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Ian Bremmer

American political scientist

Ian Arthur Bremmer (born November 12, 1969) is an American political scientist and author with a focus on global political risk. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.

Ian Bremmer in 2010

Quotes

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  • The great thing about partisanship is you don't have to spend time understanding the issues to know what side you're on.
    • [1] Twitter (February 22, 2015).
  • Money talks: financing the periphery buys Berlin a leading role recasting the eurozone governance framework. The recent ‘six pack’ of legislative reforms hints at what’s to come: institutionalized fiscal discipline and an excessive imbalances procedure that protects against future moral hazard. The whole eurozone will tilt toward the German surplus model as we get more fiscal integration and more German leverage.
  • In China, the state controls the corporations, whereas in the United States, the corporations control the state.
  • Up until now Washington has worried that terrorists will become hackers. Perhaps we all should worry that hackers will become terrorists.
  • Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power.
    • "Democracy in Cyberspace," Foreign Affairs (November/December 2010).
  • I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly...they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences – they're not interested in free markets."
  • Everyone's talked about Bank of America and Citigroup and the rest being too big to fail, but no, no, no. The most important point...is that the US must be perceived to be too big to fail.
  • It's not a third way between state capitalism and free markets, it is the free market way. Multi-national corporations should be the principal actors, but they should be properly regulated.
  • In the last 21 months, if you've learnt anything, it's that the state is back. If the free market fails, it's not because it's been defeated by state capitalism; the only people that can defeat the free market is us, we're the only ones who can destroy it.
  • When you're leaving your teenage kids alone, probably a good idea to let them know you're going to be checking in on them occasionally. I suspect Greenspan missed that part.
  • State capitalism is about more than emergency government spending, implementation of more intelligent regulation, or a stronger social safety net. It’s about state dominance of economic activity for political gain.
  • The great thing about the U.S. economy right now is that we are the smart kids in the stupid-kid class. America has fiscal problems and gridlock issues and polarity and partisanship in Congress -- and yet, compared to Japan and Europe, the U.S. looks great.
  • The free market tide has now receded. In its place has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain.
  • New York used to be the financial capital of the world. It's no longer even the financial capital of the U.S. For the moment, Washington is.
  • India and China offer intriguing mirror images. Modern India has long been open politically and, until recently, closed economically. Modern China has opened economically, but remains politically closed. The comparison reveals that, while politics and economics can never fully be separated, political openness is a better guarantor of long-term stability than economic openness.
    • The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (2006).
  • The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes—unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create the conditions most favorable for a closed regime’s safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve—however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.
    • The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (2006).
  • Political scientists don't work at banks—which is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questions—as analysts at banks are—you never want to be in the position of saying you don't know.
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