of humanity”, a 21-member “Council of Newton”. Friedrich Hayek, a 20th-century ...
Read Article